Bergson and the lan Riant

A study in humor and metaphysics

Promoter: Prof. dr. Moyaert

A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy (MA) By Hugh Desmond

Leuven, August 2010

Acknowledgements
I thank Professor Moyaert profusely for guiding me showing me to work the material into something presentable. His experience and long-term vision have more than once prevented me from falling into an abyss. His encouragement while the work was in progress is much appreciated. I thank my family for their unfailing support.

Table of Contents
PAGE

Introduction .................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter One Time, Life and Society in Bergson .................................................... 20

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Duration ....................................................................................................... lan vital: duration of life ......................................................................... Matter and Memory: duration of man ..................................................... Obligation and Emotion: duration of society...........................................

20 35 42 53

Chapter Two Lifes Laughter: Laughter as Societal Instinct ................................ 58

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 The End of Laughter ................................................................................... The Subjective Process of Laughter .......................................................... The Object of Laughter............................................................................... The Source of Laughter ..............................................................................
59 64 74 82

Chapter Three Laughter beyond Life: lan riant .................................................... 86

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Laughter and its intimate twin................................................................... 86 The Eternal Past............................................................................................ 90 lan riant ......................................................................................................... 94 Laughter beyond Duration ; Conclusion .................................................. 101

Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 105

Detailed Table of Contents

Introduction Chapter One Time, Life and Society in Bergson
1.1

Duration
Duration and Homogeneous Time:
Experience of Time Duration and Space Method Intuition Ontological Duration: Present and Past Contraction and Relaxation

1.2

lan vital: duration in life

Matter Life: Individuals Evolution
Awakening of Consciousness Instinct and Intelligence Intellect and Intuition

1.3

Matter and Memory: duration in man

Perception:
Matter as Image Memory Choice of Images Pure perception

Affection Imagination

1.4

Obligation and Emotion: duration in society

Obligation and the Closed Society Appeal and the Open Society

Chapter Two Lifes laughter: laughter as societal instinct

2.1 The End of Laughter
Social Correction Disinterestedness

2.2 The Subjective Process of Laughter

Relaxation:
Affection, Imagination art and life - comic logic - the absurd and dreams

Contraction:
Affection Imagination

2.3 The Objects of Laughter

The Method of the Dynamical Scheme Humans Forms Movements Situations and Words Character

2.4 The Source of Laughter

Society Beyond the Plane of Society?

Chapter Three Laughter beyond life: lan riant

3.1 Laughter and its intimate twin
The Intimate Self and Outer Persona Between showing and not-showing

3.2 The Eternal Past 3.3 lan riant

Laughter beyond contraction Distance Freedom Shame Blasphemy Discontinuity Laughter beyond relaxation

3.4 Laughter beyond Duration

Bibliography

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Works by Henri Bergson TFW Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, George Allen and Unwin, 1910. Translated by F. L. Pogson from Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience (1889). MM Matter and Memory, George Allen and Unwin, 1911. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer from Matire et mmoire: Essai sur la relation du corps avec lesprit (1896). Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Macmillan, 1911. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell from Le Rire (1900). An Introduction to Metaphysics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Translated by T.E. Hulme from Introduction la Mtaphysique (1903) Creative Evolution, Macmillan, 1911. Translated by Arthur Mitchell from LEvolution cratrice (1907). Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, Greenwood Press, 1975. Translated by H. Wildon Carr from LEnergie Spirituelle: Essais et conferences (1919). Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einsteins Theory, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Translated by Leon Jacobsen, from Dure et simultaneit: A Propos de la Thorie dEinstein (1923).

ITM

CE

ME

DS

TSMR The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Notre Dame Press, 1977. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, from Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932). CM The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, Philosophical Library, 1946. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison, from La pense et le mouvement: Essais et conferences (1934).

Introduction
Laughter is both ubiquitous and mysterious. Even though we laugh all the time, we do not understand why, and if we seek a solution that explains exhaustively why we laugh we are often frustrated. Nonetheless, laughter remains a fascinating topic and in this thesis, with special reference to the thought of Henri Bergson, we will explore the question: why do we laugh? Laughter raises a number of important philosophical issues. When we laugh, do we have a practical purpose we have in mind? Our mouths open, we squint our eyes, our diaphragm contracts rhythmically and we emit whooping sounds: it is hard to see how these movements would achieve any definite goal. Described in this way, laughter sounds slightly grotesque. When we reduce laughter to a series of mechanical movements, the laughing face mutates into a contorted face, an ugly face. Laughter is reduced to a waste of energy that might otherwise be used for practical purposes. Is anything of utilitarian value expressed by laughter? It might seem better to eliminate all laughter, and flex our facial muscles only when we want to say something but this seems absurd somehow. What then is achieved by laughing, if anything? In some religious orders laughter is frowned on, as it is not considered to be true to the religious spirit and earnest subservience to God and humanity. Perhaps there is some truth to this. Laughter sometimes is clearly inappropriate, and can be a sign either of callousness, or stupidity. Some things are simply too intimate and too delicate to be laughed at, and every community seems to determine implicitly what may be appropriately laughed at, if anything at all. More sinisterly, society also determines which individuals are derided if they depart from the norm. What are the conditions that deem something appropriate for laughter, or derision? What is the relation between laughter and society? These conditions shaping laughter do not only vary from society to society, but also from person to person. A man drives over a cat and laughs at the crushed body; another might cry and bury the body. Both are members of the same society, both are in the same objective situation, so it seems difference must lie in the inner processes of the mind. What goes on inside our minds to evoke these different reactions even while 7

perception remains the same? What does laughter reveal about the emotional experience of an individual? And by its very nature laughter seems to be intricately intertwined with a persons conscious perceptions. What distinguishes professional comedians from the rest of human beings is not only their ability to act or to tell a joke, but primarily their imaginative perception of the world. They see things differently. Imagination thus seems to play an important role in the humorous perception: humor seems to involve some kind of gestalt-switch in which a situation suddenly takes on a new character. Thus an important question is the relation between imagination and laughter. These questions pertain to the structure of the human being and society, and to the end which laughter might serve. But even if these questions could be answered, it might still be suggested that we have not completely explained laughter. The fact of laughter would still remain a mystery: why do we laugh at all, instead of being serious all the time? Is laughters existence accidental, or is it necessarily implied in existence itself? Can a world be imagined which is entirely lacking in the phenomenon of laughter? There are some hints that the existence of laughter has profound ontological implications. Laughter seems to suggest a hidden force of which we are mostly unaware, but that nevertheless flows through us every time we laugh. This force pertains to a certain flow of time, in which the past is torn away from the present, and yet is ever so tenuously implied in it. Laughter points to a certain discontinuity, a certain disunity, but without any absolute difference between the elements. What this could mean we will explore later, but in any case this suggests that laughter may be a potent witness to some metaphysical order we are often unaware of. These are the main questions that we will be exploring in this thesis. Basically, they concern the end of laughter, its internal subjective processes and its originating sources. In this way we will attempt a synoptic view of laughter, and try to give consideration to society, the human mind and their metaphysical groundings. In this way we hope to suggest that laughter is not merely some curiosity in human existence, but somehow reveals something very profound in it, and that philosophy should in fact take laughter seriously.

Our guiding perspective in all this will be that of Bergsons philosophy. Why Bergson? Unlike most accounts of laughter, Bergsons lends itself naturally to such a synoptic view. On the one hand he has a rich and complex account of laughter and on the other he offers the philosophical resources to place laughter in a broader context. We will connect both of these sides of his account in the first two chapters, and in the third see then how certain instabilities in Bergsons account suggest a more profound source of laughter. Other theories of laughter will be referred to as extensively as is relevant to our discussion, although it will not be possible to give exhaustive attention to other theories, since our concern is to delve as deeply as possible into Bergsons theory. We are not looking for a particular theory that fits all empirical cases; rather, we are trying to uncover what laughter can reveal about an essential dimension of human existence as a whole. In this way the thesis attempts to be both thematic and author-centered at the same time.

Bergsons theory of laughter is rooted in his whole philosophy, so a short account of his work is appropriate here. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a vitalist philosopher from France, and is most famous for his work on evolution, Evolution Cratrice (1911), in which he describes evolution as powered by a vital impulse which he calls the lan vital. In the debate concerning evolution around the turn of the century he adopted a position contrary to finalistic theories such as those of Lamarck, and to mechanistic theories such as those of Darwin. He argued that finalism could not explain the apparent disorganization and purposeless of evolution, and that for mechanism it was a mystery why living beings should have evolved at all beyond the unicellular stage. Instead evolution is like an explosion, driven by the impulse of lan vital without any definite goal. Evolution Cratrice, the book articulating this insight, is the one that definitively established Bergsons reputation, earning him a Noble Prize for literature in 1928. Many of these ideas find an echo in Le Rire, his monograph on laughter written a decade later, and the main text to be examined here. In it Bergson treats the purpose of laughter, its relation to society, and its relation to the psychology of man: just the questions we have set out for consideration in our thesis. For Bergson laughter is an instinct that enforces social adaptation in others: when certain members of society adopt

rigid gestures, ways of expression, character traits, etc., society will laugh at them in order to break in on and break up their rigidity. This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective (L, p. 21.) This end or function will determine what form the particular instances of laughter take. When will we find something funny? We laugh when we entertain a mental image of something mechanical encrusted on the living. (L, p. 37.) A living being is conscious of its surroundings, and adapts its behavior to the changing circumstances, but a machine is preprogrammed for certain behaviors, which it will continue regardless of the circumstances. What does Bergson have concretely in mind here? Some examples might be in order. Here is simple slapstick: A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. () Through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy, as a result, in fact, of rigidity or of momentum, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else. (L, p. 8-9.) A second example is a practical prank, played on somebody who usually rigidly adheres to particular habits: The objects around him have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor. () Habit has given the impulse: what was wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He did nothing of the sort, but continued like a machine in the same straight line. (L, p. 9.) Both men portray a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being. (L, p. 10.) This formula, which can be summarized as something mechanical encrusted on the living, is the leitmotiv (L, p. 21) that accompanies Bergson throughout the remainder of the work. Having given these initial examples, he goes through different instances of laughter, in which he distinguishes five main types of comic objects forms, movements, situations, words and characters and adapts the main leitmotiv accordingly to each. It might not be clear what the precise relation is between this formula and social correction, but we will show later how the end of laughter, which is social correction, in fact grounds the form of the particular instances of laughter. To see this we would need to

10

connect society and life, and to be able to understand how society can be understood as a living organism with certain internal pressures that hold its members in place. This cannot be found in Bergsons Laughter, but rather in his late work Two Sources of Morality and Religion. We mentioned that laughter is some kind of instinct, which is perhaps a surprising way of looking at it; there in that late work we will see how this perspective is in fact an offspring of Bergsons understanding of life and society. The other questions that we set out for this thesis concern the connection between laughter and the structure of the human mind. What does laughter reveal about emotion, about perception, and about imagination? In Laughter Bergson makes emotional indifference a necessary precondition for any laughter: It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. () To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple. (L, p. 10-11.) Why is this so? What is the nature of emotion? Bergson suggests that the emotion we feel for another person is the manifestation of some prior social bond: Comedy can only begin at the point where our neighbors personality ceases to affect us. It begins, in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to social life. (L, p. 134.) But emotion is more than this: it is intertwined with the nature of consciousness itself. What is this connection, and why does it have an effect on comic perception? Why, when emotionally affected, are we often unable to imagine the object to be something mechanical encrusted on the living? In fact, Bergson himself gives us the philosophical resources to tackle these questions, but they cannot be found in Laughter itself, but rather in his other works. In his first two books, Time and Free Will and especially Matter and Memory, he explores the nature of human consciousness, and its relation to the body and to memory. Many questions concerning grounding concepts remain unanswered in Laughter, and for these we must look to other works. There is the connection with society, which leads us to the Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and there is the connection with consciousness and the human mind, which leads us to Matter and Memory. How then indeed link

11

consciousness and society? For example, in Laughter he writes A comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic person is unconscious. (L, p. 16.) What has consciousness to do with life and mechanism? This question leads us deeper into the heart of Bergsons philosophy. For Bergson, consciousness is not merely subjective: it is an ontological force. Each of us has an individual consciousness, but we are not absolutely autonomous individuals; our consciousness participates in a wider consciousness which is life itself. This wider consciousness is the lan vital mentioned earlier. Is Bergson thus introducing some mystical entity that determines who we are? Where is human freedom if we are subsumed in the broader ontological force of lan vital? In fact, it is not a question of a choice between autonomy and heteronomy, to put it in Kantian terms. Bergson might say that autonomy and heteronomy are perhaps not the right concepts to use in approaching the question. They are too rigid to capture the fluidity of human freedom. But to understand why, we need to go deeper yet into Bergsons philosophy, to its very core: his notion of duration. Duration is an understanding of time that is closest to the subjective experience of it. We often think of this subjective experience as illusory, and that the real nature of time is that given by the clock: objective time. Bergson argues that in fact objective time masks the true nature of time. Duration is a continuous movement, a single unity made up of an infinitude of varying points; only afterwards do we extract the points from the movement and quantify time. This will be explained more fully later, but it is enough to note here that Bergson grounds consciousness itself in duration. This may perhaps seem like a strange move, but one must remember that Bergson is reacting to Kant, for whom time was an a priori structure of the mind that, together with space, determined the form of our perception. Although Bergson has a different understanding of time, he will still make it constitutive of the nature of consciousness. In fact, in Matter and Memory and in Creative Evolution, where he explores the ontological character of duration, he makes duration constitutive of life itself, and thus in a way Bergsons duration is Kants ding-an-sich. For Kant this cannot be known, only thought, and in a reminiscent move Bergson begins the Introduction to Metaphysics by distinguishing between two different types of knowledge:

12

The first implies that we move around the object; the second that we enter into it. The first kind of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to attain the absolute. (IM, p.1.) This absolute is duration. In this way duration will be a natural starting point for the thesis, since it is the notion from which the other essential considerations grow. Bizarrely, nowhere in Laughter does Bergson mention duration. The closest he gets is the importance he places on absentmindedness. Absentmindedness, indeed, is not perhaps the actual fountain-head of the comic, but surely it is contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows straight from the fountain-head. (L, p. 12.) Thus he seems to attribute a central importance to absentmindedness, and implies that in a certain way, all forms of the comic are a form of absentmindedness or are in some important way related to it. Why is this so? Bergson does not explain in Laughter, but perhaps if we link absentmindedness to the flow of time, this might become clear. In any case, in order to understand laughter we must peel away the different layers involved, and delve increasingly deeply, first into political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and ultimately into metaphysics. However, the danger of over-analysis is lurking here. In the cathedral of Bergsons philosophy, laughter is something of an ornament, and duration is the foundation. In showing how the ornament is supported by the foundation we risk focusing too much on the foundation, thus missing the playfulness of the ornament. It seems inappropriate when speaking of laughter to analyze the issue wholly in terms of space and time; to do so would be like describing the gracious gestures of dancers by the physical movements of the atoms in their bodies. When showing how the part relates to the whole, one must let go of a consciousness fixated on the part and be open to taking in the whole more synoptically. Perhaps then it is no coincidence that Bergson does not mention duration in Laughter. Laughter is astonishingly beautiful -almost too beautiful for philosophical analysis. We will try not to fix our gaze on the minutiae of the metaphysics of duration, out of fear this philosophical Medusa might turn us into stone, but merely show how it grounds the intermediary notions of matter, life, consciousness, and society.

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Coincidentally, these notions match the chronological development of Bergsons thought. It is as if Bergson started out with the individual consciousness, and after that added different layers. His understanding of the person is layered: a person belongs to several circles at once, and we must understand all of these circles if we are to do any justice to the complexity of a person. If these circles could be named, they might be called the societal, the vital and the ontological. Time and Free Will sets the stage and gives a first sketch of the human being. Duration is understood as the core of subjective reality, opposed to the objective externality, and in this way the human is portrayed as a duality of quantity and quality: our perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas occur under two aspects: the one clear and precise, but impersonal; the other confused, ever changing, and inexpressible. (TFW, p. 129) In Matter and Memory Bergson tries to reconcile this duality, and thereby introduces the widest of the circles: ontological duration. Duration is no longer the core merely of the subject but of all reality and thus Bergson shows the metaphysical grounds for the human being. However, only in Creative Evolution does he show how the human actually arose out of biological evolution. It shows how human consciousness is a creation of lan vital, the biological form of duration, and in this way evolution is the vital circle that envelops the human being. The last circle, the societal, is one of an organization of human consciousnesses, described in Bergsons last book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Where does Laughter fit in here? That is a major question we will be considering. Laughter is somewhat of an anomaly among Bergsons works: in it he does not refer to his other works, nor does he mention key concepts such as duration or contraction. Nor does he even once mention the subject of laughter in his later works even the word laughter itself is mentioned not even once. Though it is his most accessible work, many profound issues lurk under its surface. In order to attempt to understand it, the rest of Bergsons oeuvre has to be considered, however briefly. In this way we hope to attempt to reach as sympathetic an understanding as possible, and not leave any important aspect of Bergsons philosophy unconsidered.

Our concern then will be to approach what is perhaps the ultimate question of this thesis: why do we laugh at all? This is a question that Bergson has difficulties dealing

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with, and in considering it we will be brought to the limit of Bergsons philosophy. In that sense it is perhaps no coincidence that Laughter is an anomaly, since laughter totters at the very brink of Bergsons philosophy, at the brink of duration. How so? Here we will anticipate several Bergsonian notions that will be explained in the next chapter. Bergson ends Laughter on a pessimistic note, which perhaps conveys his most deeply felt intuition concerning laughter. He writes: An average of justice may show itself in the total result, though the details, taken separately, often point to anything but justice. () [Laughters] function is to intimidate by humiliating. () Here, as elsewhere, nature has utilized evil with a view to good. () It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the aftertaste bitter. (LR, p. 198200.) Laughter therefore aims at a good, social adaptation, but does so by the unjust means of humiliation. Taken in itself, laughter is unjust. Why does Bergson intuit laughter in this way? We will suggest that this view is a natural consequence of his notions of contraction and the lan vital. Bergson looks at life and sees continual creation and a line of increasing complexity; how to fit laughter in the mix? It is natural from this perspective to see laughter as contributing to this process. Laughter contributes to the ever-increasing adaptation to social life, the ever-increasing complexity and explosiveness of life, and the process of contraction of the past. Laughter therefore must be correction. Yet, why should there be such a thing as laughter at all? Could laughter not be replaced by a more efficient method of social adaptation? When we look around us laughter often seems to be something else. To be sure, we could be unconscious of our motive to correct those we laugh at, and perhaps this is more often the case than we would like to admit; even so, many times when we laugh we laugh exactly because we would not like to change anything whatsoever! We laugh because we finally are able to take a distance from faults in ourselves and others, and are able to love them as they are instead of straining ourselves, often futilely, to change them. As the English essayist, Horace Walpole noted: Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is. Laughter perhaps arises from the encrustation of the mechanical on the living, but there

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seems also to be something in laughter that somehow has the power to give rigidity a lifelike quality without changing it at all. When this happens we enjoy imperfection as it is. The laughter seeks no adaptation, nor to achieve any external purpose. How to account for this side of laughter? Bergson in fact is not blind to this side and in a few places he admits laughters playfulness, purposelessness. Speaking on the absurdity involved in humor, and the corresponding relaxation in the rules of reasoning, he says our initial reaction is to join in: Here, too, our first impulse is to accept the invitation to take it easy. For a short time, at all events, we join in the game. And that relieves us from the strain of living. (L, p. 196.) We will explore this in more detail in the second chapter; for now it is sufficient to note that Bergson ultimately subordinates this perspective to the idea of laughter as social correction. Thus, when we relax we do so only temporarily and accidentally, for the true purpose of laughter is correction. It is in this way that he paradoxically ends up with a pessimistic view of laughter: laughter might contribute to an increased adaptation to society, but since it makes use of evil and violence it cannot be called just in itself. Here, as elsewhere, nature has utilized evil with a view to good. (L, p. 199.) But what if the relaxation of laughter was not something accidental, something temporary? What if it cannot be subordinated to correction? On the surface of Bergsons account, the joy of laughter appears like a ripple, a meaningless ripple which he then writes off as an accidental occurrence; however, what if the ripple is more than just the wind blowing over the water -- what if there is something large lurking beneath? What if perhaps correction itself is only a particular manifestation of laughter? This would perhaps not be laughter as humiliation, but laughter as a celebration of life. It would be heartfelt laughter, spontaneous, not straining itself in order to deride or correct, but somehow accepting of the other person. It is difficult to progress beyond these vague intimations as to the true nature of laughter. We all have a sense of what laughter is, but most attempts to make this sense explicit in philosophical concepts often end in frustration or partial theories that somehow do not grasp the nature of laughter. We will not attempt to formulate a full theory, but merely to articulate some suggestions of what goes on in the deep recesses of our mind,

