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HENRI BERGSON: ACTIVIST MYSTICISM AND THE OPEN SOCIETY
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: Henry Holt and company, 1935). Authorized translation of Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1932), reprinted in Henri Bergson, Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 981-1245. All references to the French are to the latter editions. Page numbers in parentheses refer to the English translation, unless preceded by "Fr." as in Fr. 1069.
enri Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion is a classic of contemporary political theory. One of the properties of a classic is that no matter how often one reads it, the freshness of its analysis of the human condition is still there, and one makes new discoveries about the work's meaning and its implications. Bergson's study more than adequately fulfills this criterion. The purpose of this review article is to consider The Two Sources in relation to a critical theory of the open society. As with my previous article on Karl Popper,' I shall first let Bergson speak for himself and then offer my criticisms. Parts of the book must be ignored both because of space limitations and because they do not bear centrally upon the question "What is a political theory of the open society?" Bergson divides his work into four lengthy chapters; in the following discussion, I shall follow his own division of subject matter, although not necessarily his emphasis. The chapters on "Moral Obligation" and "Static Religion" are twice as lengthy as those on "Dynamic Religion" and "Mechanics and Mysticism."
I. Moral Obligation Significantly, Bergson begins his analysis of moral obligation with the question "Why did we obey?" rather than "Why should we obey?" He presents moral obligation as an experience of the con.
1. "Karl Popper's Open Society," The Political Science Reviewer, VIII (Fall, 1978), 21-61).
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sciousness which at once constitutes the basis of and emanates from something called "society." Unlike the social contract theorists who hypothesize man out of a society which must then be constructed on abstract, conjectural principles, Bergson begins with the concrete experience of a child's encountering a prohibition and raises the question of that prohibition's origin.
Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves than from their status in relation to us. [P]arents and teachers seemed to act by proxy. We did not fully realize this, but behind our parents and our teachers we had an inkling of some enormous, or rather shadowy, thing that exerted pressure on us through them. Later we would say it was society.(1)
To an unreflective consciousness, society is comparable to "an organism whose cells, united by imperceptible links, fall into their respective places in the highly developed hierarchy, and for the greatest good of the whole naturally submit to a discipline that may demand the sacrifice of the part." (Ibid.) Of course, human beings are not cells; they are "free wills." Once organized, however, their wills "assume the guise of an organism," and "in this more or less artificial organism habit plays the same role as necessity in the work of nature." (2)
From this first standpoint, social life appears to us a system of more or less deeply rooted habits, corresponding to the needs of the community. Some of them are habits of command, most of them are habits of behavior, whether we obey a person's commands by virtue of a mandate from society or whether from society itself, vaguely perceived or felt, there emanates an impersonal imperative. Each of these habits of obedience exerts a pressure on our will. We can evade it, but then we are attracted towards it, drawn back to it, like a pendulum which has swung away from the vertical. A certain order of things has been upset, it must be restored. In a word, as with all habits, we feel a sense of obligation.(2)
The "pressure" of "social obligation" is so immeasurably greater than that exerted by other habits that compared with them, it amounts to a difference in kind. In any case, all of our habits of obedience combine to lend each other mutual support within the context of society, which is the "uttermost limit" of our "surroundings." Society appears as a great whole coordinating all our duties down to the most trivial. It would be an intellectualist fallacy to assume that we calculate whether to obey each and every single command or prohibi-
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tion: on the contrary, in its original condition, obligation is experienced as a "solid block." To refuse any one command would mean to endanger the whole complex of prohibitions. The general proposition " 'do what duty bids' triumphs over the hesitations we might feel in the presence of a single duty" (2-3). Initially, then, "everything conspires" to make the social order "an imitation of the order observed in nature" (6). "Habit, served by intelligence and imagination," produces between the separate individuals a unity comparable to that of cells in an organism. At this point, obligation is experienced as a "necessity." This necessity is not entirely from without, however. "Each of us belongs as much to society as to himself." Each of us possesses two selves: a "social self" and an "individual self." The individual self is encountered only in the "depths of our being," while the social self is at the "surface" of the consciousness. Obligation to obey the commands of society for Bergson is not something rationalistic and abstract. Rather, it is rooted in the concrete experience of obligation to those who are closest to us, our family and our friends. Ordinarily, we do not hesitate and calculate about the question "why obey?" before performing our obligations. Rather, we experience ourselves at the center of a series of concentric circles.
Society occupies the circumference; the individual is at the center; from the center to the circumference are arranged, like so many ever-widening concentric circles, the various groups to which the individual belongs. From the circumference to the center, as the circles grow smaller, obligations are added to obligations, and the individual ends by finding himself confronted with all of them together. Thus, obligation increases as it advances; but, if it is more complicated, it is less abstract, and the more easily accepted. When it has become fully concrete, it coincides with a tendency, so habitual that we find it natural, to play in society the part which our station assigns to us. (10-11)
Against Kant, Bergson maintains that, considered as a whole, obligation is habitual rather than rational in nature. The error of the rationalist school of ethics is rooted in their failure to see that resistance to duty is the exception and not the rule. Of course, we encounter specific obligations against which we internally rebel; we then have to invent reasons to ourselves for obeying a specific command. We generally have no difficulty in overcoming the "resistance" of the self in a given instance, because "owing to the interdependence of our duties, and because the obligation as a whole is immanent in each of its parts, all duties are tinged with the hue taken on exceptionally by one or the other of them" (11-12).
It is a mistake to regard obligation as a "unique fact, incommensurate with others, looming above them like a mysterious apparition. If a considerable number of philosophers, especially those who follow Kant, have taken this view, it is because they have confused the sense of obligation, a tranquil state akin to inclination, with the violent effort we now and again exert on ourselves to break down a possible obstacle to obligation." (12-13) It is important to note that "from the fact that we get back to obligations by rational ways, it does not follow that obligation was of a rational order." (14) Thus far, Bergson has argued that "the essence of obligation is a different thing from a requirement of reason." (16) The only truly "categorical imperative" is that in which intelligence supports instinct. When we question an obligation, reason ultimately supplies us with the answer: "You must because you must." Social morality is at bottom a matter of pressure Despite his criticism of an abstract, intellectualist explanation of obligation, Bergson does not maintain that any particular obligation can be called instinctive. "What we must perpetually recall is that, no one obligation being instinctive, obligation as a whole would have been instinct if human societies were