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where laughter takes hold. Perhaps the unifying idea behind these suggestions lies at a deeper level than social correction, at a somewhat existential level: laughter seems to be our true way of dealing with materiality. What does this mean? At this point Bergsons metaphysics become relevant. His metaphysics is one of immanence: as we will explain in the first chapter, duration and its diverse contractions and relaxations make up the entire Bergsonian ontology. There may be many forms of discontinuity in the world, but ultimately these are accidental, since everything is a form of continuously flowing duration. Yet, there are experiences in our lives that remain discontinuous with our life as a whole; it is as if they somehow stubbornly remain in the past, and resist being completely contracted into the present. These experiences are often very powerful elements in our lives, the sources of our greatest joys and our greatest sorrows. We fall helplessly in love; we witness children being born and friends die; we are betrayed by somebody we thought we trusted, and see how somebody else sacrifices himself or herself out of love for us. In fact, without these, perhaps life would not be worth living. Perhaps they are an invisible presence in our memory, giving color to a life that would otherwise be a homogeneous grey. These are experiences we cannot comprehend, which overpower us, and yet to which we remain helplessly attached, and to which we long to remain helplessly attached. The fact that we cannot hold everything together in a single act of consciousness, the fact that the past cannot be completely contracted into the present, is perhaps not some temporary discontinuity on the way to increased continuity. Perhaps this discontinuity is ontologically significant and points to something that transcends duration. What would be this transcendence? If a name can be given to it, we could imagine it to be like an Eternal Past. It is so far removed from the present that it escapes all contraction. Bergson gives the past a trans-subjective character, a point that will be explored more fully in Chapter 1. That is to say, when we remember something, we do not retrieve the memory from a storehouse localized in the brain, but instead our brain merely actualizes the past. The past is already there before we remember it; we are only a medium through which it is contracted into the present. In the same sense this Eternal Past would also always be there, but because it is so far in the past it would necessarily remain unconscious. This understanding of the Eternal Past is perhaps similar to what

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Roland Breeur describes as the singular that somehow escapes duration. He makes the point clear in a comparison between Proust and Bergson: De Recherche van Proust heet niet toevallig een Recherche du temps perdu. De tijd is altijd al verloren tijd. () Vandaar enkele frappante tegenstelligen met Bergson: de tijd is niet continuteit maar discontinuteit. (...) Voor Proust is het singuliere iets in mij dat zich aan mijn greep, mijn duur en mijn innerlijkheid onttrekt.1 What is then the relation between this singularity to the particular discontinuities in life? Perhaps we can imagine that this is somehow intimated when we fall in love, harbour bitter disappointments, or are given unimaginable joys. Yet one cannot really say that it is a particular object that is responsible for these experiences for it could be looked at with a cool scientific eye. However, sometimes we do not react so rationally. It seems as if what Bergson understands as contraction cannot bring this particular experience into the continuous whole of our life. Why? One could perhaps say that this singularity is like an Eternal Past that we somehow become aware of. The object becomes a kind of symbol for something that transcends time, and in the process becomes discontinuous with the rest of life. The Eternal Past sparks our most intense emotions, and perhaps it plays an essential role in laughter as well, for laughter breaks up the flow of duration. It introduces a discontinuous element. As we shall see, it contains a movement of contraction followed by relaxation, a build-up of tension and then a sudden relaxation: something mechanical encrusted on the living. The suggestion here is that Bergson makes the right moves, but interprets them wrongly. He makes this sudden relaxation accidental, since it is part of the larger movement of social correction; we will suggest that it is essential. It is in order to make sense of how it is essential that we introduce the Eternal Past. When we laugh we are able to distance ourselves from the living thing, not in a scientific way, but in such a way that the Eternal Past is somehow suggested. When we laugh we somehow realize that nothing in life is of ultimate importance, that there is something else that transcends duration, and that therefore we do not need to take life too seriously.

Roland Breeur, Bergson: het zuivere bewustzijn als moi profond in Vrijheid en bewustzijn: essays over Descartes, Bergson en Sartre, Peeters, 2002: p. 112-3.

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Laughter is thus somehow beyond our control. We cannot help but desire it, and furthermore, when we are laughing we are often swept up in it. Do we not often find everything funny when in a cheerful mood? And when caught by a fit of laughing, do we often not find it difficult to make the transition back to seriousness? One could almost imagine some force taking hold of us, causing us to laugh. We are not responsible for our own laughter; something else laughs through us, and we are only a medium. We only have to relax, to open ourselves up to this force and soon we are laughing. Soon we are in the tribunes of the Eternal Past, watching life unfold itself and enjoying the spectacle. There is a force flowing from the Eternal Past to the present, but it is not that of contraction, nor that of the lan vital: it is the lan riant. How then is laughter a particular way we have of dealing with materiality? Laughter is a way of taking a distance from finitude, and opening ourselves up to the Eternal Past. We are seized by the lan riant, and this force somehow mediates how we relate to materiality. We are not entirely indifferent to it, as we would be to an instrument, but neither do we take it entirely seriously, as if it were a great work of art. Laughter is love with a smile. It is a way of freeing the object of laughter and ourselves, under the auspices of the Eternal Past. With some imagination perhaps, one could say that this is the most fundamental reason why we laugh.

In this way laughter totters at the brink of duration and points to something beyond. The David of laughter fells the Goliath of duration, as it were. It is astonishing how something as mundane as laughter can have such deep sources perhaps its ubiquity arises precisely from the depth of its sources. But before dealing with laughter at this abstract remove, its mechanisms should be examined, namely its societal function, and its ontological source, and duration.

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Chapter One Time, Life and Society in Bergson

1.1 Duration
At the heart of Bergsons philosophy is his conception of time, which he calls duration. In fact, it is the notion on which his entire philosophy rests, both in content and in method, and therefore it is essential to give it the consideration it deserves. We will first explain what is meant by duration, which is most easily done by showing the connection with the subjective experience of duration. Having outlined the nature of duration, we will then be in a position to show its metaphysical and ontological significance, and to show how it is not confined to the subject alone. Following this discussion of duration, we can then move on to evolution, the human mind and human society, as these considerations are of crucial importance in our treatment of Bergsons account of laughter. However, before exploring the ontological significance of duration, we will focus first on Bergsons notion of duration itself by opposing it to its counterparts in space and homogeneous time.

Duration and Homogeneous Time

The Experience of Time How do we usually think of time? We are often not conscious of the flow of time as such, but only of the events that delineate time. The passage of time cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be felt, and we only are awoken to an awareness of time when some event grabs our attention and reminds us that time has passed. Have we not all been so engrossed in something that we completely forgot about the time? Psychology has labeled this phenomenon as flow2 and one of its main characteristics seems to be a lack of
2

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

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awareness of time. The reason for this may possibly be that no single event stood out to capture our attention, neither in our external perceptions or in our internal experience. Not only do we experience the activity itself as a seamless whole, but we ourselves are united with it, to the point of forgetting about ourselves. It is a paradoxical state: it is an unconsciousness of self, and yet it is the highest degree of consciousness. In particular, there is nothing to remind us about the passage of time because we cannot distinguish between those events that might give us anchor points to keep track of time. Quite probably, flow is not a clearly determinable state, but is more of a tendency that can be more or less present in ones state of mind. We are always in danger of losing a sense of time; this would explain why we rely on clocks, which produce clearly distinguishable events at regular intervals, providing us with reliable anchor points in order to quantify time. If he were alive today, Bergson might say that this state of flow reveals something about the true nature of time. We talk about losing the sense of time, but in fact we lose merely quantitative or homogeneous time, and gain duration: When I follow with my eyes on the dial of a clock the movement of the hand which corresponds to the oscillations of the pendulum, I do not measure duration, as seems to be thought; I merely count simultaneities, which is very different. (TFW, p. 107-108.) The quantitative time we ordinarily use in daily life is merely the surface of real time, for it is reducible to a relationship between events that take place in space. In this way, quantitative time arises from spatializing time: it is time that has been contaminated by space, as it were. Quantity, extension these are properties that belong to space, but duration is beyond extension, beyond quantity. We get into the habit of setting up the same distinction between the successive moments of our conscious life: the oscillations of the pendulum break it up, so to speak, into parts external to one another: hence the mistaken idea of a homogeneous inner duration, similar to space. (TFW, p. 109)

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Duration and Space What is this inner duration of which Bergson speaks? How precisely does it differ from space? What is space? It is interesting to note that Bergson originally came to the notion of duration through a study of mechanics: En ralit, la mtaphysique et mme la psychologie mattiraient beaucoup moins que les recherches relatives la thorie des sciences, surtout la thorie des mathmatiques. Je me proposais, pour ma thse de doctorat, dtudier les concepts fondamentaux de la mcanique. Cest ainsi que je fus conduit moccuper de lide de temps. Je maperus, non sans surprise, quil nest jamais question de dure proprement dite en mcanique, ni mme en physique, et que le temps dont on y parle est tout autre chose. Je me demandai alors o est la dure relle, et ce quelle pouvait bien tre, et pourquoi notre mathmatique na pas de prise sur elle. Cest ainsi que je fus amen graduellement du point de vue mathmatique et mcanistique o je mtais plac tout dabord, au point de vue psychologique. De ces rflexions est sorti lEssai dur les donnes immdiates de la conscience o jessaie de pratiquer une introspection absolument directe et de saisir la dure pure.3 Perhaps it is by reacting to the mechanistic conception of time that Bergson initially places duration solely in the subject. He deals with this most fully in his first book, Time and Free Will, where he contrasts duration with space. The first characteristic of duration seems to be a ceaseless change, for we observe a ceaseless change in our mental states: I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do thinking, I look at what is around me or I think of something else I change, then, without ceasing. (CE, p. 1) Inner states are inextricably intertwined with the flow of time. They are never repeated, for each later psychic state contains the memory of the earlier one. Thus duration is also characterized by irreversibility: My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates (CE, p. 2.) Furthermore, each mental state cannot be separated from what precedes it, for they interpenetrate: We can thus conceive of succession without distinction, and think of it as a mutual penetration, an interconnexion and organization of elements, each one of

Henri Bergson, letter to Giovanni Papini, October 21, 1903, in Mlanges, p. 604. Quoted in Arnaud Franois, Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche: Volont et ralit, Presses Universitaires de France, 2008.

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which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought. (TFW, p. 101.) Thus we see here that the flow of time is a very particular succession, a continuous succession, of which the elements cannot be clearly distinguished. Bergson often describes these characteristics by means of metaphor. One he is particular fond of is the movement of a hand. When I move my hand across space, I do not endeavor to move my hand to this point and then to the next point, and so on, but conceive of it and execute it as a single movement. Thus it is a continuous movement, and in this respect a unity, but in another respect it is a multiplicity, since it traverses ever-changing points in space. The movement describes an infinite succession of points in space and yet is a single movement. In ITM Bergson describes a series of metaphors in order to suggest the nature of duration, even though each is faulty in some way: This inner life may be compared to the unrolling of a coil, for there is no living being who does not feel himself coming gradually to the end of his role () But it may just as well be compared to a continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us... (ITM, p. 8.) However, every new moment is novel, duration is irreversible, and this is not something the rolling coil conveys. The symbolic representation of duration must be always different if it is to convey true duration. The metaphor for this would a myriad-tinted spectrum, with its insensible gradations leading from one shade to another. (ITM, p. 8.) In itself, this metaphor does not convey the nature of duration either, because the colors of the spectrum are juxtaposed in space, whereas pure duration, on the contrary, excludes all idea of juxtaposition, reciprocal externality and extension. (ITM, p. 9.) Perhaps most basically, duration must be understood as a movement. A movement in space has a beginning, middle and end, and can be represented by a set of points, called the trajectory. . Now, the trajectory in this mathematical space can describe the process, but it is not identical with the process. The trajectory is a symbolic representation of the process; it consists of a succession of points. Each of those points is defined as the point at which the process would halt if it were to stop. But the process does not stop at that point, for if it did, it would no longer be a dynamic process but a static point. For this reason, there is always an element of consciousness built into the representation of a process by a trajectory:

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The division is the work of our imagination, of which indeed the office is to fix the moving images of our ordinary experience, like the instantaneous flash which illuminates a stormy landscape by night. (MM, p. 248.) A process can be described by a trajectory, but a trajectory is a static representation, and cannot describe the movement at the basis of the process. This was the mistake in Zenos arguments that movement does not exist. They all consist in making time and movement coincide with the line which underlies them, in attributing to them the same subdivisions as to the line, in short in treating them like that line. (MM, p. 250.) Indeed, the movement is of another order: the movement is the source of the trajectory, and therefore the latter can never be identical with the former. The movement itself is indivisible. In any case, we can thus get an idea of what Bergson means by duration. These characteristics of continuity, irreversibility and perpetual change are unified in the concept of qualitative multiplicity. It is a multiplicity of which the elements cannot be separated from the whole because there are qualities instead of quantities. This qualitative multiplicity is most easily explained in contrast to a quantitative multiplicity. For this we will explain what Bergson means by number, and in number we will see how space and duration relate: Number may be defined in general as a collection of units, or, speaking more exactly, as the synthesis of the one and the many. (TFW, p. 75.) However, what is the connection between number and time? The notion of structure can help here. In a Kantian vein, Bergson is also investigating the conditions of our experience, in which time and space play a vital role by structuring our experience of the world. A structure is both a whole and the sum of different parts. Number then is an abstract representation of structure: it abstracts from the details of the structure and retains only the skeleton. The opening motif of Beethovens Fifth Symphony can thus be represented by the number 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. The parts are taken to be identical and are replaced by unities; the relations between the parts are also taken to be identical and the whole is replaced by the sum of unities. Number thus involves the homogenization and quantification of structure. Russell criticized Bergson for this conception of number in an article on Bergsons philosophy:

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Bergson does not know what number is, and has himself no clear idea of it. There are three entirely different things which are confused by Bergson in the above statements, namely: (1) number, the general concept applicable to the various particular numbers; (2) the various particular numbers; (3) the various collections to which the various particular numbers are applicable.4 Russell undoubtedly has a point here, for Bergson does not distinguish between these different notions of number; however, what Bergson is trying to do is not to give a detailed analysis of what number is, but to distinguish it from duration. The three notions mentioned by Russell are perhaps not entirely different, for they all refer to some clearly defined entity, with clear borders separating it from another number. This is precisely Bergsons point. How can numbers be distinguished? Let us assume that all the sheep in the flock are identical; they differ at least by the position which they occupy in space, otherwise they would not form a flock. (TFW, p. 77.) This means that space is a necessary condition in order to conceive of a number. Without space we could not juxtapose the various unities, and they would merge into single unity. Without space, there would only be one number, the number one. And then there would be no number, because what is unity if there is nothing to unify? There would be no longer anything to distinguish one from zero; everything would turn into a homogeneous, confused and infinite mass, and the world would collapse into utter unintelligibility. Thus we see how numbers presuppose space. Like Kant, Bergson understands space as a mental structure ordering experience. Numbers, as ordered by space, therefore are identical and distinguishable: in this they differ from qualities. The collection of numbers is a numerical multiplicity, but qualities, such as mental states, cannot be quantified. They belong to space, and not so much to duration. We see here that duration opposes space. Homogeneous time, the time we use in our practical life, is in fact duration that has been spatialized: Time, conceived under the form of an unbounded and homogeneous medium, is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness. (TFW, p. 99)

Russell, Bertrand, The Philosophy of Bergson in The Monist, vol.22, 1912.

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Events in time, which actually relate to each other as in a qualitative multiplicity, thus are conceived as forming a numerical multiplicity. This opposition between duration and space is also one of subjectivity and objectivity: We can understand that material objects, being exterior to one another and to ourselves, derive both exteriorities from the homogeneity of a medium which inserts intervals between them and sets off their outlines: but states of consciousness, even when successive, permeate one another, and in the simplest of them the whole soul can be reflected. (TFW, p. 98.) Why do we thus confuse space and time? We do this for very good reasons, says Bergson, for the opposition that takes place between duration and space, between subjectivity and objectivity also is present within our own self: Our ego comes in contact with the external world at its surface; our successive sensations, although dissolving into one another, retain something of the mutual externality which belongs to their objective causes. (TFW, p. 125) We quantify time so that we have a hold on it, and can use it as a tool for structuring our actions. This will be a recurrent theme throughout Bergsons work: quantification is intrinsically connected with a practical frame of mind. Thus the quantification of time is perhaps fundamental to any organization of daily life. Without it, we would be more inclined to drift off in a subjective dream world, unaware of the world outside us. Furthermore, social life takes place in space, and therefore this mixing of duration and space is inevitable. Language consists of words, which are discrete entities, and so therefore forms somewhat of a numerical multiplicity which will always remain insufficient to convey the qualitative multiplicity of our inner states. There is a deeper reason however why we confuse space and time, one that lies in the nature of duration itself. Duration is never manifested as it is, but always needs the materiality of space to be communicated. In itself, pure movement is invisible. Even when we compare duration to a movement, we still rely on space to communicate duration. Duration can only be expressed symbolically and thus needs space to manifest itself. This distinction between duration and space is absolutely crucial to the whole of Bergsons philosophy. However, the distinction is not absolute, for we will show how in fact space itself is a form of duration. Duration therefore is not confined to the interior of

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the subject, but also has an objective aspect as well. Before discussing this, let us consider how the relation between space and duration is constitutive of his style of thinking, of his method as it were, for whether he is discussing life, the human mind, society or morality, the relation comes back again and again.

Method In approaching philosophical problems Bergson often tends to split his thought into two phases. In a first he establishes a dualism between two different tendencies in a situation, often corresponding to the superficial and profound, which is to say, to space and duration. The first contains a succession of discontinuous solid elements; the second forms a continuous ever-changing whole with overlapping parts which cannot be separated from each other. Then in a second phase of his reasoning he reconciles these two tendencies by showing them to be extremes constituting a continuum. Thus, in a sense he shows both the discontinuous and continuous tendencies in a situation to be manifestations of a deeper continuity. However, in connecting the two points, the continuum does not reduce them to sameness. Rather it shows how these two tendencies can generate a qualititative multiplicity of phenomena, or to borrow a metaphor from the Introduction to Metaphysics, a myriad-tinted spectrum, with its insensible gradations leading from one shade to another. (ITM, p. 13.) When Deleuze speaks about the Bergsonian method, with its two main aspects, the one dualist, the other monist5, it is this approach that he has in mind: the movement from difference to reconciliation of the difference without reducing one to the other. He analyzes Bergsons method in three rules, the last two of which correspond roughly to the two phases we have been speaking of here. Deleuzes second rule of Bergsonism is: Struggle against illusion, rediscover the true differences in kind or articulations of the real.6 This search for differences in kind rather than differences in degree, could be reformulated as the first phase, in which one seeks to distinguish different tendencies. Differences in degree reduce all to a single tendency, which then can differ in intensity; however a difference in kind points to an irreducible difference. Or rather, it is a

5 6

Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 73 Ibid., p. 21.

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difference that cannot be resolved in terms of space alone, for when this difference is analyzed in terms of time, the different tendencies do not seem absolutely different, but rather like two isolated points at the extreme of a continuum. Thus Deleuzes third rule: State problems and solve them in terms of time rather than of space.7 In this way difference in kind between space and subjective duration is shown to be a continuum on the line of ontological duration, as we will explain further on. This movement from difference to reconciliation has Hegelian overtones, but unlike in Hegel the opposition is not mediated by an all-inclusive whole. Space remains radically different from duration, even though there is a movement from the one to the other. There is a mediated difference without reduction to sameness; if Hegelian dialectic describes a circular movement, from Geist back onto itself, albeit in more inclusive form, the Bergsonian method is an open-ended movement. The outcome of Hegelian dialectic is not a qualitative multiplicity; this is the crucial difference with Bergson. As Deleuze writes: Bergsonisms incompatibility with Hegelianism, indeed with any dialectical method, is also evident in these passages. [CE, p. 167] Bergson criticizes the dialectic for being a false movement, that is, a movement of the abstract concept, which goes from one opposite to the other only by means of imprecision. 8 Thus in Hegels dialectic the movement from one abstract concept to the other is in fact not movement; all remains within Geist. However, there may yet be a totalizing tendency here, albeit in a more subtle form. Difference is not reduced to a mediated sameness in Bergsons philosophy since the notion of duration contains in itself a multiplicity while being a unity at the same time; yet one might wonder whether Bergson perhaps makes a reductive move of another kind, and reduces discontinuity to continuity. Space and duration are both forms of a deeper ontological duration, something we will discuss shortly, but one may wonder whether Bergson does not reduce the discontinuous here. We will return to this consideration in the third chapter, since it is a key consideration for the nature of laughter.

7 8

Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 44.

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In any case, perhaps we can give some examples of this method. In Time and Free Will, Bergson seeks to distinguish between two senses of the self, our social self and fundamental self: In other words, our perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas occur under two aspects: the one clear and precise, but impersonal; the other confused, ever changing, and inexpressible, because language cannot get hold of it without arresting its mobility or fitting it into its common-place forms without making it into public property. (TFW, p. 129.) As we will discuss later, this dualism is a particular form of the dualism between space and duration, and thus in a sense Time and Free Will is the articulation of the first phase of Bergsons thought on the nature of the self. In his next book, Matter and Memory, he moves on to the next phase, and reconciles these two senses of the self with the connecting notions of contraction and extension, which show the continuity between duration and space. Other examples would include the dualism between types of time (duration and homogenous time), types of memory (spontaneous and habitual), types of society (open and closed), and between instinct and intellect, matter and memory, past and present, etc. In this way the distinction between duration and space plays a role not only on the philosophical level, but also on the meta-philosophical level.

Intuition The way a philosopher proceeds in tackling a subject usually reveals the beliefs he holds about what true knowledge consists of; so too Bergsons method reveals his epistemology. In his text Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson distinguishes between analysis and intuition: with the former we distinguish between discrete elements or properties of a thing, and with the latter we grasp the essence or duration of a thing: By intuition we mean the intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. (ITM, p. 5.) Intuition thus places itself in the depths of an object as it were. Analysis on the other hand, remains on the surface: Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common to it and other objects. (ITM, p. 5.)

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Perhaps one could say that the first phase of Bergsonian thought is the more analytical, the second more intuitive. Are these phases consecutive? Is analysis a necessary prerequisite for intuition? Bergson in fact claims the opposite: it is possible to go from intuition to analysis, from the depths to the surface, but the opposite movement is impossible: In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn, analysis multiplies without end the number of its points of view in order to complete its always incomplete representation () But intuition, if intuition is possible, is a simple act. (ITM, p. 6.) Is Bergsonian intuition some kind of mysticism? Bergson has received much criticism on this front, not least from Russell. However, the criticism does not seem entirely justified, because Bergson does not negate the importance of analysis, but rather claims merely claims that intuition must be prior to analysis. Analysis is used in order express the intuition. Without analysis we remain in an opaque intuition, unable to distinguish between discrete elements. Yet in an important sense the process of intuition is inexpressible. The first phase can be expressed in words; the second must be done in silence. The reason for this is due to the nature of duration. As Mullarkey comments: Whenever we philosophise about time we inevitably confuse this space with time thinking and talking about time distorts it: We cannot measure time, we cannot even talk about it, without spatializing it.9 (The latter quoted in DS, p. 150.) We may look outside ourselves for useful concepts in order to grasp duration, but these concepts in the end can only be suggestive of duration; without an accompanying effort on our part we will never be able to grasp duration. Relying on concepts alone implies a lack of effort to place oneself in the originary movement itself. As alluded to in the introduction, here we see more explicitly how duration is related to the Kantian ding-an-sich, the unknowable noumenal reality. As Mullarkey writes: Kant characterized things-in-themselves as unknowable in virtue of what was for Bergson his impoverished conception of understanding and the perception of space and time.10 What Kant conceived of as understanding, Bergson might have called analysis,

10

Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy, p. 150. Ibid, p. 170

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which deals with objects merely in their external manifestation. Kant grouped together analysis and the a priori mental structures ordering experience, space and time, whereas Bergson places time firmly beyond analysis. The reason for this, Bergson believed, was that Kant underestimated the importance of time and placed it on the same level as space: Kants great mistake was to take time as a homogeneous medium. (TFW, p. 232.) Time is more than this, more than a subjective structure of the mind; contrary to what Kant believed, duration is constitutive in an ontological sense as well, and because of its fluid reality is inextricably linked with human freedom. The thing-in-itself is accessible, albeit perhaps not in the way Kant imagined, and as Mullarkey writes: If Kant banished metaphysics and with it the absolute, Bergson sees it as his task to reinstate them both, only now in a newly redeemed understanding rather than in the form in which Kant uncovered them. 11 In this way we see how duration is not only at the ground of the method of Bergsons thought, and the methods two phases, but also at the ground of Bergsons epistemology, in which he distinguishes between analysis and intuition. To conclude therefore, the opposition between duration and space, or between real time and homogeneous time, cannot be absolute. It is a result of an analysis, a first phase in the method. We will see now how homogeneous time and duration are not wholly different, since the latter is the source of the former. Duration is not so much nonobjective as transobjective; it is the ontological force of all reality.

Ontological Duration

How can duration be at the basis of all reality? We will suggest here that two elements and two movements are necessary to understand duration as an ontological force: past and present, and extension (dtention) and contraction (tension).

Past and Present Past and present represent a continuum. In fact there is no single past, nor any single present. What we call the present is in fact already suffused with the past:
11

Ibid., p. 115.

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The real, concrete, lie present that of which I speak when I speak of my present perception that present necessarily occupies a duration. () The psychical state, then, that I call my present, must be both a perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future. (MM, p. 176.) And the past in itself cannot exist without the present. If the past would not be in the present in some way, we would never be conscious of it, nor would the past even have any effect on the present. Nevertheless it is useful to distinguish between the two. The present is the realm of materiality: Sensations and movements being localized at determined points of this extended body, there can only be, at a given moment, a single system of movements and sensations. That is why my present appears to me to be a thing absolutely determined, and contrasting with my past. () Our present is the very materiality of our existence.12 (MM, p. 178.) The past on the other hand is immaterial, and is therefore powerless. It needs the present in order to be actualized: thus for example a memory needs a perception in order to become conscious: Memory, on the contrary, powerless as long as it remains without utility, is pure from all admixture of sensation, is without attachment to the present, and is consequently unextended. (MM, p. 181.) In this way the difference between the present and past is one of materiality. The present takes place in space, where the elements are clearly defined and form a numerical multiplicity. The past on the other hand forms an immaterial qualitative multiplicity. Often we think spontaneously of the past as that which no longer exists; however, Bergson disagrees with this. The past still exists, independently of any consciousness that is able to remember it, and remains indefinitely, in the recesses of time, detached from life. In fact, consciousness is identical with the present: we cannot be conscious of the past. Therefore, what is past is what we are unconscious of, and the past can continue independently of the subject: If consciousness is but the characteristic note of the present, that is to say of the actually lived, in short of the active, then that which does not act may cease to belong to consciousness without therefore ceasing to exist in some manner. (MM, p. 181.)

12

My emphasis.

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How to conceive of this survival of the past, independent of consciousness? Bergson says it is completely identical with the survival of space independently of our consciousness. Just as we know that the street outside our house still exists even though we do not perceive it, whatever happened yesterday survives in the past even though we do not remember it. Duration in this way gets an objective significance.

Contraction and Relaxation Present and past relate by movements of contraction and relaxation. Contraction is basically synonymous with consciousness for Bergson, even though consciousness thus gets an ontological significance. Contraction can be best imagined as some kind of synthesis. A passage from TFW is most illuminating: Here [in the external perception] we certainly have a series of identical terms, since it is always the same moving body; but, on the other hand, the synthesis carried out by our consciousness between the actual position and what our memory calls the former positions, causes these images to permeate, complete, and, so to speak, continue one another. (TFW, p. 124.) In this way a multiplicity of points are gathered together into a single movement. Each and every single point is a quantity, yet by an act of synthesis they are contracted into a movement, which is a qualitative unity. He gives another example in MM: Thus the sensation of red light, experienced by us in the course of a second, corresponds in itself to a succession of phenomena which, separately distinguished in our duration with the greatest possible exonomy of time, would occupy more than 250 centuries of our history.( ) Then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life. (MM, p. 273, 274) Thus contraction gathers discrete points in the past, and inserts them in the present. For this reason we will use the phrase contracting the past into the present to describe the movement of duration. When past is not contracted into the present, duration is in a state of relaxation. This is basically space, and we can deduce the characteristics of space from this lack of contraction. The elements of space are identical, as the past does not influence the present and is therefore a repetition in the present. Each moment is created anew continually, and there is no distinguishing factor between the moments. This means also that movements

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in space are reversible. Because the present is separated from the past, the elements of the present will be present only as materiality, as solids. This means that they will be able to be clearly distinguished from other elements. Both contraction and relaxation can be described by the notion of a rhythm of duration. A slower rhythm is a more extended or relaxed state; in a more tense state duration will have a faster rhythm. Thus we see that subjective consciousness is a state with a faster rhythm of duration, whereas a material object is in a state of a slow rhythm. This variation in rhythm thus allows qualities to arise. Duration without rhythm would be a pure multiplicity: the past would be disconnected from the present and there would be no interaction between beings whatsoever. Duration with an infinite rhythm would be a pure unity: past and present would be contracted into one whole. These however are extremes and do not exist in pure form. We can now revisit our discussion of number and show how duration and contraction in fact also play a role in our conception of numbers. If there were no duration, there would be no past, only a present. Then we could never conceive of a succession of unities, because with every moment of duration we are presented with a new unity, and we would have forgotten the old one. We would never be able to add 1 and 1 together, for we would have forgotten about the first 1 by the time we got to the second. We could never add the past to the present, and we would only be able to conceive of unity. There would be only one number, the number one. Duration thus plays the role of unifying what is multiple in space. These notions of past and present, contraction and relaxation are crucial in our discussion of laughter and allow us to form a unity in understanding the phenomena of laughter. However, laughter also has a relation to life, the human mind and society, and we will now examine Bergsons understanding of these.

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1.2 lan vital: The Duration of life

Life can be understood as a particular organization of past and present. Matter is a form of duration in which the past plays a far less important role. As we will discuss later, Bergson understands laughter as arising from something mechanical encrusted on the living, so an explanation of both matter and life is in order here.

Matter As mentioned above, matter is extended duration, that is, duration with a slow rhythm. Therefore matters past is usually unnecessary in order to understand its present, because it has no effect on it. To predict matters next movements in space, it suffices only to know its immediate past. The present state of an unorganized body depends exclusively on what happened at the previous instant; and likewise the position of the material points of a system defined and isolated by science is determined by the position of these same points at the moment immediately before. In other words, the laws that govern unorganized matter are expressible, in principle, by differential equations in which time (in the sense in which the mathematician takes this word) would play the role of independent variable. (CE, p. 19.) Matters past is therefore detached from its present, and we can go about understanding matter by means of analysis, which cuts up movements into different points. We will see later how laughter mimics this detachment of past from present. Science also mimics this detachment, since it constructs quantitative laws governing matters movements in space; perhaps it differs from laughter in that it believes it has understood the world, whereas laughter revels in its ignorance. Yet, despite this detachment, even matter is not completely detached from its past. There are physical processes which are irreversible, and which seem to be governed by a movement of duration instead of mere objective time. This is the second law of thermodynamics (See CE, p. 243.) Why should matter evolve in this way? Why does the universe age? Why do our bodies age? For Bergson this fact does not need explaining: it is the very nature of matter to tend in this direction:

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The order which reigns there, and which is manifested by the laws of nature, is an order which must be born of itself when the inverse order is suppressed; a detension [sic] of the will would produce precisely this suppression. Lastly, we find that the direction, which this reality takes, suggests to us the idea of a thing unmaking itself; such, no doubt, is one of the essential characters of materiality. (CE, p. 245) Matter appears as the detension of the will13; because it is separated from the past, it will become increasingly disorganized. Matter thus has the inverse inclination of consciousness. In this way, material organization seems to be associated with a movement of contraction. In order to understand this, perhaps we could suggest notion of a material memory. Such a memory would contain the past in the material organization of bodies. Bergson does not speculate directly on this, but perhaps one could wonder if the difference between organic and inorganic matter is not so much due to the absence of the past in the present indeed, every kind of organization is due to the contraction of the past into the present but rather due to the absence of a duration of the past in the present. We are here going on a suggestion of Bergson: The present state of an unorganized body depends exclusively no what happened at the previous instant () [whereas it is] the fact that the present moment of a living body does not find its explanation in the moment immediately before, that all the past of the organism must be added to that moment, its heredity in fact, the whole of a very long history. (CE 19-20) The organization of matter contracts specific points of time whereas a living body contracts a duration of time. The living body contracts a stretch of the past into the present, not merely discontinuous events. Thus the difference between organic and inorganic matter is perhaps a gradual one, a gradual difference in rhythm of duration.

13

The word detension here is used as a synonym for relaxation; both are the translation of detention.

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Life Individuals Only where the present meets the past does duration adopt a faster rhythm: this is life, or consciousness. Note that Bergson attributes consciousness to every life form, not only to humans. The latter possess consciousness in a narrow sense, but this narrow consciousness participates in a wider consciousness which is life itself. Both consciousness and life are basically the same: the contraction of the past into the present. In life this contraction is called the lan vital. This vital impulse is an explosion, for it gathers the energy of the past in order to unleash it in the present: All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. (CE, p. 253-254) The difference between plant life and animal life is that the former is more focused on accumulating energy by photosynthesis, while the latter specializes in expending it. Even the human brain, in Bergsons analysis, is in fact a means for a more efficient expenditure of energy. Not only does the brain coordinate the muscles, allowing for more effective usage of energy, but the brain also fabricates tools, which are merely catalysts for the expenditure of energy. Thus we merely have to put our foot on the gas pedal, and we cause a much larger source of energy to be unleashed. In what way is this accumulation and expenditure of energy a form of contraction? If there is a movement from state A to state B by fixing the carbon atom of carbonic acid and thus accumulating energy, state B somehow contains the memory of state A. This memory is not something immaterial but is rather a material survival of the past. It is not just a mechanical change because the process is irreversible. Solar energy is needed to go from A to B, but if the carbon atom is unfixed (during an expenditure of energy) it will not be the case that visible light is emitted, but electromagnetic radiation of a longer wavelength. This is the second law of thermodynamics. Therefore accumulating energy is an act of contraction, requiring a faster rhythm of duration that that of matter. (See CE, p. 115-117)

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Evolution This is the way in which the lan vital governs individual beings. However, it also governs evolution as a whole. The lan vital thus represents a wide consciousness in which the narrower consciousness of individual organisms take part. Consciousness, or supra-consciousness, is the name for the rocket whose extinguished fragments fall back as matter; consciousness, again, is the name for that which subsists of the rocket itself, passing through the fragments and lighting them up into organisms (CE, p. 261) It is thus a supra-consciousness that grounds narrower consciousnesses. The explosiveness of these narrower consciousnesses mimics the more powerful explosion of evolution itself: [Evolution] proceeds rather like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a time incommensurably long. (CE, p. 98) In this way evolution is governed neither by a mechanical causality, nor by a finality. It is a purposeless explosion from within. Evolution cannot be explained by a mechanism, such as natural selection. Mechanism touches only upon the form of evolution, but not on the movement of evolution itself. It explains how certain organisms evolved, but does not explain why they evolved at all. Indeed, why did life evolve further from the unicellular stage? The truth is that adaption explains the sinuosities of the movement of evolution but not its general directions, still less the movement itself. The road that leads to the town is obliged to follow the ups and downs of the hills; it adapts itself to the accidents of the ground; but the accidents of the ground are not the cause of the road, nor have they given it its direction. (CE, p. 102) The hills are the circumstance of the road. It is like the clay with which the sculptor moulds the figure: the clay is necessary for the work of art, but yet the artwork flows beyond it in some way. It would be like explaining the history of philosophy as a series of reactions and adaptations to previous generations of philosophers. This ignores the fact we use other philosophers merely as dialogue partners to express a more profound philosophical impulse. We borrow and modify thoughts from other philosophers, but often only as a means of articulating our own thoughts, as a way of solidifying deeper but

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more vague intuitions. However, mechanism cannot explain why we philosophize at all; it cannot explain why life has evolved at all. Unicellular organisms are excellently adapted to the environment; there is no reason to think that there is a necessity involved in the movement from unicellular to multicellular organisms. In fact, this is how contemporary biology explains the motor of evolution: what is called genetic drift produces a variety of organisms within a population, and this variety is culled by natural selection, with successful varieties eventually developing into new species. But what explains genetic drift itself? Nothing but chance. However, what is chance? Is it not a name we give to something we cannot determine any cause whatsoever for? It is as if chance is an entity that is invoked every time that determinate scientific thinking reaches its limits. Does this suggest that the cause of this variety, if there is a cause at all, cannot be a determinate cause and that it must be beyond the mechanical order? While the spontaneous variety of life appears an impenetrable unintelligibility to the analytic thinking of science, for Bergson the same variety is an expression of the explosive force of the lan vital. Neither can evolution be explained by finalism. Finalism, according to Bergson, implies that life evolves according to a definite plan, but this cannot be the case for as evolution progresses, it becomes increasingly complex: The discord between species will go on increasing. (CE, p. 103.) The unity of life must be found not at the end, but in the beginning, in the impetus that pushes it along the road of time (CE, p. 103.) In the notion of lan vital Bergson thus combines the blindness of mechanism with the unity of finalism. In fact the explosiveness of the lan vital is nothing but a reformulation of the movement of duration in a biological context. The principle of life relates to physical and chemical processes in the way time relates to life: So likewise "vitality" is tangent, at any and every point, to physical and chemical forces; but such points are, as a fact, only views taken by a mind which imagines stops at various moments of the movement that generates the curve. (CE, p. 31.) How to connect the lan vital that governs evolution and the lan vital that courses through the consciousnesses of individual life forms? This calls for an examination of how how consciousness can awaken. This will be important, since we will be arguing that

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Bergsons laughter is a societal instinct, and for Bergson an instinct is a particular form of consciousness to be distinguished from torpor and intelligence.

Awakening of consciousness Torpor is the consciousness of plants. Plants are living beings that have fallen asleep. They have chosen to specialize in extracting their nutrients from their direct environment, unlike animals which must look for their nourishment and which must therefore be mobile: We may say that vegetables are distinguished from animals by their power of creating organic matter out of mineral elements which they draw directly from the air and earth and water. () Animal life is characterized, in its general direction, by mobility in space. (CE, p. 108.) Animals are living beings in which the lan vital has been awakened, whereas plants have been crusted over by immobility. Plants therefore do not realize the full potential of the lan vital, and tend in the direction of matter. However, because the narrow consciousness of living beings is separate from the wider stream of the lan vital, the lan vital keeps on pulsating, even in quasi non-consciousness organisms as plants: It lies dormant when life is condemned to automatism; it wakens as soon as the possibility of a choice is restored. (CE, p. 261) This possibility of choice is precisely the mobility of animals which has evolved along two main paths: instinct and intelligence.

Instinct and Intelligence It must be emphasized here that instinct and intelligence show fundamental similarities here for Bergson, for they represent two different solutions to the same problem, the problem of fulfilling needs: The life manifested by an organism is, in our view, a certain effort to obtain certain things from the material world. (CE, p. 136.) Their difference lies in that instinct is geared to fulfilling needs by means of the body, while intelligence uses external objects to procure the needs:

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Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even of constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments. (CE, p. 140.) This is why Bergson later says that intelligence and instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former towards inert matter, the latter towards life. (CE, p. 176)

Intellect and Intuition What about the rhythm of duration of the human being? Besides bodily instinct, there are essentially two differently rhythms in human consciousness: intellect and intuition. Intellect is the human form of intelligence for Bergson. It contracts perception according to material needs, and thus is primarily geared to action and the needs of the body. Human beings rely on it in order to survive, because their intellect allows them to manipulate the solid objects in the world. In this way intellect is something that deals with the present instead of with the past, with space instead of duration. It is in this way that intellect is turned towards inert matter. Intuition is neither instinct nor intellect, in that it is disinterested. Intuition is like instinct in that it is turned towards life itself, but differs from it in that it is no longer occupied with fulfilling needs. By intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely. (CE, p. 176.) Human intuition is freed from matter and places itself in the lan vital itself. In this way perhaps the narrow consciousness of intuition parallels the wider consciousness of the lan vital. Intuition is a manifestation in the human being of the vaster power of lan vital: the violence needed for an act of intuition14 testifies to the greater violence and explosiveness of life itself. However, it cannot be the case that intellect is superseded by intuition. Intellect remains necessary in practical life. Furthermore, without intellect intuition would remain on the level of the instinct of animals: But, though it thereby transcends intelligence, it is from intelligence that has come the push that has made it rise to the point it has reached. Without intelligence, it
14

In Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson speaks about intuition as being a laborious, and even painful effort (p. 32) and about its essentially active, I might almost say violent, character.(p. 33)

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would have remained in the form of instinct, riveted to the special object of its practical interest, and turned outward by it into movements of locomotion. (CE, p. 178) This is perhaps another consideration to be taken into account for the relation between analysis and intuition mentioned above.

In this way we see how the key concepts of matter, life, instinct and intuition can be related to the basic notion of duration and contraction. This will serve us well when we come to our discussion of laughter. Laughter, however, is not only something that needs to be situated in life, but is also something that needs to situated in the consciousness of man, since the particular inner workings of the human consciousness will determine the character of laughter.

1.3 Matter and Memory: Duration of Man

What will be of particular interest here is Bergsons understanding of imagination and of affection, since these are two notions that will play a role in our understanding of the subjective process of laughter. However, first we must discuss what perception means for Bergson, and how it is related to memory. It is important to examine this in some detail, since it will play a role in how we will treat the comic perception.

Perception Bergsons conception of the nature of perception went through a considerable evolution in his oeuvre. In his earliest book, Time and Free Will he establishes the opposition of duration and space by trying to show that psychic states are not magnitudes, but rather intensities. Each perception, no matter how quantitative it may seem, is actually a quality, and thus completely unique. This seems obvious with regard to perceptions of deep-seated feelings as joy and sorrow, but less so with more empirical perceptions, such as pain or the sensation of light. Can we not legitimately say we feel more or less pain; do we not have a stronger or weaker perception of light? According to

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Bergson there are good reasons why we have a habit of saying this, but the truth of the matter is that each inner psychic state is a quality that cannot be quantified, an intensity, not a magnitude. How does Bergson support this surprising claim? He distinguishes between two layers in the psychic state, one corresponding more to duration, and the other to space. He calls the layers the superficial self and the fundamental self (TFW, p. 128.). In this way perceptions are grounded in duration, but at the surface they are manifested in space. It has generally been pointed out that we generally perceive our own self by refraction through space, that our conscious states crystallize into words, and that our living and concrete self thus gets covered with an outer crust of clean-cut psychic states, which are separated from one another and consequently fixed. (TFW, p. 167.) To reformulate in terms of past and present, perceptions are grounded in the past, even though this past is contracted into the present. Only in Matter and Memory did Bergson realize the ontological implications of duration. The subjective past becomes an ontological past; consequently, perception is not a contraction of a past that we contain in our self, but is rather an actualization of a past that is not confined to the subject. We do not possess the past; rather, we are merely a medium through which the past passes on the way to actualizing itself in the present. Thus perception is the meeting point of the two vast realms of matter and memory. This will be the conclusion of MM. How does Bergson get there?

Matter as Image Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed. (MM, p. 1.) An image in this sense is simply the spontaneous impression we get when we perceive matter: This conception of matter is simply that of common sense. (MM, viii) There is yet no questioning about the true nature of things and whether the perception is correct; the primitive fact is that we are in relation to the world. What Bergson now says is that our spontaneous impression is the correct one, and it is no coincidence that the subtitle of TFW is An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. In a phenomenological vein,

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Bergson is interested in the immediate perception of the world, for since the material world consists of images, it is not to be distrusted. Everything that could possibly be known about an image can be discovered by human perception; an image cannot exercise powers of any kind other that those which we perceive. (MM, p. 78) But are not our immediate perceptions often mistaken? How then could matter be an image? Perhaps the most direct way to understanding this is by first keeping in mind that all these images are in relation to each other in some kind of network. They interact with each other in necessary, determinate ways, according to certain forces: they attract and repel each other, rub against each other, and collide. All these images act and react upon one another in all their elementary parts according to constant laws which I call laws of nature. (MM, p. 1.) An image therefore could be conceived as a porous entity, connected to the other images by attraction and collision. The essential point here is that my body is an image like any other. It is not a privileged image, so the perceptions it has of other images therefore can be conceived as a simple form of interaction. My body is, then, in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement. (MM, p. 5) If we assume that images form a network, then perception and action will just be a particular kind of link between images. Perhaps one can say that perception is the receiving of movement, and action is the giving back. Perception and action are therefore already implied in Bergsons understanding of matter itself. They cannot be separated from each other, since each is a different aspect of the same link between two images. Perception flows into action and vice versa. This means though that perception is as much to be localized in the external object as in the mind. What we perceive is what we will be able to act on, and since our action deals with matter, one must admit that perception and matter are fundamentally connected. Perception and matter are on a single continuous line, and it is for this reason that matter is an image. Thus we can conclude that matter as an image implies that there is a fundamental continuity between material objects, and also between perception and action. Perception thus is not a static representation, but an incipient action. Material

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objects cannot be fundamentally separated from each other; indeed, this is one of Bergsons final conclusions: All division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division. (MM, p. 259) In this way matter as an image is simply showing how there is a movement of duration present in matter itself. When we do not keep this fundamental continuity in mind, we will believe our immediate perceptions to be mistaken, and we often will take one of two positions: idealism or realism. Idealism and realism are both positions that disconnect the subjective from the objective and erect them into different orders. Idealism disconnects the objective reality from the subject, making all reality subjective, and thus limiting the movement of duration to the subject. Realism disconnects the subject from objective reality by reducing subjective reality to objective movements of particles. But it cannot explain consciousness qua consciousness, since it is something of a totally different order. This is concisely how idealism and realism relate to Bergsons position, but perhaps we could expand this somewhat. Idealism and realism accordingly have their own conceptions of what matter is. Realism takes matter to be a thing. One can imagine a thing as something encased by an impenetrable boundary, and that can only interact with other things by colliding with them. A thing is matter stripped of all its quality, and makes it into something very different than our spontaneous perception of it. A thing has neither the color ascribed to it by the eye, nor the resistance found in it by the hand. (MM, viii.) Idealism, on the other hand, such as that of Berkeley, takes matter to be mere representation, contained in the spirit. A representation exists only in his mind and for his mind. (MM, viii.) Both doctrines will have difficulty explaining the transition from perception to matter. For realism perception arises from the movements of particles and waves in the brain; consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain, and can be reduced to it. (MM, x) This deus ex machina, as Bergson calls it (MM, I, p. 15), comes not as a surprise, since realism is precisely a consequence of the interruption between perception and action, consciousness and matter. For the idealist the world does not consist of a homogeneous totality of images, but of a central privileged image, the human image, which engenders representations of the whole world inside itself. Nonetheless, because the success of science cannot be denied, the idealist will admit there must be an objective

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reality, and will have to assume by an arbitrary hypothesis, some sort of pre-established harmony between things and mind, or, at least (to use Kants terms), between sense and understanding. (MM, I, p.16) As Bergson concludes at the end of MM, both realism and idealism issue from a discontinuity between perception and action, or yet, between consciousness and matter: The two doctrines are agreed in maintaining the discontinuity of the different orders of sensible qualities, and also the abrupt transition from that which is purely extended15 to that which is not extended at all. (MM, p. 284) It is in this way that matter can be understood as an image. However, what is that which Bergson refers to as not extended? It is consciousness, and consciousness is memory.

Memory In a way, one could suggest that the existence of memory is already implied in the conception of matter as an image, for there seem to be different levels of interaction between images. The images outside us behave in strictly causal ways, and we are able to understand their laws of interaction and predict their movements. These are more spatial forms of interaction. However, there seems to be at least one image that relates differently to the world: our own body. It seems to be impossible to predict mathematically how the human body will act when presented with a certain stimulus. The body therefore seems to introduce real novelty into the world, unforeseeable novelty. This freedom of choice that the human has implies that there must be some way in which past images are retained, so that the human image can have an overview of the situation and choose the appropriate action. The indetermination of the will implies the survival of the past in memory; the human image implies the presence of memory. We have already explored how the past has an ontological character for Bergson, and that memory serves only as a means for this past to be actualized. Pure memory, which is an unactualized memory, situated in the past without a contraction into the present, is distinct from perception or sensation, which is situated in the present: Sensation is, in its essence extended and localized; it is a source of movement; pure memory, being inextensive and powerless, does not in any degree share the nature of sensation. (MM, p. 180.)
15

Extension is relaxation of duration. It is the spatial form of duration, i.e. materiality.

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However, actual memory plays a role in perception, varying according to the nature of the perception. In more conscious perceptions, it plays a large role, whereas this is diminished in automatic perceptions and reaction. Bergson suggests the following helpful comparison here. If perception is imagined to be a beam of light that enters the person and action the same beam of light that exits the person, then memory is something that will determine the amount of refraction of this beam of light. Thus when perception and action are automatic, they more resemble reflection. When you put your hand on a hot surface, the body itself understands what needs to be done and it can deal with it without the intervention of consciousness. The reaction is immediate and accurate. When the stimuli are more complex, and it is not so clear how one should act, the stimulus from outside penetrates deeper into the human being, where we select various memories that will determine the nature of the action: Perception therefore resembles those phenomena of reflexion which result from an impeded refraction; it is like an effect of mirage. (MM, p. 30). In this way the process of voluntary action resembles refraction. Perception can be thought of as the contraction of memories. Indeed, perception seems to be suffused with memories: there is no perception which is not full of memories. (MM, I, p.24) Even the simplest sensation, that of touching an object for example, involves memory. The sensation itself occupies a certain length of time, with a beginning and an end, and by retaining the beginning of the sensation in memory, we can unify the beginning, middle and end of the sensation into one whole afterwards by an effort of the mind. Without memory, we would perceive only a multiplicity and would never be able to give names to distinct sensations. Bergson concludes: However brief we suppose any perception to be, it always occupies a certain duration, and involves consequently an effort of memory which prolongs one into another a plurality of moments. (MM, I, p. 25) According to the degree of this contraction, that is, the rhythm of its duration, there will be different types of memory and different types of recognition. Bergson distinguishes between two main types of memories, habit-memory and spontaneous memory. The habit memory consists mainly of motor mechanisms in the brain, and in this

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way it is an embodiment of the past. It is matter, composed of a certain organization of brain cells in accordance with the past. Spontaneous memory is the immaterial form of memory, memory par excellence. (MM, p. 95) It consists of memory images, which have recorded past perceptions without omitting the smallest detail. This spontaneous memory consists in letting the ontological past be actualized in all its detail. Recognition then varies according to the memories that are selected.

The choice of images How precisely are images selected according to action? This mechanism of selecting memories for the purpose of action is governed by what Bergson calls the attention to life. (See MM, p. 225 ff.) The detailed spontaneous memories often have no practical use, and therefore they are not contracted into the present, even though from time to time they appear in ones mind independently of ones will. This attention is geared to what is practical, and will select memories in function of their usefulness for action. Thus, spontaneous memory often is too rich in detail for it to have any practical significance and the attention to life will let these memories rest in the unconscious in most normal individuals. The brain therefore functions as a kind of siphon: it lets through memories that can be applied to the current situation and blocks others. The brain is no more than a kind of central telephonic exchange: its office is to allow communication, or to delay it. It adds nothing to what it receives. (MM, p. 19) The brain thus is not a source of pure knowledge, but is always geared to practical action. The chief office of the brain then is not representation, but action. That is why most of the brain is unconscious: it takes care of motor mechanisms for us. Only a part of the brain is conscious, and if that part represents the world in some way, it is mostly to provide guidance to the body for eventual action. In this sense there is no fundamental difference between the spinal cord and the brain. The cord transforms into movements the stimulation received; the brain prolongs it into reactions which are merely nascent; but, in the one case as in the other, the function of the nerve substance is to conduct, to coordinate or to inhibit movements. (MM, p.10)

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It is for arguments such as this that Bergson is often associated with pragmatism. However, the brain does not contain the memories it allows to be actualized. The past has an ontological significance, something we have mentioned already, but it is in Matter and Memory that Bergson first realizes this objective character of the past. He argues for it by considering pathology, in this case aphasia. He argues that these pathological cases are not due merely to some lesions in the brain, but more fundamentally to the absence of the attention to life. As it is lacking, the ability of the patients to contract their memories into the present is greatly diminished. This is possibly his strongest argument against the reduction of memory to a mere function of the brain; at the time (1896) he was reacting to Ribot, a French psychologist, who in The Maladies of Memory argued that memory could be entirely localized within the brain and was therefore merely a form of matter. Freedom of choice cannot be limited to the brain either. Bergson seems to go so far even to identify consciousness with the ability to choose between different possible actions: The consciousness of a living being may be defined as an arithmetical difference between potential and real activity. It measures the interval between representation and action. (CE, p. 145) Consciousness means choosing how the present will be formed by the contraction of memories, and this is where our freedom lies. Freedom is not so much the choice between a determinate number of possible actions, but rather a hesitation in a choice between an infinity of possible actions (TFW, p. 177.) The greater the hesitation the deeper the consciousness plunges into the past before resurfacing in the present, and the greater the difference between potential and real action. In this way the choice of images is a form of contraction of past memories into action; recognition also is a form of contraction. Perception, memory, action thus can be seen as a movement between different planes of consciousness: We must distinguish a series of different planes of consciousness, beginning with the plane of pure memory; not yet translated into distinct images, and going down to the plane where the same memory is actualized in nascent sensations and incipient movements. The voluntary calling up of a memory consists, I said, in traversing these planes of consciousness one after another in a definite direction. (ME, p. 188.)

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Bergson compares the totality of these planes of consciousness to a cone that touches a plane. The base of the cone is situated in the past and contains my memories, the plane is the present, and the point at which the cone touches the plane is where my memories are contracted into a perception and an action. Thus we see how the present and past form a seamless unity in the human mind, and that human consciousness is nothing else but the continuous movement between past and present. However, it is instructive to consider what perception would be like if it were to be separated from the past. This will be of some importance when discussing laughter, for laughter too shows aspects of this Pure Perception.

Pure Perception When we separate memory from perception, perception will resemble a pure reflection. There will be no consciousness of time, nor any unity in sensation. There would be consciousness, but it would be confined to threading on the continuous string of memory an uninterrupted series of instantaneous visions. (MM, p. 69) We would instantaneously act on these instantaneous visions, without thought or deliberation. There would be no difference between perception, action and the material objects outside us. Perception, in its pure state, is then, in very truth, a part of things. (MM, p. 68) In this way we would have completely solidified our interior, allowing for no refraction. Duration would no longer play a role, and we would be things of space alone. However, since perception and memory always go together, the reflection is never pure and there is always at least some refraction. Furthermore, in optics refraction can never be complete since a small part of the energy is always absorbed, and this is no different in humans: the absorbed energy gives rise to affections. Perception therefore never occurs without some kind of affection as well, and to understand perception in all its complexity we need to consider affection as well.

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Affection Affection is felt when the line from perception to action is not smooth: [The body] does not merely reflect action received from without; it struggles, and thus absorbs some part of this action.(MM, I, p. 57) The energy does not flow unimpeded from stimulus to response but encounters obstacles in the internal structure and gets partially absorbed. When a task only requires a motor mechanism, it will hardly elicit any affection, since the energy is almost purely reflected; likewise when we can form a perfect understanding of what is happening and have no difficulty choosing the appropriate action, there will be little affection as well. It is only when the human image cannot efficiently deal with the stimulus that affection arises. This is why every perception can turn into an affection. When a stimulus is increased, it will eventually become painful: it would seem as if there were a difference of degree and not of nature between affection and perception. (MM, I, p. 53) The body no longer knows how to deal with the sensation, tries to reject it, and when this attempt proves to be futile the pain persists. Every pain, then, must consist in an effort -- an effort which is doomed to be unavailing (MM, I, p. 56). Similarly, when we are unable to create a virtual object which answers to the real object, energy cannot flow outwards efficiently. We no longer can contract the past into the present, and our memories get stuck somewhere between. In the process our body is activated. Thus affection always involves some kind of effort, either by the body or by the mind. We forget this when we think of affection as a passive state, as is often the case. Affection, like perception, always entails something active and creative: a contraction of the past. How do perception and affection differ? The difference is that the effort involved in affection is real action, not just virtual action. (MM, pp. 57-59) Affection energizes the body itself, and the body goes through different physical responses according to the nature of the affection. This is why an affective state can be so creative: the body itself is at a high level of energy.

Imagination Bergson insists that imagination must first of all be distinguished from memory: To picture is not to remember () For then, if the two states differ merely in degree, there

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should be a given moment at which the sensation changed into a memory. (MM, 173,175) When a perception or sensation grows weaker and weaker, there is a point at which we are unsure whether we are feeling the sensation or are merely imagining it. Imagination thus seems to consist just of a virtual object in the mind, whereas perception consists of a real object in the body. However, just as recognition needs to be distinguished from memory, imagination needs to be distinguished from memory too. The virtual object of the imagination seems to be more tightly contracted than the virtual object of the memory, for just as in recognition we are not explicitly conscious of the memory that allows us to recognize an object, so too in imagination we are not explicitly conscious of the memory of the image that allows us to imagine. Imagination thus seems to be a particular contraction of the past into the present. Imagination in fact is always present in perception, for we always create a virtual object that corresponds in a way to the real object. Imagination and perception therefore cannot be distinguished, for they lie on the continuum of past and present: The progress by which the virtual image realizes itself is nothing else than the series of stages by which this image gradually obtains from the body useful actions or useful attitudes. In other words, the virtual image evolves towards the virtual sensation, and the virtual sensation towards real movement. (MM, p. 168.)

This concludes our discussion of imagination, affection and perception, which will be of considerable value to us in the following chapter. We see how the body and mind of man, his matter and memory, his affection and his imagination are particular forms of interplay of past and present. We are but a particular contraction of duration. This can perhaps be linked to the previous discussion of evolution, for Bergson notes how the evolution of a persons life follows striking parallels with the evolution of life itself. Further, in a persons life contraction appears as a force pushing for novelty, and the choices that we then make in our lives are similar to the choices life itself makes in biological evolution: Each of us, glancing back over his history, will find that his child-personality, though indivisible, united in itself divers persons () But these interwoven personalities become incompatible in course of growth, and, as each of us can live but one life, a choice must perforce be made. (CE, p. 99-100.)

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The difference is of course that life does not need to choose between the different tendencies present in it. Unlike humans it is not limited to a single body, and it can let these different tendencies grow into the multitude of natural species. Our choices define who we become as individuals. However, individual choice is only one part of our lives, for more often than we realize, society chooses for us. We will briefly focus on society, since the nature of laughter is closely intertwined with the structure of society.

1.4 The Duration of Society

Obligation and the Closed Society It is amazing that something like a society should even exist. We often think of ourselves as isolated entities, small microcosms, which happen to be in society contingently, but which are in fact self-sufficient. We are predominantly concerned with our own needs, our own fears, our own ambitions, and if our emotional involvement extends beyond ourselves, it reaches only a small group. Yet, is it not telling that we are always part of a society? For humans, there seems to be no life in isolation. We lack the instinct that insects have for example: the baby spider can already crawl around and spin a web, but if any newborn human were to be let to its own devices, it would meet a speedy death. We need other human beings in order to survive. Yet society is completely natural since it lies on the line of evolution. The lan vital has energized matter to organize itself into organisms of ever-increasing complexity; similarly, it has energized organisms to collectively form even larger unities, called societies. And in a way similar to the evolution of organisms, several important types of society have emerged, depending on the degree of inner contraction in its members. Thus those organisms which are governed by instinct will form strictly hierarchical societies, similar to organisms in which each cell carries out a specific task: The hive and ant-hill are actual organisms, the elements of which are united by invisible ties, and the social instinct of an ant I mean the force by virtue of which the worker, for example, performs the task to which she is predestined by

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her structure cannot differ radically from the cause, whatever it be, by virtue of which every tissue, every cell of a living body, toils for the greatest good of the whole. (TMSR, p. 19.) The human community, on the other hand, since it consists of intelligent beings, is variable in form, open to every kind of progress. (MR, p. 28) Human beings have freedom of choice; since they can hesitate in deciding how to respond to a stimulus and can choose between an infinity of possible reactions, they therefore cannot be subject to necessary laws governing their behavior. Even so, we often do not fully use our freedom, and instead we rely on habit. A habit is a particular contraction of the past. When confronted with a choice, a habit narrows down the infinity of possible actions and makes any decision we take less effortful. This is necessary for daily life: it would be quite detrimental if one were to contemplate the infinite possibilities when confronted with a pair of unlaced shoes. Habit, which is precisely this contraction of past events into some kind of template that guides present action, is extremely useful, and its power should not be underestimated. Indeed, in society habit can form a powerful force, which Bergson calls obligation. This obligation functions like a moral pressure on the individual, which pressurizes him to conform to the habits of society: Social life appears to us a system of more or less deeply rooted habits, corresponding to the needs of the community. Each of these habits of obedience exerts a pressure on our will. (TMSR, p. 10.) An obligation is nothing else except a habit of society, which inclines us to make decisions along the lines of certain expectations that we experience as our duty. Completely contrary to Kant, Bergson sees no fundamental difference between duty and inclination. How are we to understand this force of obligation? It is not a rational, Hobbesian contract between its members so that mutual needs can be satisfied. In fact this obligation is pre-rational; forms of rationality arise from it. The source of obligation lies in the relaxation of the duration of society into habits. What is meant by this? There is something ontologically necessary about society: we are drawn to the other in our very being, and as we interact with each other, our interactions solidify into determinate habits.

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There is nothing rational about this, for it is merely due to the inexorable flow of duration. When obligation becomes the dominant force in society, Bergson calls such a society a closed society. In such a society the members have relaxed their efforts of contraction. When the lan vital is awakened in the members, it shows itself through actions that are continuous and ever-changing; however, this freedom costs a lot of effort, because we have to delve into our past and conjure up what fits the singularity of the present situation, instead of applying a pre-made template. In a closed society, individuals opt for a template, and thus actions become repetitious and out of sync with each other. In this respect a closed society shows a resemblance with an organism that is governed by a mere material necessity: We should compare [society] to an organism whose cells, united by imperceptible links, fall into their respective places in a highly developed hierarchy, and for the greatest good of the whole naturally submit to a discipline that may demand the sacrifice of the part. (TSMR, p. 8)

Appeal and the Open Society However, society is ultimately a manifestation of the lan vital, and only if we ground it in these ontological resources will we be able to understand morality and social life. We must search below the social accretions, get down to Life, of which human societies as indeed the human species altogether, are but manifestations. (TSMR, p. 100) It is these social accretions that philosophers too often focus on when they attempt to analyze society. Since they are merely the static manifestations of a more dynamic source, they miss out on the originary movement at work in society, and therefore on the true nature of society itself. This must also be the way in which morality is approached, and thus we see that for Bergson morality is essentially something more than a set of rational determinations. As in Matter and Memory, his main dialogue partner here is Kant and Bergson tries to show that there is an aspect to morality that transcends the practical reason of the subject. The genealogy of morality can be traced back to the lan vital, and in this the lan vital is akin to the Schopenhauerian Will. However, whereas for Schopenhauer we must try to

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escape the Will, for Bergson we must immerse ourselves as deeply as possible in the ontological force of duration and its biological form, lan vital. Indeed, the lan vital can be reawakened, and when this happens the closed society is transformed into an open society. This society will be characterized by a different kind of morality than the closed societys morality of obligation. Its morality will be one of an appeal: Whereas natural obligation is a pressure or a propulsive force, complete and perfect morality has the effect of an appeal. (TMSR, p. 34.) Typically this does not happen to a whole society, but only to a privileged individual, whom Bergson calls a hero. These exceptional men are not creations of society, but are direct creations of the lan vital. They transcend society, and therefore cannot be thought of as mere individuals: The appearance of each one of was like the creation of a new species, composed of one single individual, the vital impulse culminating at long intervals in one particular man. (TMSR, p. 78.) While the Schopenhauerian ascetics cut themselves off from their source by placing themselves in detached contemplation, Bergsonian heroes seek the very current of life itself, which they ride until they have gone beyond society. But if they are beyond, how can they constitute the essence of a society? These exceptional men are creators: they are not so much a product of society, but society is their product. They are filled with an originary emotion that transcends the rules, obligations and habits by which the closed society is organized, in much the same way that duration transcends objective time. The originary emotion is at the source of obligations, but itself cannot be limited to its determinate products. It is a diffuse and fertile energy, a creative force, and in this it is similar to the lan vital itself. Bergson is careful to emphasize that this originary emotion is no simple affect. The latter is a the consequence of an idea, or of a mental picture. (TMSR, p. 43) Thus we feel fear when we picture a wolf. In this sense emotion is infra-intellectual (TSMR, p. 44), since it is only a vague reflection of the representation, and therefore inferior to the representation itself. The originary emotion on the other hand is supra-intellectual (TMSR, p. 44) since it incites the intelligence to undertake ventures and the will to persevere with them. (TMSR, p. 43) The originary emotion is prior to the intellect, to the

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imagination, or to the will. The difference types of emotion is that in the one it is an oscillation of the parts without any displacement of the whole; in the other the whole is driven forward. (TMSR, p. 43) An affect is a mere absorption of energy, whereas an originary emotion will drive the person forward into action. This originary emotion then is responsible for the appeal of the hero. His emotion gradually spreads to the other people of society, and they partake in the heros energy. Heroism cannot be preached, it has only to show itself, and its mere presence may stir others to action. For heroism itself is a return to movement, and emanates from an emotioninfectious like all emotionsakin to the creative act. (TSMR, p. 53.) It is thus by the sympathy of appeal that the pressure of obligation is replaced.

This brings to a close our discussion of the most important concepts in understanding laughter. We have attempted to show how obligation and society, habit and freedom, affection and imagination, perception and action, life and matter can all be understood as particular formations of the basic notions of Bergsonian ontology: past and present, contraction and relaxation. This will give us a sturdy framework from which we can approach laughter.

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Chapter Two Lifes laughter: laughter as societal instinct

Thus we are brought to laughter. There is a slight hesitation to go further. Why do we want to think about laughter at all? Laughter does not invite one to analyze it further; it invites one to accept it at face-value and to participate in it. When confronted with laughter, we usually react by laughing ourselves, not by questioning the nature of laughter. It pains us to think about laughter, because we can subconsciously feel that thinking about it will destroy the fun. Why is this? Perhaps thought has the effect of forcing our energy back on to ourselves, on to the subject. The question what is laughter? becomes why do I laugh? When thinking, the movement of ones being can sometimes turn back on oneself; thought can create self-encircled being. There is something in us that does not even want to know why we laugh: we do not want to think about ourselves. There is something in us that longs to forget about ourselves in an act of self-giving. Laughter puts us outside of ourselves, in an ec-stasis, and why would we then want to destroy this? When caught up in a torrent of merriment, who would want to bring this merriment grinding to a halt by brooding on the question why? "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind": thus E.B. White.16 If we risk a petrifaction of laughter with the gaze of this Medusa of thought, why should we attempt think about laughter at all? Why not remain in a pre-reflective state about laughter, and let our energy flow to the object of amusement, and forget about ourselves? Is this kind of self-forgetting not a blessed state that should be protected? Maybe this is a question that could be posed of all philosophy. Philosophical thought can detract from life; why attempt philosophy at all? It is a question perhaps every philosophically minded person faces at some point. Nietzsche springs to mind as a figure painfully aware of the limits of self-encircled thought, one who wanted to be freed into post-reflective energies of life-affirming being. Even though some might claim he lacked
16

"Some Remarks on Humor," preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941)

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the ontological resources to realize such a freedom, nonetheless his conception of the highest form of will-to-power as the gift-giving virtue and amor fati perhaps suggests that we all have an inherent urge to manifest the energies we have inside us. As Bergson might say, there is a creative emotion is at the core of philosophy, which bursts forth despite itself in determinate thoughts. We philosophize because we need to give outward form to the energies which are inside of us. Perhaps then we love wisdom because we wish to love as widely and as deeply as possible. In the following we will give an overview of the extent of Bergsons thought on laughter, in a schematized version of his text Laughter. The text itself reads like a literary essay, consisting of a flowing prose luxuriously adorned with imaginative metaphors, but we will pare it down to the main movements in the philosophical thought itself, in the process disentangling several elements which interpenetrate in the text itself. In the introduction we distinguished between the function of laughter in society and the structure of particular instances of laughter, which is an interaction between a spectator and object of laughter. This object of laughter is a person who can be consciously or unconsciously amusing; he or she could be the source of the joke, or the very joke itself. A distinction could be made between the joker and the joke, but here we will identify them. So in this way we can distinguish 3 stations in the movement of laughter: the object of laughter, the subjective process of laughter itself, and the end towards which laughter is directed. With some imagination, laughter could thus be conceived as a flow of energy that originates in the object, passes through the subject and is then manifested in society. We will consider these three stations in opposite order, in the belief that a movement is most naturally understood if one considers the goal first.

2.1 End of Laughter: Society

Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness. (L, p. 197.)

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We are now in position to understand why this should be the purpose of laughter. As described previously, society is like a living organism, and its members relate to each other by means of habit. This habit, or obligation, exerts a pressure on each of the members to fall in line. Habits bind members together like the binding energy between atoms in a molecule: to break through habits one needs to possess adequate force. This is then what heroic individuals can do: they break through the crystallized formations of life, and place their consciousness in the lan vital itself, thus allowing for novel obligations and habits to arise. However, heroism plays no role in laughter: laughter is merely a particular form of hidden obligation. Laughter is the most subtle, and perhaps insidious, form of obligation. The person may not be visibly out of line; yet there is something unmistakably strange about him or her, even though it may be impossible to say exactly what this is. Criminals are obviously out of line: they are gravely lacking in this adaptability to social obligations, and their offenses against society are material. Society does not respond to criminals with laughter, but with punishment.17 However, others may not so grievously offend society and may only be slightly lacking in this contraction in their consciousness; society then naturally changes its response. It then tries to humiliate by derision, and to instill fear: Society cannot intervene at this stage by material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion. It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptomscarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of social gesture. By the fear it inspires, it restrains eccentricity. (L, p. 20.) How then does it restrain eccentricity? By jolting the person back into life. Laughter is like a small pin-prick that reminds us of the lan vital inside of us. It keeps us awake: It keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep, and in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity. (L, p. 20.) This passage makes sense if we keep the ideas of Creative Evolution in mind. Just as life itself can relax in its effort of contraction and go into dormancy, human consciousness
17

Originally, criminal acts were punished with identical acts: eye for an eye. In contemporary times, material transgression is punished with a prison sentence. Link with Foucault

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can go in certain directions of torpor. We are then often tempted to make no more effort in life, to succumb to our own habits; laughter prevents us from going down these dead ends and wakes us up from our incipient torpor. Does laughter truly awaken us? Perhaps Bergson would say not: as an instrument of society, it is limited to society, and laughter may wake us up from our rigid individual habits, but it again sends us to sleep in the arms of the habits of society instead. We awake out of one dream, but are still in another. One can perhaps speculate further on this relation between attention to life and societal punishment. Does society not also punish those in a fuller contact with life than is the norm? Does society not also laughs at geniuses, those individuals who exit the dream of society and thereby transcend the habits of society? Laughter seems to be not only the response to a slight slackening of tension, but also the response to a slight increase in tension. Indeed, as has often been remarked, society has difficulty telling the difference between madness and genius. What about the societys reaction to those individuals which transcend the norms of society, who possess an inner tension of such intensity that they break through all habits? It is not laughter. Here society has difficulty distinguishing between criminality and such great individuals one thinks spontaneously of Jesus and Socrates. Great men have often been put to death for transgressing the boundaries of society, as if they were criminals. This is perhaps tragic; however, Bergsons understanding of society shows it is also simply the natural process. Society requires attention to life: if there is slight deviation, whether it be an increase or a slackening, it will laugh regardless; if there is a large deviation, it will punish more severely, even by death. In this way laughter is firmly embedded in society. The question arises here why Bergson focuses so emphatically on the derisive aspect of laughter. Surely he is aware of more gentle forms of laughter; why does he reduce them all to forms of derision? Perhaps this can be understood when we remember the fundaments of Bergsons philosophy. Contraction and relaxation determine Bergsons philosophical world and it is therefore natural that he would approach laughter through these lenses: laughter is a form of contraction, and contributes to a greater tension of society. This is perhaps why Bergson places central importance on the social correction inherent in laughter. Laughter () pursues a utilitarian aim of general improvement (L, p.20.) Laughter thus is merely a

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point in the larger movement of society, lan vital and duration in which the past is contracted in the present at increasing levels of tension. In this way the purpose of laughter can be understood as a natural consequence of the nature of life and society.

However, if this is Bergsons final idea concerning the end of laughter, he in fact shows some hesitation before stating it definitively. There seems to be something to laughter that is not confined to society, something that at least partially seems to go beyond it. Indeed, following the passages quotes earlier, he admits that there is something to laughter that seems to escape this general social improvement: And yet there is something esthetic about it, since the comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freedom from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art. (L, p. 20.) There is a detachment involved in laughter here, something that would not be possible if we led a existence purely governed by our physical needs. Disinterestedness plays an essential role in the comic: The comic belongs neither altogether to art nor altogether to life. On the one hand, characters in real life would never make us laugh were we not capable of watching their vagaries in the same way as we look down at a play from our seat in a box; () on the other hand, the pleasure caused by laughter, even on the stage, is not an unadulterated enjoyment; it is not a pleasure that is exclusively esthetic or altogether disinterested. (L, p. 135.) The disinterestedness of laughter allows us to sympathize with the person we are laughing at: The comic character is often one with whom, to begin with, our mind, or rather our body sympathizes. By this is meant that we put ourselves for a very short time in his place, adopt his gestures, words and actions, and if amused by anything laughable in him, we invite him, in imagination, to share his amusement with us. (L, p. 194-195.) What does Bergson mean by sympathy here? Is it the sympathy of intuition Bergson mentions in the Introduction to Metaphysics? Perhaps not, because Bergson seems to identify the disinterestedness with relaxation rather than with contraction: In particular, there is in laughter a movement of relaxation which has often been noticed. (L, p. 195.) This relaxation is opposed to common sense, which requires effort:

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To remain in touch with things and men, to see nothing but what is existent and think nothing but what is consistent, demands a continuous effort of intellectual tension. This effort is common sense. (L, p. 195.) The disinterestedness is one of a lack of effort, and should therefore be identified with a dream-like state rather than intuition, which involves precisely a heightened effort. Indeed, Bergson makes this connection with dreams: When the comic character automatically follows up his idea, he ultimately thinks, speaks and acts as though he were dreaming. Now a dream is relaxation. (L, p. 195.) We see thus how Bergson identifies a moment of relaxation inherent in laughter. Laughter is not a simple contraction.

How does Bergson make sense of these two aspects, relaxation and contraction? We enjoy laughter, but in which way does this contribute to the utilitarian aim of general improvement? In fact, he addresses this problem, and suggests that the sympathy and disinterestedness of laughter is accidental, due to a momentary slackening of the tension on the part of the laugher himself: But we rest only for a short time. The sympathy that is capable of entering into the impression of the comic is a very fleeting one. It also comes from a lapse in attention. (L, p. 196.) Laughter is therefore ultimately contraction; its relaxation is only temporary. We enjoy laughter only by accident because we for a brief moment relax in our efforts of social correction, and somehow partake of the rigidity of the person we are laughing at; soon we check ourselves and concentrate again on the purpose of laughter. However, does this really answer the question? The lapse in attention may be temporary, but is it necessary for laughter? Could there be laughter at all without it? Or is it merely accidental, and would laughter proceed if it was purely a corrective, without any sympathy for those laughed at? The answer is not entirely clear from Bergsons account. If relaxation is accidental, then why should it occur every time we laugh? On the other hand, if relaxation is a necessary part of laughter, then a new question arises why relaxation is necessary. This is an essential point. One could say that the relaxation added into the mix of contraction generates laughter, and that without relaxation there would be

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no laughter, just a serious form of correction. This is undoubtedly true; if the effort is too strong, laughter seems difficult to achieve. This is something Freud remarked on: Thus the examiner does not find the nonsense comic which the candidate produces in his ignorance; he is annoyed by it, while the candidates fellow students, who are far more interested in what luck he will have that in how much he knows, laugh heartily at the same nonsense. () The comic process will not bear being hypercathected by attention18 However, why should there be any laughter at all? Could laughter not be replaced by some other efficient forms of social correction? If the purpose is utilitarian improvement, could a more efficient mechanism without this accidental relaxation not replace laughter? Would the ideal world then not contain any laughter at all? This is perhaps the focal point of the whole thesis. Bergson senses the limits of contraction as a means to describe laughter, but insists on it in the end, even though laughter perhaps points to something beyond. But the issue is not clear if we consider the level of society alone. We must explore the process in the mind of the one who laughs since this will add a new dimension to our considerations and shed more light on the issue.

2.2 The Subjective process of Laughter

In the first place laughter is a societal instinct: this is the macroscopic view. If we zoom in on a lower lying level, to what goes on in the individual while this instinct is acting through him, we see a certain inner affective and imaginative process. This process has two moments again, one of relaxation and one of contraction. The moment of contraction within the subject must not be confused with the movement of contraction at the societal level. The contraction at societal level is the movement of social correction; the contraction within the subject is a certain sympathy. We will discuss the aspect of relaxation first.

18

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 220

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Relaxation Affection We often spontaneously think of tears as laughters opposite, and perhaps this is no coincidence. Tears signify a deep emotional arousal, while laughter seems to imply some kind of indifference. Furthermore, before any laughter can arise, all emotion or affection must be silenced: It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. (L, p. 8.) We seem to need a process of emotional relaxation. However, this is only part of the picture: we are not indifferent towards the people we laugh at in the same way as we are towards simple inanimate objects. Laughter is not instrumentalization. There thus seems to be a deeper form of sympathy that precedes this emotional indifference, but we will not consider this for the moment. We will first explore this indifference which indeed seems to be necessary to a certain extent.

Why is this indifference necessary? Can it perhaps be understood as a consequence of the social significance of laughter? Bergson provides a suggestion in a particular passage, where he seems to suggest that it is not so much the case that emotion needs to be silenced in order for laughter to arise, but rather the inverse, that if an affective bond was present that there would no longer be a need for any correction. If a person is adapted to society, then others are more likely to sympathize with him or her, and consequently laughter would be unnecessary. Comedy can only being at the point where our neighbours personality ceases to affect us. It beings, in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to social life. Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his fellow-beings. (L, p. 134.) Thus what is happening at the level of the individual is somehow the result of forces at play at the level of society. When at the latter level an individual cuts itself off from societys habits, there will no longer be a mediating context in common, and then emotional ties with other members of society will be severed. Social life thus seems to be

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a mediator for emotions. It is a fascinating reminder that somehow society is responsible for the emotions we feel towards others. However, we are no mere automata. Any attempt to explain our emotions will remain partial if it refers merely to society, since we are not mere material entities exhaustively determined by mechanistic processes. We are not point-beings, but have an internal structure as well. In what way are our mental processes relevant for laughter? What goes on in our mind that makes it impossible to laugh when we are emotionally engaged? Laughter seems to require us to take distance from the object of laughter, for when we are overwhelmed by something we might be able to cry, but are quite unable to laugh. Recall from the discussion on matter and memory that Bergson understood affection as some kind of absorption of energy: It [the living body] does not merely reflect action received from without; it struggles, and thus absorbs some part of this action. Here is the source of affection. (MM, p. 57.) Pure perception is pure reflection; perception without affection would be a pure refraction, as the action enters our mind and becomes infused with the past before leaving then as action; perception with affection would then be refraction with partial absorption of the energy. How to understand this in the conceptual framework of Matter and Memory? Thus, when we are affected by something, we are unable to place ourselves completely in the present, nor are we able to contract our past completely into a present action. Part of our past remains inside us, without it being solidified in action, and in this way we are unable to completely spatialize what we perceive. The virtual image we form then remains confused, with diffuse boundaries, and therefore we prove to be unable to take distance from it. In this manner, if we are affected we will not be completely able to contract the past into an action, and will therefore remain in a continual a state of tension. This is why emotion can be so creative, because it forms a force driving action forward. However, since laughter requires that we relax, affection will often negate laughter. Laughter requires a consciousness moving more in the direction of pure perception. Yet at the same time laughter cannot become pure perception, because laughter does not consist

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only of unthinking reactions to changes in the present. How to make sense of this? To what degree does consciousness shift? Perhaps it could be suggest that consciousness detaches itself from affection so room is created for the imagination to take flight.

Imagination What role does imagination play in laughter? What is the virtual action involved in laughter? Which mental reconstruction do we make of the object? This is perhaps one of the most important question for Bergson in Laughter. Indeed, he mentions it in the beginning that the study of comic can be offer insights into human imagination and art: Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not also have something of its own to tell us about art and life? (L, p. 2.) How do we gain a foothold in this issue? We have already given a sketch in the introduction. Recall the example: a man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. (LR, p. 8) If attentive, the man would not have stumbled, but instead he let his body carry him forth without altering course, and was not able to adapt to the changing circumstances. Implicitly we imagine the man to be a machine instead of the living being we expect. We imagine a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being (LR, p. 9). Every object we laugh at is somehow a concretization of this scheme: Something mechanical encrusted on the living (LR, p. 32). This is the main formula guiding the comic imagination. This process of imagination is in fact the transposition into the human mind of what is happening at the level of society. At the latter level there is an individual that no longer responds to the pressures and the habits of society, and that subsequently has settled into rigidity. This is precisely what the observing individual imaginatively perceives: the encrustation of a living being by something mechanical. It is a fascinating reminder that somehow society does the imagining for us, even though we think ourselves to be the originators of our own mental images. Unwittingly the laughing imagination is guided by and serves the end that society determines.

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How precisely is this end reached by the imagination? How do we imagine something to be mechanical? Perhaps we could use Bergsons comparison between art and life here. Both have a characteristic tension, and because we are considering how laughter serves the end of society, it will appear to be similar to life rather than art. Here it is appropriate to ask: What do art and life mean in Laughter? Life is action. Life implies the acceptance only of the utilitarian side of things in order for us to respond to them with appropriate reactions. (L, p. 150.) Perception, as in Matter and Memory, is understood pragmatically, as determined by action: We, for our part, make a distinction between a goat and a sheep ; but can we tell one goat from another, one sheep from another ? The individuality of things or of beings escapes us, unless it is materially to our advantage to perceive it. (L, p. 152.) Consequently, in life we only perceive what can be solidified into action. These perceptions are also general, since we mostly are not interested in what is individual, but only what can be extracted to fulfill our needs. This is why the general can be described by language, since it takes note of the most ordinary function and commonplace aspect of the thing (L, p. 153.) As we become more focused on language, we tend to forget the individuality of the object which gave rise to these general characteristics. In this way we find that even our own individuality escapes us: Not only external objects, but even our own mental states, are screened from us in their inmost, their personal aspect, in the original life they possess. (L, p. 153.) Our dependence on utilitarian needs creates a veil between our superficial and our fundamental self. Language can further this contamination of time with space, and confuses the slower rhythms of spatialized entities with the faster rhythms of subjective states. Art can offer a contact with our true selves. Art frees us from our superficial self and brings us into contact with the pure duration which is inside all of us: Art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. (L, p. 157.)

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In this sense art is a path to reality, and even though we associate art with idealism, this is only because it breaks with the spatialized conventional and social order to connect with the more temporal order of the inner self. In other words, it breaks with the spatialized forms of duration in order to place itself in duration itself by an effort of intuition. The consciousness of the artist requires a detachment from the utilitarian concerns of everyday life in order to place the self in pure duration. In this way, Bergson claims, art attains the individual. He seems to understand by the individual a certain subjective state, or mood: What the poet sings of is a certain mood which was his, and his alone, and which will never return. (L, p. 161.) We may label this mood as melancholic or festive, but these words remain symbolic representations and do not fully describe the feelings. Indeed, they cannot be generalized, or manifested in the externality of social life and communicated to others, but remain unique to the specific individual: We may, indeed, give general names to these feelings, but they cannot be the same thing in another soul. They are individualised. (L, p. 161.) Here Bergson seems to be taking duration still in a somewhat subjectivistic vein, even though Laughter (1900) was written after Matter and Memory (1895). However, perhaps he had by then not fully realized the ontological dimensions of art and its relation to life, something which he would explore more fully in Creative Evolution. This is further suggested by a juxtaposition of art and life. Why then is it often said of great art that it touches what is universal in human existence? Here, Bergson claims, there is a difference between the source of the work of art, and the effect it has. The source, which is the mood deep deeply intimate to the artist, is always individual, but this is not what we refer to when we say art touches on the universal. The work of art has a suggestive effect on us, and somehow induces us to make an effort of intuition similar to the one the artist himself has made. It is this effect that art has on us, this effort, which points in a more universal direction. His [the artists] work is an example which we take as a lesson. And the efficacy of the lesson is the exact standard of the genuineness of the work. (L, p. 162)

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Art thus seems like a means to induce intuition on the spectators; the actual content of art seems to play a less important role in Bergsons understanding. In any case, comedy is opposite to art in this respect. Comedy is concerned with the general from the very outset. This can be seen in drama for example: comic drama is not concerned with a profound portrayal of the complexities and contradictions in the character of its protagonist; it merely wants to portray types, not individuals. Whereas the tragic poet looks into the recesses of his own self, the comic dramatist simply observes other people in a more external and superficial way. Settling on the surface, it will not be more than skin-deep, dealing with persons at the point at which they come into contact and become capable of resembling one another. (L, p. 168) This superficiality seems to be a necessity to comedy, indeed, to penetrate too far into the personality, to couple the outer effect with causes that are too deep-seated, would mean to endanger, and in the end to sacrifice all that was laughable in the effect. (L, p. 169.) How can this tendency in laughter be linked to laughters purpose which is social correction? Bergson suggests in a passage that just because laughter aims at correcting, it is expedient that the correction should reach as great a number of persons as possible. This is the reason comic observation instinctively proceeds to what is general. (L, p. 170.) One could also suggest that the general is marked by the same rhythm of duration as habits are, and since laughter seeks to correct rigid habits and replace them with more fluent societal ones, it is necessary that it operates on the level of the general. The comic imagination seeks to put a mechanical crust around a living being as it were, in order to subsequently draw attention to its rigidity and lack of living adaptation to social life.

This perhaps explains the purpose of the comic imagination. However, what are the means by which it attains it? How precisely is our attention drawn to the general? In another part of Laughter Bergson provides a suggestion when he treats the absurd in the comic. Laughter cannot proceed simply as art, but it cannot proceed as the instrumentalizing consciousness either, for when we deal with instruments, we do not think of the materiality of the instruments themselves, since they form an integral part of our needs. Laughter precisely wants to draw attention to a living bodys materiality. The

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way in which it does this is by making use of the absurd. It is here also that the comic can be linked to dreams. Bergson discusses this relation when wondering why negroes are so funny. (This was written in the time before multiculturalismand political correctness!) The insight into the question came not from the theorists of his time, but from a rather unexpected source: And yet I rather fancy the correct answer was suggested to me one day in the street by an ordinary cabby, who applied the expression " unwashed " to the negro fare he was driving. Unwashed! (L, p. 40.) Of course we do not rationally believe the negros face to be covered with soot, yet somehow the idea takes hold of our imagination. Comic imagination obviously has an element of the unreal built into it, and Bergson distinguishes between a logic of reason and a logic of the imagination. What is false for reason can be true for the imagination, for example the proposition A negro is a white man in disguise. (L, p. 41.) What is this logic of the imagination? There seems to be an obvious element of the absurd present, yet it cannot be completely identified with the absurd, since not all absurdity is comic. What precisely this logic entails we will see in the next section, when discussing objects of laughter. We will see that the logic there varies from object to object, but if there is one thing in common, it is perhaps that imagination draws attention to the materiality of a person, and thus to his rigidity. The interplay of images at work in the comic imagination seem to be governed by some kind of necessity. There is a method to its madness: This interpenetration of images does not come about by chance. It obeys laws, or rather habits, which hold the same relation to imagination that logic does to thought. (L, p. 42.) Indeed, there is a systematism inherent in dreams, something that Freud famously explored, so it is perhaps not surprising that the comic would not possess something similar. To add to the similarity, Bergson also notes an aspect reminiscent of Freuds wish-fulfillment: Common sense represents the endeavour of a mind continually adapting itself anew and changing ideas when it changes objects. () [Comical absurdity] consists in seeking to mould things on an idea of ones own, instead of moulding ones ideas on things. (L, p. 183-4.)

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However, these dreams however cannot be strictly called individual dreams. The comic imagination shows similarities with the imagination in dreams, but is nonetheless at least partially determined by society: It is something like the logic of dreams, though of dreams that have not been left to the whim of individual fancy, being the dreams dreamt by the whole of society. (L, p. 41.) So, as an intermediate conclusion, one could say that the process of imagination works by conjuring up an image of the mechanical by extracting the general, superficial characteristics of a person. These images then interact in a way similar to images in dreams: by means of association, and the inversion of common sense. This describes the processes of relaxation inherent in the comic imagination. This room for this flight of imagination was, in turn, made possible by a certain emotional relaxation, or indifference. We are also now in a position to approach the question mentioned in the introduction, where we had wondered why it should appear amusing when somebody was unconscious of himself. The relevant passage was: A comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic person is unconscious. (L, p. 24.) What does consciousness have to do with the comic? Well, since consciousness and life are pretty much synonyms for Bergson, we will be better able to spatialise something that appears to be unconscious. It is easier to be indifferent about an unconscious being and to imagine it to be mechanical, precisely because the lan vital appears to be somewhat dormant in such an individual. Somebody who is perfectly conscious of himself will more likely arouse pity than laughter, and if no emotion is aroused, it will then still be hard to imagine the person as a jointed puppet. (L, p. 30) However, does this give a full picture of the inner process at work in laughter? This describes the movement of relaxation; however, there seems to be an unmistakable movement of contraction that precedes it.

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Contraction Bergson emphasizes that emotion precludes all laughter; however, this is only one part to laughter. Laughter is ambiguous. Do we not laugh most with those we love most? If there was no emotion at all, we would instrumentalize the other, not laugh. At a deeper level than the indifference, it seems there must be a rapport. What this rapport is is mysterious. Perhaps it is not emotional, in the sense of an inner accumulation of energy that cannot escape, but yet there is a connection that prevents us from being wholly indifferent to the object of laughter. Indeed, Bergsons first remark on the comic is that we only laugh with humans: the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. (L, p. 3) What if something non-human appears that elicits laughter? If any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to. (L, p. 4.) We are not contesting this statement in itself, but does it not suggest that we are never wholly indifferent when we laugh? It seems as if on the affective level there must be a contraction prior to the relaxation. This is true as well of the imagination. Before imagining the mechanical, we must first imagine the living body. We first need to build up the tension before we release it. Is this not also the method of many jokes? Perhaps one could say that an effort of contraction is necessary to imagine the living, whereas a process of relaxation then coats this image with a crust of something mechanical. In our comic imagination we imitate how we perceive the object: something mechanical encrusted on the living. So before there can be any relaxation, there must be a prior contraction. This also implies that the effort of contraction will vary according to the degree of complexity of the image of the living being. If we construct a more complex character type, more effort will be needed, but then the comic effect could also be greater if we subsequently succeed in covering over this character with a crust. Bergson mentions how in comic situations, the comic effect will be greater if the deeper the roots the situation strikes into life itself: they are more laughable in proportion as the scene repeated is more complex and more naturally introduced. (L, p. ) In fact, Bergson refers to this contractive aspect of humor as a general law (L, p. 12):

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When a certain comic effect has its origin in a certain cause, the more natural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find the effect. (L, p. 12.) On the other hand, the simpler forms of humor, such as slapstick, invariably do not require much effort of imagination. Indeed, highly conscious minds tend less to experience slapstick as highly amusing, because these minds tend to sympathize more readily with the object of laughter than less conscious minds. Their reaction might be one of sympathy for the pain of the person who trips, rather than laughter. For slapstick to be amusing, one must therefore let go of almost all tension in the mind. This shows how there must first be an upwards one of contraction for there to be a downwards movement of relaxation. Indeed this consideration has led to Kant define laughter as the result of an expectation which, of a sudden, ends in nothing.19 What is this process of contraction? As suggested above, it will vary according the object of laughter. It will adopt itself to the peculiarities of the comic situation, and adopt a varying degree of tension. This process is in fact the method that Bergson follows in Laughter.

2.3 The Object of laughter

The Method of the Dynamical Scheme Bergson uses a particular method for applying the main formula of comic imagination to the different instances of laughter. How does he go about it? He is careful to insist that he is not looking for a definition. A definition is a formula that can conclusively generate the particular instances, which then do not contain anything that was not already present in the definition. However, as alluded to, laughter itself resists such efforts. The many different theories which all propound a particular definition see their efforts nullified by the single counterexample which falls outside the range of the definition. Something mechanical encrusted on the living is thus not a definition. Definitions apply only to mechanisms; laughter on the other hand has an element of creativity and of life that causes it to resist all definition. Bergson therefore states:
19

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 209

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We shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. (L, p. 1.) What does it mean to regard something as a living thing? Perhaps that we seek not to imprison it within certain categories, so that it can serve our needs, but instead to give it its freedom and seek instead to develop some kind of friendship: However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. (...) Maybe we may gain from this prolonged contact something more flexible than an abstract definition, a practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. (L, p. 1.) What does it mean to treat laughter as a friend? How to conceive of it as a living thing and yet try to cover the different instances of laughter? He writes: It would be idle to attempt to derive every comic effect from one simple formula. The formula exists well enough in a certain sense, but its development does not follow a straightforward course. (L, p. 36.) Bergson does not elaborate explicitly, but in his essay On Intellectual Effort20 he gives some hints as to what this might mean. There he talks about dynamical schemes which guide intellectual efforts. When we make an effort to recall something particular, we first have a rather nebulous impression of what it might be. We might remember that it begins with a certain letter, or that it somehow is connected with a certain situation, but we might not be able to remember the thing itself. The effort of recollection then consists of reconstructing the particular image from the hints that this nebulous impression gives us. The impression contains many hints, each of which branch off in different directions, each of which leads to a different image. Thus the dynamical scheme is linked to a multiplicity of concrete images, but does not actually contain them in itself : How are so many different images held together implicitly in one simple idea? ()Let me first suggest a term by which to characterize the simpler idea which is able to develop into multiple images. Let me say, borrowing from the Greek, that it is a dynamic scheme. I mean by this, that the idea does not contain the images themselves so much as the indication of what we must do to reconstruct them. (ME, p. 195.) Because it contains so many different directions without the concrete image itself, it appears to be nebulous, but this vagueness is only because the scheme is full of

20

Henri Bergson, On Intellectual Effort in ME

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movement, full of dynamism, branching off in different directions. An effort of the intellect is needed to contract the scheme into the present, to solidify the dynamism of the scheme into concrete images. A scheme therefore can cover a multitude of instances, but in its application real novelty is introduced because of the intellectual effort required. By contrast, a definition covers many particulars as well, but it does so mechanically, because the application of a definition is more or less effortless. Bergsons approach can then be seen as a search for a dynamical scheme that would allow us to reconstruct the different instances of laughter. This dynamical scheme does not contain the concrete instances in itself, but rather the indication of how to arrive at these instances. It will require intellectual effort to understand each new instance of humor, to see how a new instance fits into this dynamical scheme. Each new understanding is in some sense a reconstruction of the object. To use the language of Matter and Memory, it is creating a virtual object in the imagination that is both in agreement with the real object and with the dynamical scheme. This is why the method in Laughter is to first come up with a scheme and then apply it to the instances of the comic. When a thinker has recourse to a definition, he or she usually goes through the particulars first, and then arrives at the definition as the conclusion. How is this method related to the general one of setting up dualisms and then reconciling them, as discussed in the section on Bergsons framework? At first sight they seem quite different: Bergson is not distinguishing between two forms of laughter, one more spatial and the other more temporal, both at the ends of a spectrum covering reality. Bergson is not isolating two opposite tendencies in laughter. Rather, he is setting about to describe a single tendency that of interplay between life and mechanism which then can be seen to generate the multiplicity of instances of laughter. So Le Rire is not typical, yet it is unmistakably Bergsonian. The way in which the dynamical scheme is reconstructed to meet the concrete manifestation is precisely contraction. The vague fertility of the dynamical scheme is akin to pure memory, which in itself is impotent, but which can be inserted into the concreteness of present perception by a process of contraction. So here we still have the move between duration and space which is fundamental to Bergson. Yet even so, it might be an interesting experiment to apply

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Bergsons dualistic method to laughter. The exploration of the lan riant could be seen as such. Let us now see how Bergson applies this method.

Humans The first step in the concretization of something mechanical encrusted on the living brings us to humans. We do not laugh at anything but humans: The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. (L, p. 3.) The human soul therefore is somehow a requisite presence in an object of laughter, and if it is not actually present, we must be able to imagine it is present, in the virtual object we form in our minds. Why is this the case? Why could nature itself not be amusing? One could of course dispute Bergsons claim, and this would quickly bring us to the problem of anthropomorphism: do we project ourselves onto nature, or do we fallaciously attribute to our autonomous selves what has its origin outside of us? We will not explore that issue here. In any case, Bergsons claim seems to be at least partially true in that, on the whole, humans elicit much more laughter than does nature. It seems as if sympathy plays some role in laughter, because sympathy is exactly what is missing when we perceive, for example, a landscape. A landscape is an inanimate entity, and we usually regard it in a somewhat detached way, or at least in comparison to our perception of a human being. We never feel the same depth of sympathy for a landscape as for a living human being. It seems that in order to laugh with something we need to place ourselves in it to a certain extent, in order to feel what it feels, and because of this only human beings can be truly comic. What is it in humans that elicits laughter? Bergson distinguishes between five elements which give five basic objects of laughter. The first is the most concrete: the comic form.

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Form Bergson begins by noting the relation between the comic and the ugly. A face often becomes funny when it verges on becoming ugly; yet obviously not all ugliness is comic. To understand the transition from ugliness to the comic, Bergson considers deformities in general. He states that A deformity that may become comic is a deformity that a normally built person could successfully imitate. (L, p. 23.) We see here that in the comic logic as applied to forms, there is a certain contractive effort necessary in order for something to become comic. We must be able to create an imitation in our mind or in our body, in order to crust it over with something mechanical and laugh at it. Indeed, Bergson goes on to wonder Is it not, then, the case that the hunchback suggests the appearance of a person who holds himself badly? His back seems to have contracted an ugly stoop. By a kind of physical obstinacy, by rigidity, in a word, it persists in the habit it has contracted. (L, p. 23.) The ugliness must be suggestive of a rigid habit which can be corrected by laughter. It differs from expressive ugliness, which on the contrary is ugliness that is connected to the movement of society and life. When we speak of expressive beauty or even expressive ugliness, when we say that a face possesses expression, we mean expression that may be stable, but which we conjecture to be mobile. It maintains, in the midst of its fixity, a certain indecision in which are obscurely portrayed all possible shades of the state of mind it expresses (L, p. 24.) In this way caricature can also be explained. The caricaturist detects in a face certain elements that somehow are not quite in harmony with the rest of the face; for example, these elements could be a big nose, or big ears. The caricaturist then sets out to exaggerate these elements, thus drawing attention to the materiality of the face. Whereas the face is an expressive object, expressing our thoughts and emotions, a caricature brings to the fore something more like a rigid material object. In this way laughter is always an interplay between the soul and its material manifestation. The contractive effort of the imagination endeavors to see how a body it perceives is animated by a soul:

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Our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul, which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. (L, p. 28.) On the other hand, matter consists of the relaxation of the rhythms of duration, and sometimes matter forms a crust through which the soul can no longer radiate: Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outer life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of a body, an effect that is comic. (L, p. 29.) In this way the comic in forms can be seen to be an encrustation of the mechanical on the living, a living body that suddenly shows itself to be rigid, as it were, made out of stone.

Movement Bergson then goes on to discuss the comic in gestures and in movements. Here again he proposes a similar guiding formula: The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine. (L, p. 29.) Normally human gestures and movements are continuous, expressing movement of certain ideas that go behind it. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never repeats itself, (L, p. 31.) An expressive gesture is one that follows this continuous evolution of the idea, and thus in fact never draws attention to itself. Because of its continuity and lack of repetition, it becomes a symbol for the idea that goes behind it. However, when there is repetition or discontinuity, ones attention is drawn to the material gesture and this can be a point then at which laughter is elicited. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic. (L, p. 32.) With this idea in mind one can also make sense of why imitation is such a successful comic method. If a gesture or movement is imitated, it loses its expressive power because the same gesture is used in two different situations; our attention is consequently drawn to the matter and the lower plane of consciousness. Our gestures

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can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living personality. (L, p. 33.) In the same way we will laugh when we see two faces that are alike, even though neither would elicit laughter in themselves. This was a riddle posed by Pascal in his Penses21, to which Bergson would answer that we laugh because the similarity suggests that the faces are like machines that can be easily fabricated. He goes on to suggest how laughter would be even more pronounced when a person is multiplied not once, but many times, and that in fact many comic plays or shows make use of this device. Of course, perhaps the playwrights might be unconscious of the way in which they construct comic scenes, and do so only instinctively, but in any case the general principle seems to be one of setting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an outward aspect of probability and thereby retaining something of the suppleness of life. (L, p. 36.)

Situations and Words This arrangement of human events is most evident in comic situations. Here the main formula is modified as thus: Any arrangement of acts and events is comic which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement. (L, p. 69.) How are acts and events arranged to give this impression? Again, Bergson presents the comical situation in contrast with the living situation. The germs of Creative Evolution are already present in this text, for here too life is as an evolution in time and complexity in space (L, p. 88.) What are the most important characteristics of life? A continual change of aspect, the irreversibility of the order of phenomena, the perfect individuality of a perfectly self-contained series: such, then, are the outward characteristics whether real or apparent is of little moment which distinguish the living from the merely mechanical. (L, p. 88.) Therefore, a mechanical effect will be produced if any one of these three characteristics of life is reversed, and in this way Bergson distinguishes between three ways of producing comical situations: repetition, inversion and reciprocal interference of series.

21

Blaise Pascal, Penses, II, 133.

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For the comic in words Bergson makes the distinction between the witty and the comic; a phrase is comic when it makes us laugh at the person uttering the phrase, whereas wit makes us laugh at some other person or object. In any case, the effect is the same, because in both witty and comic sayings our attention is focused on the material aspect language instead of its expressive power. It emphasizes the rigid aspect of language, and how it is alienated from the continuous ever-changing movement of duration. The ways in which the comic and witty imagination can proceed are analogous to those of the comic imagination in situations. The rigidity of words can be seen in the comic use of stereotyped phrases, or when a common phrase is used to express an absurd idea. Here Bergson repeats that the absurdity is by no means the source of the comic, it is only a very simple and effective means of making it obvious, even though some will equate the comic and the absurd. Absurdity is only a particular means of encrusting a living being with something mechanical. Another means Bergson mentions is by taking a metaphor literally. (L, p. 115.)

Character Comic in character is perhaps the comic at the highest plane of consciousness, at the highest rhythm of duration. It is also the form that has most social import, since whereas laughing at situations for example mostly does not bring about any social change, laughing at characters can. In fact, it was this form of the comic that Bergson had in mind when defining laughter as social correction: Convinced that laughter has a social meaning and import, that the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society, and that, in short, there is nothing comic aparat from man, we have made man and character generally our main objective. (L, p. 133.)

Laughter sets out to correct unsociability, and consequently its foremost object will be the characters of people. How then characters are approached comically does not need much discussion, because it in fact has already been discussed. Laughter is between art and life, and

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proceeds to portray not individual characters in their infinite complexity, but general types with certain superficial, and invariably rigid characteristics.

In this way the dynamic scheme of something mechanical encrusted on the living is applied to different concrete objects of laughter. How are the objects of laughter and the subjective process related? Where is laughter situated: in the object or in the subject? Do we laugh because it is amusing, or is it amusing because we laugh? How can it be ontologically classified? It might be helpful here to apply Bergsons theory of perception to laughter. Laughter is a particular kind of perception and action: it is a movement from object to subject, within the subject, and then from the subject back out into the objective world. We perceive a particular object, which then has a certain effect on our imagination, and then we react by laughing. Laughter is a movement, akin to Bergsonian perception, that moves from object in through to subject and finds its end in social correction. However, this only delineates three points in the movement; what is the source of the movement itself? What causes the movement in the first place? This question brings us to the issue of the source of laughter.

2.4 The Source of Laughter

Society We mentioned already that for Bergson society is the end of laughter; however, in an important sense it is also its source. Bergson mentions society as the necessary environment for laughter, without which there could be none. We need other people in order to laugh: Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table dhte, to hear travelers relating to one another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed like them, but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do so. (L, p. 6.) Thus the energy of the laughter of one person is amplified by others who hear the laughter, and once infected, begin to laugh themselves. Laughter needs the presence of a group. We become painfully aware of this dependency when we try a joke in another

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language, or in another social group. Many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group! (L, p. 6.) The comic feeds of the habits of a society; take these away and the comic will vanish: You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others. () However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity with other laughter, real or imaginary. (L, p. 6.) Why is laughter so dependent on society? This is an almost trivial question from Bergsons perspective, because laughter is in its essence a societal phenomenon. To understand laughter without society would be like trying to understand the hand without reference to the body. To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society. (L, p. 7.) When society is not given full consideration, as in quite a number of theories of laughter, laughter is understood solely as an interaction between subject and object, without reference to a larger whole. Such approaches often sideline the comic as a mere curiosity in which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity. (L, p. 7.)

In this way, Bergson can be seen to emphasize that society is laughters origin, even while being its end at the same time. In this sense laughter describes a circular movement, beginning and ending in society. It is a mechanism engendered by society in order to improve social adaptation, and obviously then where there is no society there will be no laughter. Furthermore, our guiding idea in presenting Bergsons account of laughter has been to view it as a social instinct, and perhaps it is in this context that we can most clearly see why. In some passages Bergson can be seen to suggest the instinctual aspect of laughter: To be certain of always hitting the mark, it would have to proceed from an act of reflection. Now laughter is simply the result of a mechanism set up in us by nature or, what is almost the same thing, by our long acquaintance with social life. It goes off spontaneously and returns tit for tat. It has no time to look where it hits. (L, p. 198.)

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Laughter thus is a result of the habit and obligation of society. Indeed, in a key passage in TSMR he links instinct and habit: An activity which, starting as intelligent, progresses towards an imitation of instinct is exactly what we call, in man, a habit. And the most powerful habit, the habit whose strength is made up of the accumulated force of all the elementary social habits is necessarily the one which best imitates instinct. (TMSR, p. 26) Laughter thus is a powerful habit, contracting many elementary social habits, into something that is almost like a natural instinct. This instinct is one towards social correction, a form of contraction. How is this instinct actually carried out? This larger movement of contraction contains within it two sub-movements in the subject: one of contraction and one of relaxation, as discussed in the subjective process. We perceive a living being, and for a moment we sympathize with it and imagine it to actually be a living thing; soon however we captured again by the societal instinct and cut of our affective sympathy, thus allowing our imagination to portray the living being as something mechanical. From the point of view of society we first relax and then contract our consciousness; from the point of view of the object we do the opposite. The reason we do this is to draw attention to its rigidity by exaggerating it and thus we hope to wake it up to social life.

Beyond the plane of society? What about the lapse of attention that allows us to enjoy laughter? As mentioned above, Bergson suggests that this arises when we forget about the larger movement of contraction. Later on when we are recaptured by the societal instinct we only feign our relaxation, in order to parody the relaxation of the object of laughter, but initially we actually join in on the relaxation: So, comic absurdity gives us from the outset the impression of playing with ideas. Our first impulse is to join in the game. That relieves us from the strain of thinking.22 (L, p. 196.) However, why do we join in? Why do we forget ourselves and enjoy laughter? This is a pivotal point in the argument. Bergson here seems to realize that something in laughter in
22

My emphasis.

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a way somehow escapes contraction, that it somehow is more than a societal instinct. He seems to realize that laughter does not seem to perfectly contribute to the creativity of the lan vital, to the contraction of the past into the present. And yet he does not seem to attribute any importance to this consideration: It also comes from a lapse in attention. Thus a stern father may at times forget himself and join in some prank his child is playing, only to check himself at once in order to correct it. (L, p. 197.) We forget ourselves, and thus the enjoyment, the love, the sympathy that arises from the play of laughter seems to be merely accidental. Let us imagine laughter to be a physical movement, and society to be its plane of movement. Here we see that laughter for a brief moment exits the plane: for a brief moment it enters a different dimension. Accident or not? This is the whole question. If so, and to return to a question posed earlier, why then might laughter not be replaced by some other movement within society? Why should laughter exist at all? Can a world be imagined which is purely serious? If not, the source of laughter cannot be society, nor life.

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Chapter Three Laughter beyond life: lan riant

In a final reflection in this chapter we will explore the question: Why do we laugh at all? What is the ultimate source of laughter? In doing so we will depart from Bergsons account of laughter; however, the thinking will be still guided by the Bergsonian framework as explored in the first chapter and by many of Bergsons analyses of laughter as examined in the second. We will be guided by the intuition that laughter is something more than derision or social correction, and for this reason will begin by considering the relation between laughter and its Intimate Twin, the tear.

3.1 Laughter and its Intimate Twin

The Intimate Self and the Outer Persona Underneath the extravagant boisterous exterior of clowns, so the clich goes, lies a vulnerable unhappy self. During the day crowds gather around the clown to glimpse his exaggerated gestures and amusing tricks, but at night when everybody has gone home, the clown sits alone and weeps. The day is the time of whiteface makeup, outlandish costumes, long red shoes, exaggerated facial expressions and gestures. He adopts a persona, a mask that hides his self but at the same time he loves the artificiality of the mask and the thrill of the performance. In a certain sense it allows him to be himself, since it is like a filter through which his love and the love of others can indirectly pass. But at night, when the show is over, he is left with himself, his intimate self, and the tears of loneliness return. We are perhaps too quick to feel sorry for the clown; often we ourselves are clowns without knowing it. We realize not that we too hide behind masks to make others laugh; we realize not that we also shed tears. Without knowing it we present our cheerful sides to people we meet during the day. This is neither hypocrisy nor a conscious choice.

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There seems to be almost an ontological force at work here: the day is a time of relative formality and distance when we deal with each other in each others materiality, and perhaps that is why we instinctively choose humor. Actually, it is not even an instinctive choice as laughter chooses us. If a stranger were to approach us in tears, spilling out details of his intimate life, we would more often squirm out of awkwardness than listen with sympathy. This stranger does not seem to know the difference between the intimate and the public. Of course sometimes we are moved to genuine sympathy when a person shares his or her sadness, and are perhaps even moved to tears. Why do we respond thus? Perhaps one could say that tears often break out after long hardship, when we suddenly break down. We realize our weakness, our impotence, our utter ineptness and in an astonishing move of acceptance, we simply cry. To formulate it in Bergsonian terms, we are placed in our impotent past and through this past something beautiful is intimated which we long for even though we know we cannot reach it. It is perhaps no coincidence that sadness swells up from contemplating the past: the past and tears are intimately related. One could even suggest that we cry when the past somehow is disconnected from the present: we relive a certain memory but with the implicit realization that this memory cannot be actualized in the present. Thus we grow sad when thinking about the deceased, for this person we loved will no longer be with us in the present. We grow sad when we remember a failure, not because the failure itself is tragic, but because it has forced us to acknowledge that our dreams cannot be realized in actual life. Failures sober us perhaps, but they can also make us sad or pessimistic about life. This is perhaps why we cry mostly when alone, that is, alone with our intimate selves. In those moments we live in the past and are unable to manifest ourselves in the present, not to mention enter into social situations. If we cry we do so in the presence of people who know us well, who somehow understand our character and our past. Laughter, on the other hand, is often spontaneously linked to extrovertedness and gregariousness. When we laugh we live in the present, and if something appears absurd when we laugh, that is because we separate the present from the past. We do not try to make sense of things when we laugh, but merely take them as they are. Thus we present a more material side of our person, if it can be called that. This material side consists of well-defined characteristics, and in a certain sense it can be thought of as a solid in

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comparison with the more ethereal intimate self. It allows us to project ourselves into the world, to make ourselves larger than life. We become more visible to other people, since our well-defined characteristics are easy to grasp, and others then deal with us more readily. If we were to take this persona away, we would slink into a corner and be afraid to utter a word. Bergson distinguishes between the fundamental and superficial selves, a distinction that could perhaps be here reformulated as a difference between an intimate self and an outer persona. Laughter would then belong more in the persona and tears more in the intimate self. And yet it cannot be said that laughter dwells solely in the persona, for it does not treat its objects of laughter as pure materiality. Laughter is good; it is a beautiful?? way of dealing with materiality while acknowledging that it is something more than a valueless objectivity. It is in this sense that tears are essential to an understanding of laughter. Without the counterbalance of the tears of the intimate self, laughter has the tendency to turn to arrogance and violence. Without some kind of sympathy, some love perhaps, laughter will only partake of the movement of relaxation and treat its object of laughter as a mere machine. In a certain sense tears seem to remind us of our own finitude and weakness, and remind us of the injustice in instrumentalizing others. We cannot be merely an intimate self or a persona, but need to be both. We never laugh or cry, but somehow always do both at the same time. This is most obvious in loving laughter, and in this sense laughter seems to contain invisible tears even while it laughs.

Between showing and not-showing However, what does invisible here mean? Perhaps we could say that laughter is suggestive of an intimate past, while tears themselves make this past explicit. Laughter may draw attention to the present, but yet there is something almost intangible linking it to the past. To say, as Bergson does, that the comic is an encrustation of the mechanical on the living could perhaps be thus reformulated by suggesting that the comic imagination somehow detaches an objects past from its present, thus eliciting laughter. However, if the tear would be complete, laughter would be instrumentalization and violence; instead, this detachment is playful. It detaches and at the same time does not

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detach the past from the present. There is still something suggestive of the past, of the intimate self. delete/too many questions This is the side of humor that cannot be explained, in the sense that a joke cannot be explained while still remaining a joke: these links cannot be made explicit, for then they are made present, and the object of laughter will then be placed solely in the present. One thinks of Bergsonian intuition here, for like intuition, laughter too is opposed to the usual form of conceptual thinking: The various concepts into which a change can be analysed are therefore so many stable views of the instability of the real. And to think of an object in the usual meaning of the word think is to take one or more of these immobile views of its mobility. (ITM, p. 32) However, in laughter the present is merely suggestive of what lies beneath. In this respect humor shows itself to be some kind of seduction, lying between the vulgarity of showing all, and a shyness in showing nothing. The seductive women is one who entices and invites, suggests but never shows. Even her physical appearance reflects this movement between showing and not-showing. Perhaps it is not coincidence that humor and seduction are closely related. As Marilyn Monroe once said, If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything. Both humor and seduction are a play between the solid and the intangible. But this interplay between past and present, showing and not showing is not peculiar to laughter or seduction. All art, music and literature might be said to be based on it. As Bergson notes, whenever something from the depths of duration is expressed, it cannot ever be contained in the materiality of drawings, notes or words. The words or notes are are often more suggestive than explicit about what lies beneath; the readers or listeners must reconnect to the source of duration if they are going to be able to appreciate the work of art. This is what Bergson in fact had in mind when he showed how it is not the specific content of an artwork that is universal, but rather the effort of intuition that each spectator must make if he/she is to appreciate the work of art. Likewise laughter cannot be elicited in a mechanical way; somehow there is some kind of effort of contraction that goes on beneath. Without being challenged in some way we are unlikely to laugh. However, as we will see further on, the effort involve in laughter is of a very different nature than that involved in art, since it is not simply a contraction.

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In any case, this play between showing and not-showing serves to elicit an energy of laughter in the subject. What this energy might be is still mysterious, but what is certain is that a laughter involves an interplay between an outer persona and an intimate self. Like the clown, a laughing person may be secretly a weeping person, and even though the tears come out only at night, in fact during the day they shape the character of his laughter. A laughter without tears would be more derisive, would be less mindful of the past of its object of laughter, to put it in the terms of the second chapter, whereas a more loving laughter allows the intimate reserves of the past somehow to shape the form of laughter. In this way invisible tears can mellow out the rough edges of laughter. However, if tears and laughter are so intimately related, this suggests there might be a common source.

3.2 The Eternal Past

What do tears and laughter point to then? What is this intimate self we talked about? There is something more in laughter and tears than either the relaxation or contraction of duration. Laughter points to something that resists contraction. How is this so? Recall the meaning of contraction in the context of consciousness: it is basically a form of recognition. As discussed in the first chapter, recognition is the process of contracting a particular past into a present experience. Thus we have a memory of a table, and a perception; recognition consists of the insertion or actualization of this memory by the perception. In this way, the past is indistinguishable from the present in an act of recognition, since the two form a continuous line. Contraction is then a continuous movement from past to present. How then does laughter point to something that resists this continuous movement? Even though at first sight it might seem to have little to do with laughter, let us consider falling in love, for falling in love also has this discontinuous element in it. It is safe to say that when we are in love with a person we see more in this person than what sense-perception gives us. We do not place the woman we are in love with squarely in the

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present, we do not look at her with the unreflecting eye of pure perception, but instead one could almost say we sense something like an enormity of the past pressing on what we see. This past is a confused mass, and cannot be contracted into the present, as in an act of recognition. The process of falling in love is thus essentially different from recognition. Despite a certain similarity when in love we recognize something extra in the person recognition in the Bergsonian sense of the word involves a definite past that is contracted into the present and that becomes indistinguishable from the present. Falling in love on the contrary bestows, as it were, an indefinite halo on the person, as if the person symbolized something in our deepest being, our most intimate nature. Bergson himself notices something of this discontinuity: We may add that the nearer love is to adoration, the greater the disproportion between the emotion and the object, the deeper therefore the disappointment to which the lover is exposed. (TMSR, p. 42.) In fact, if we lose this discontinuity, and recognize the person by a continuous contraction of the past something that happens when we become habituated to the person then we are no longer in love. The person ceases to be a mystery for us, we are no longer intrigued in the same way by this person, and we implicitly assume there is nothing left to fascinate us. When the past is continuously contracted into the present, forming a definite unity, there is no longer anything that arrests us, that stops us dead in our tracks. We are blinded by something indefinite, something that resists contraction into the present. Often being in love is something associated with youth, but what if it is a permanent feature of human existence? What if we are blinded because we are exposed to an awesome light and later lose this infatuation because we have become blind to this light? What if sober love is merely the encrustation of our eyes? If this be granted, perhaps we could then imagine that when in love we see an Eternal Past somehow present in the person we are infatuated with. This Eternal Past perhaps is always there, waiting to be uncovered in our intimate self. Why call it eternal, and what is the relation to the thought of Bergson? It is eternal because it cannot be contracted into the present. Somehow it cannot ever be encapsulated in a material form, but always resists such contraction. It thus cannot be situated in the definite past, but neither can it be in the present, since it can neither be seen, heard nor felt. It is outside of

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time, outside the flow of duration. The distance between the Eternal Past and the present is infinite, and for this reason it cannot be contracted into the present. It is a singularity, a discontinuity in the flow of time. There is a paradox here. If the distance between it and the present is infinitely great, how can it have even an effect on the present? Perhaps one could imagine the Eternal Past not as having a direct effect on the present, but only an indirect one. The Eternal Past is somehow like a pressure on the definite past, creating a disturbance that culminates in the present. In that way one could imagine the Eternal Past as something that transcends duration, but yet at the same time as the source of the movement of duration. In this way it only has the most indirect of influences on the present. For present purposes, let us imagine there beyond duration there is an Eternal Past, some kind of singularity, of which we can be conscious in a mysterious way, and which equally mysteriously has an effect on the present.

How could this Eternal Past have an effect on the present? What is the nature of this singularity? Often it seems to be suggested by beauty. Usually we do not fall in love with just anything. In principle, of course, we can fall in love with anything, something to which psychoanalysis has testified extensively, but usually we fall in love only with human beings, and only with certain humans at that. It seems as if there needs to be a certain trigger to elicit this upsurge of the Eternal Past. It seems as if beauty is intrinsically connected with this past. Of course, often we do not recognize the beauty of others and mostly take each other for granted. Beauty here seems to be more than some mere physical harmony, even though it contains that surely, and touches on the nature of consciousness itself. Only in the human being does the past become intricately interwoven with the present in a most fascinating way. In fact this is basically Bergsons understanding of beauty: if we go by his understanding of art, then the human being is the most perfected artwork. Thus the human being unconsciously invites the other to fall in love. We often are unconscious of others beauty, and of our own.. Perhaps that is why we value art so much: because it presents a simplified reality that we can marvel at from a distance.

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However, we may need to be triggered by beauty in order to fall in love, but what is it that we fall in love with? Is it beauty itself? We fall in love with a face; we fall out of love with the same face. It seems as if beauty only serves to elicit a certain memory of the Eternal Past in us. Falling in love is quite impersonal in this sense: what we fall in love is distinct from a persons character or particular identity. Yet when another falls in love with me, I do not feel as if Im treated impersonally, but perhaps the opposite: I feel as if somebody has seen something in me that is deeply intimate to my being. The Eternal Past thus seems to be most impersonal, but at the same time also the most personal. We seem somehow to be at our most personal then when we are overwhelmed by something that is larger than us. We love something and open ourselves up to it, but in the act of love we can let down our guard too much and the vast energy of the world destroys us. Falling in love can cause madness and the loss of all contact with reality. One thinks of Freud here when in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he describes trauma as the breach of the defense mechanisms of the mind, as the swamping of the mind by psychic energy that cannot be cathected23. Sometimes we choose to undergo this trauma even though we know it will damage us. Perhaps it can hardly be called a choice though. We are attracted to these objects of sublime beauty as flies to a lightbulb at night, we are completely mesmerized like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. It is as if love is a force that chooses for us, as if we are mere vessels for a sublimely powerful stream of energy we cannot control. What kind of heteronomy do we willingly sacrifice our autonomy for? It might be called the Eternal Past here, but in fact it remains highly mysterious. What if our submission is not so irrational? What if we somehow realize that we will die anyway, because if we stop the flow, we die as well, albeit in a very different way. We can only remain highly suggestive here, as our focus is on laughter, but if anything can be concluded from the previous discussion, it is that infatuation implies some kind of discontinuity. The Eternal Past which can propel us to sacrifice ourselves is discontinuous with the present. Thus the continuity of contraction seems not to be all there is to life. In fact, what we value most in life escapes the process of contraction. There are always recesses of the past which are not contracted into the present, but which yet form a nameless force pressing on the present. What in the end makes life worth
23

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, II

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living for us is not our consciousness, but perhaps our sense of being caught up in a something that is immensely stronger than us. This relation between the singularity of infatuation and beauty is similar to the relation between the laughter and the comic. The self-sacrifice involved in being in love is more similar to laughter than would appear at first sight, for the laughter also points to something overwhelming that may destroy us. It is in this respect that laughter perhaps cannot be confined to society as is suggested in Bergsons account. What is this force, and what could be its significance for laughter? What distinguishes laughter from being in love?

3.3 lan riant

Laughter beyond contraction Distance There seems to be an essential move of spatialisation involved in laughter that is not present when we fall in love. When we fall in love, we are often not able to distance ourselves from the person we have fallen in love with, and to approach him or her soberly. Indeed infatuation is a mania, and precludes all efforts of cool rationalization. On the other hand, as Bergson emphasizes, laughter has a definite rational element. We thus take distance from the object we laugh at, and are able to see it as a materiality disconnected from its past. This is the move of relaxation as discussed extensively above, which is not present in the state of mind of being in love. This move of relaxation can be reformulated as a particular interplay of space and time, present and past. When we are in love, the object of our infatuation becomes a symbol of an Eternal Past, but with humor, the object of laughter is looked on rather soberly. When we take distance from the object in a humorous fashion we somehow perceive the objects present as disconnected from the Eternal Past. Laughters imagination may show similarities with dreams, yet laughter is everything but a dreamlike state. It is firmly rooted in the present, and looks on objects with a rather sober eye.

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However, laughter is not a mere interplay of the definite past and the present. Thus laughter is different from sympathetic intuition in the Bergsonian sense. It not only disconnects disconnect the Eternal Past from the present, as opposed to falling in love, but it also disconnects the definite past from the present. When we laugh we do not attempt to place ourselves in the duration of an object, or to understand it in its infinite complexity. We interact with it only in its superficiality, in its external appearance. Laughter is also different from a certain instrumentalization which perceives the present in terms of definite needs to be fulfilled. Laughter, on the other hand, has no needs; it perceives finitude but does not do anything with it. Thus the objects finitude is somehow perceived so that one does not feel the need to use it or to change it. Laughter looks on from a distance and marvels, but does not wish to touch it. It lets things be as they are. Why does laughter thus affirm objects as they are? Perhaps it is because of the suggestive connection with the Eternal Past that the objects are given a halo, a comic halo. Laughter thus is a way of dealing with materiality. In laughter we distance ourselves from the object of laughter but at the same time we are intensely involved with it. Laughter ostensibly deals with superficialities, unlike serious effort which endeavors to plunge to the depths, but only in such a way that the superficialities are not mere superficialities. Mysteriously, they point to an even deeper source. This source is different from the present and even the past, but yet it somehow can transform our perception of an object into a comic perception. When we laugh, things are transformed and in a mysterious way become a source of great pleasure and perhaps even joy. Laughter is neither an instrumentalization nor a sympathetic intuition, and in this way escapes contraction. The difference here with Bergsons account is that Bergson makes the move of relaxation accidental in that he understands laughter basically as a societal instinct, which is a form of contraction. Paradoxically laughter in the Bergsonian account is precisely the tool that society uses to shorten the distance. The object of laughter had been dormant, the person had been behaving like a machine, out of sync with society, and we laugh in order to take a distance from the object that would allows us to reactivate the lan vital in it. Laughter thus takes distance in order to come closer afterwards; it describes a circular movement within the plane of society, in a continual process of contraction. But what if

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we take distance and leave it at that? This would mean that laughter resists the move of contraction, and that there is in it something in a certain sense beyond time.

However, speaking about laughter in terms of distance is to remain at an abstract level. What does it mean concretely? Perhaps we could say that laughter give us freedom in a certain sense. Laughter thus can free us from our material manifestations. Selfdeprecation is often seen as a gift to the other person at the expense of oneself. A fortiori, it is a gift to oneself, since taking oneself too seriously is a form of slavery. To take oneself too seriously is to cut oneself off from the depths of some Eternal Past inside oneself, depths that are inexpressible and that therefore must always remain somewhat estranged from their visible and communicable manifestations. Thus the onus of our existence is placed on something that is almost beyond existence, and finite being as manifested in time is freed from this weight. Thus perhaps in the end too much seriousness results from an excess of superficiality. It is the laugh that laughs at everything that is the most true expression of who we really are. The laughter that laughs at time itself is not always derisive but can also be a knowing laughter that acknowledges the existence of something beyond this world. This portrays laughter not as a superficial phenomenon of society, but as a deep force rooted in human existence itself. We long to laugh as much as we long to be free. We work hard, we concentrate on our goals and ambitions, and even though these may be self-imposed we may eventually begin to wonder what the point of it all is and why we suffer so much for our goals. Inevitably, sooner or later, we realize we only have one life and that perhaps the goals we endeavor to achieve do not merit our being enslaved to them, especially since they sink away in insignificance when placed in the totality of history. We wonder what the point of it all is, and whether it is worth it. Do not people sometimes realize later in life that they should have enjoyed it more? When life has gone by, we look back and wish that we could have been more mindful of lifes richness, instead of being concerned with our own needs or ambitions. Even while we adopt the tension necessary for life, we somehow long to be freed from it. We long to relax. Laughter thus can free us from shame. We are ashamed of something when we take it to be an inauthentic representation of who are. We are ashamed of solidifying

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something of our intimate nature when we fear others may be able to harm us in our intimacy by attacking our solid expressions. Sometimes shame can thus oppress whatever expressive energies we might have in us. Admittedly it can prevent us from inappropriate action that does not take other people into consideration, but sometimes shame can become excessive and immobilize us. What laughter can do is allow us to take distance from whatever solid form our expression takes, and to laugh at any possible flaws it might have. Laughter introduces a discontinuity between our intimate self and the outer persona above, thus allowing us to view the solid manifestations of the persona from a distance. When this persona adopts a holy character, laughter can take on certain elements of blasphemy. If we were to understand mysticism in a Bergsonian sense, a mystic would be one living in a state of pure contraction. No longer confined to the rigid boundaries of social obligation, the mystic is placed in the lan vital itself. Everything that one then does expresses what is holy: every thought, word and act is an expression of an intuition of the duration of the world, an expression of the creative emotion, of love for humanity. In a sense such a person is a perfect individual: every aspect of the person is unified by a single deep love for humanity. Some mystics indeed talk about a perfect tranquility as being the state of blessedness, so here we see a lack of confusion in their state of mind. This is not to say that blessedness is like a mathematical clarity: it contains the interpenetrating elements of duration, and in its own way is confused. Tranquility does not imply the clarity of solid objects; it rather means that all aspects of the self are united in a common stream of energy, flowing from ones fundamental self outwards. The mystic, though of all human beings the one most in touch with ontological duration and thus the most ecstatic, is at the same time the most clearly defined human ?. All aspects of the mystic form a unity. He can also be said to be the most alive, because in him the lan vital has been aroused most from its dormant state. Indeed, life and individuality go together: [The living body] is an individual, and of no other object, not even of the crystal, can this be said, for a crystal has neither difference of parts nor diversity of functions. (CE, p. 12)

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Laughter breaks up this individuality. When we laugh we are no longer one person, but are essentially split. We take a holy object and we laugh at it, because even though it may be holy, it is still a mere object. We may even take humanity itself and laugh at it, for though we are driven by intelligence and intuition, as a whole we still remarkably resemble a colony of crawling ants. We laugh at ourselves, for even though our consciousness might contain an infinite number of memories interwoven into a complex unity with the present, the human being is still a body that rigidly continues along its path in the fulfillment of its needs, regardless of its changing circumstances. In comparison to mysticism, laughter introduces both a distance and discontinuity. It separates the present from the Eternal Past, while still suggesting a connection between the two.

Discontinuity Perhaps the reason for this difference with the flow of duration, or lan vital, is this element of discontinuity mentioned above. Laughter presents a certain discontinuity between past and present. There is a certain shock involved in humor that is not present in contraction or intuition. It shows the present in such a way that it is disconnected from the past, and when we distance ourselves from the present in this way we are freed from it and at the same time acknowledge it. This is why laughter is a remedy against resentment: if we can laugh at what we resent, we can distance ourselves from it, and yet acknowledge it for what it is. Laughter is our way of dealing with the present while yet retaining a connection with an Eternal Past. Perhaps we can imagine that every laugh, however trivial it may be, is somehow the result of an ontological force flowing through us, an lan riant. The aspects of laughter we have been discussing till now, the distance and discontinuity involved, together with the suggestive connection with the Eternal Past, might simply be the result of the rough movements of an lan riant coursing through us. Just as infatuation is like a force we cannot control, arising from an awakening of the Eternal Past, perhaps so too is laughter. Are we not sometimes in a laughing mood, in which we tend to find things amusing we might not otherwise? Freud observes as well: The most favorable condition for the production of comic pleasure is a generally cheerful mood in

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which one is inclined to laugh24 It would seem as if we are caught in a torrent of an invisible lan riant which propels us to laughter. Once caught, do we not also often find it difficult to escape it? Sometimes it can be difficult to return to seriousness and productivity after being caught by the fun of games, something we perhaps have more difficulty with as children than as adults. Let us compare the lan riant to the lan vital. It differs from the lan vital in that it endeavors to create nothing. It laughs at creation, and ridicules the earnestness of the lan vital, with its purported explosiveness25. It somehow realizes that the products of creation are merely finite; in every laugh there is the germ of the metaphysical insight that finitude is separated from the love that grounds all, and that in the end it does not really matter. When we laugh we seem to realize that beings are merely like toys: miniature versions of the real thing, which we can easily grasp and play with. Laughter is our instinctive way of dealing with the chaos of life, its unintelligibility. Laughter looks it straight in the eye, and honestly says: it does not matter. There are things that the lan vital does not reach; there are things that are not touched by a movement of contraction. What matters truly is the Eternal Past, even though this is not something that can be manifested directly in the present.

Thus if laughter were a continuous contraction, it would lose all its charms. If it were an efficient mechanism of social adaptation, we would no longer desire laughter in the way we do. This fundamental discontinuity in laughter is the very motor of its playful energy, the motor of the lan riant; however, this is also a witness to a darker side of laughter, to laughters violence. Laughter requires wrenching an object from its past, and placing it outside our habitual environment. The discontinuity referred to above can in fact be seen as a form of violence. Note the close link between laughter and violence. Tiger cubs play with each other by biting each other; in fact, boys will often fight as a form of play and amusement. By the way teenagers talk to each other, boys in particular,
24

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 282 See CE, p. 98 ff. : [Life] proceeds rather like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a time incommensurably long.
25

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one might think they are actively insulting each other, whereas in fact they themselves believe it to be mere teasing. One of our first encounters with laughter is through tickling, but can not tickling sometimes become unpleasant or even painful? However, there is always some kind of continuity involved here. Witness how we can be most unkind to those we love most. We laugh more often at our friends and family than at strangers. We often feel timid when laughing at strangers, for fear of hurting their feelings and instead adopt a position of a somewhat cautious politeness. Our friends we know well and we know that our laughter will not hurt them too much. Why is this? Maybe this suggests again that the violence of laughter is situated only on the surface; in the depths a harmony is created. With strangers we only have a superficial bond; our timidity is an instinctual realization that our laughter might be an actual act of violence. Paradoxically perhaps the violence of humor is based on a deeper love: the Eternal Past is always suggestively present.

Laughter beyond relaxation As alluded to, laughter is not a pure discontinuity, not a pure distance from the object of laughter. If it were, it would tear the past from the objects present, thereby rendering it valueless. Laughter would be a gross act of violence. Undoubtedly there are forms of malicious laughter that tend in this direction. These are forms of laughter that forget that the object of laughter is in fact a living being, and they exaggerate in their emphasis of the discontinuity between the objects present and past. They take such distance from the object that it becomes difficult to distinguish such laughter from malicious violence. Yet for all these movements of relaxation, there is something more to laughter. We laugh only because we somehow love the object of laughter. This implicit love is difficult to uncover, and often remains unconscious. For all our images of something mechanical encrusted on the living, there is a sympathy at a deeper level. This sympathy is neither one of contraction or one of intuition where we try to grasp the duration of an object. It requires not intellectual effort, but is rather an effortless sympathy. We do not try to contract various memories in order to form a virtual object that can be actualized in our perception of the real object. We may not understand the object of laughter, but

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neither do we try to, at least not in a definite sense. We are not concerned simply with the definite past in laughter, but with some suggestion of the Eternal Past. Our sympathy allows us to somehow see this Eternal Past in the object of laughter, even though it may nonetheless be discontinuous from it. In this sense laughter is a gift to others. We separate the present manifestation of others from their Eternal Past, and thus do not pressure them to change. In this perspective laughter appears like the very opposite of what Bergson describes. While there may be forms of derisive laughter that seek to correct others, there are also forms which simply appreciate the other person as they are and for what they are. We do this not only for ourselves, but also for the other. A loving laughter can be liberating for the other person, as they feel as if their faults or other manifestations of their finitude are not of the ultimate importance after all. Of course, one might suggest that laughter would not be laughter if it were a direct gift. There is nothing amusing about directness; laughter needs a certain equivocity, a certain subtlety in order to emerge. For example, when teasing we feign withdrawing ourselves in order to implicitly give ourselves.??? But if we exaggerate the feigning, the other might take it as an actual withdrawal, and take the tease as an insult. In this way laughter always treads a fine line between showing and dissimulating, between giving and withdrawing.

3.4 Laughter beyond Duration; Conclusion

To recap and conclude: the phenomenon of laughter, which seems to be a mere curiosity in human existence, has been shown to be deeply rooted in society, life and time itself. The first chapter served to show how society, life and time were intricately connected; the second chapter explored how laughter forms an integral part of this picture. In all this we tried to outline the main elements in Bergson thought relevant to the matter, and we have tried to give laughter an interpretation within the whole of Bergsons philosophy. Laughter as a societal instinct geared to social correction: this has been the focal point of the investigation. At the same time, we were concerned not just with the reproduction of Bergsons thoughts but sought clearly to see the boundaries of

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his account and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. In the end however, such an analysis cannot be any replacement for the book Laughter itself, which is incomparably charming and well written. Inevitably an analysis cannot avoid some critical element precisely because having defined the boundaries of something, one cannot help but look to what lies at the other side of the line. So if this analysis was begun out of a fascination with laughter and Bergsons account of it, it ends with a modest suggestion of what laughter might be beyond the boundaries of Bergsons account. There we suggested that what lies beyond the boundaries of Bergsons laughter in fact lies beyond the boundaries of his philosophy as a whole. Laughter points to something that cannot be simply described as social correction, as contributing to contractive processes within society. However, something that thus resists contraction into the present is, in an important sense, outside of the flow of time. We were thus led to the thought that laughter might well be seen not only to transcend society and life, but also duration itself. What this could mean we tried to articulate by introducing the notions of Eternal Past, which is something that is outside of both duration and the lan riant, the force by which this Eternal Past lets itself be suggestively felt in laughter. We have been careful to avoid giving these notions any particular metaphysical import, since it would lead us too far. It was suggested how the Eternal Past is somehow transsubjective in the way the Past is; it was suggested that the lan riant is a propulsive force in which we participate, in this aspect similar to the lan vital, but dissimilar in that the lan riant creates nothing. The movement of the lan riant does not go from a definite past to the present, but from the Eternal Past to the present, and thus cannot ever finish. Yet we somehow can be conscious of this lan riant and this Eternal past; it is very mysterious how this would be possible. Many questions could be raised here, but perhaps this is not surprising as these notions are built from Bergsonian material, but try to express perhaps something the material was not made for. At this point however, we must conclude by delimiting the lan riant, and putting it into the perspective of life as a whole. That is to say, we cannot live by laughter alone. The lan vital is necessary, for if we were to laugh incessantly, we would not take any of our bodily needs seriously, and we would die. The definite past needs to be contracted into the present, we need to take most things seriously. Thus the lan vital and lan riant

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both have their place in life, and neither of the two can be reduced to the other. How do they keep each other in balance? Is the lan riant a movement of relaxation which we can indulge in now and then to relieve us from the strain of contraction? Do we participate in the lan vital and the lan riant separately? Doubtlessly, this is how laughter is often incorporated into our lives, as laughter is most often used as a means to relax, but perhaps the lan riant and lan vital need not to be separated in this way. Perhaps it is possible to laugh and to love at the same time. Perhaps it is possible to see life as a game, and yet be passionately involved in it. It seems this would mean placing ourselves outside of time, and somehow creating time anew as we live. This would mean placing ourselves outside of life, and even while we sacrifice ourselves to the movements of life, we would still treat it with a smile. Laughter may signal a momentary indifference, but it deepens our love for life. The lan riant detaches us from life, and shows us how life itself is a mere puppet-show, but perhaps in our detachment we are better able to love it, and by standing outside are better able to make a gift to life. We are able to view it at a distance, like an old man looking at the children play in the park. In a way, laughter makes us our minds old while keeping our bodies young. We are able to look at the world from the viewpoint of the Eternal Past, from the viewpoint of that which has always been, and will always be.

However, thought and laughter are uneasy bedfellows, and what is certain is that this cannot be achieved by thought alone. This thesis must therefore come to a rapid end. We mentioned how thought sometimes can kill laughter, well, Freud has made a sharply observation on this point: Unfavorable conditions for the comic arise from the kind of mental activity with which a particular person is occupied at the moment. Imaginative or intellectual work that pursues serious aims interferes with the capacity of the cathexes for discharge cathexes which the work requires for its displacements so that only unexpectedly large differences in expenditure are able to break through to comic pleasure.26

26

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p. 283.

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It seems like a fine ideal to be able to live and laugh at the same time, but often this is not possible, much less to think and laugh at the same time. After thought, life must resume in its full-bloodedness: enter laughter.

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Bibliography
Primary Sources: (1) Works by Bergson

uvres, Edition du Centenaire, Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Mlanges, Presses Universitaires de France, 1972. Correspondences, Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Cours I: Leons de psychologie et de mtaphysique, Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. Cours II: Leons d'esthtique. Leons de morale, psychologie et mtaphysique, Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. Cours III: Leons d'histoire de la philosophie moderne. Thorie de lme, Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.

(2) English Translations

Bergson: Key Writings, edited Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey, London: Continuum, 2002. Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell, New York: Dover, 1998 [1911]. The Creative Mind, tr. Mabelle L. Andison, New York: The Citadel Press, 1992 [1946]; translation of La Pense et le mouvement. Duration and Simultaneity, Robin Durie (ed.) Manchester Clinamen Press, 1999. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, tr. Cloudsley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999 [1911]. Matter and Memory, tr. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1994. Mind-Energy, tr., H. Wildon Carr, London: McMillan and Company, 1920; translation of L'energie spirituelle. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, tr., F.L. Pogson, Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, original date, 1910. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trs., R. Ashley Audra and Cloudsley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter, Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977 [1935].

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Secondary Sources: (1) Other works on laughter Corrigan, Robert W. (ed.), Comedy: Meaning and Form, 2nd ed., Harper & Row, 1981. Critchley, Simon, On Humour, Routledge, 2002. Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, W. W. Norton and Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1960, trans. James Strachery from Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (1905). Kant, I., Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans.), Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 208-210. Meredith, George, An essay on Comedy, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher, Doubleday, 1956. Plessner, Helmut, Lachen en Wenen : een onderzoek naar de grenzen van het menselijk gedrag, trans. J.M.G. van Helmond, Spectrum, 1965. Santayana, George, The Comic Mask and Carnival in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, Charles Scribners Sons, 1922, pp. 135-144.

(2) Bergson Scholarship

Ansell Pearson, K., Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life, Routledge, 2002. Ansell Pearson, K., Henri Bergson: An Introduction (Routledge, 2003). Breeur, Roland, Bergson: het zuivere bewustzijn als moi profond in Vrijheid en bewustzijn: essays over Descartes, Bergson en Sartre, Peeters, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, Bergsonism, Zone Books, 1988, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, from Le Bergsonisme, Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Deleuze, Gilles, Bergson: 1859-1941 in Les philosophes clbres, ed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mazenod, 1956, pp. 292-299. Felt, James W. Epochal Time and the Continuity of Experience in Review of Metaphysics 56, No. 1 (Sept. 2002), pp.19-36.

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Franois, Arnaud, Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche: Volont et ralit, Presses Universitaires de France, 2008. Gunter, Pete, A.Y., Whitehead, Bergson, Freud: Suggestions Toward a Theory of Laughter in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 4 (Summer 1966), pp. 55-60. Guerlac, Suzanne, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Cornell University Press, 2006. Husson, L., LIntellectualisme de Bergson, Presses Universitaires de France, 1947. Janklvitch, Vladimir, Henri Bergson, Presses Universitaires de France, 1975. Kolakowski, Leszek, Bergson, Oxford University Press, 1985. Lacey, A. R., Bergson, Routledge, 1989. Le Roy, Edouard, A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson, FQ Books, 2010. Moore, F.C.T., Bergson: Thinking Backwards, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mullarkey, John, Bergson and Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. ed., The New Bergson, Manchester University Press, 1999. Paul, N. M., Henri Bergson: An Account of his Life and Philosophy, Foreman Press, 2008 (first published Macmillan and Co., 1914). Robinet, A., Le Passage la conception biologique de la perception, de l'image et du souvenir chez Bergson, Etudes philosophiques, vol. 15 (1960), no. 3, pp. 375-88. Russell, B., The Philosophy of Bergson, The Monist, 22 (1912), pp. 321-347. Soulez P. and Worms, F., Bergson, Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Vieillard-Baron, J-L., Bergson, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. Worms, F. (ed.), Annales bergsoniennes, I: Bergson dans le sicle, Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Worms, F., Introduction Matire et Mmoire, Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Worms, W., L'Intelligence gagne par l'intuition? La relation entre Bergson et Kant, in Les Etudes philosophiques (2001), 4 (59), pp. 453-464.

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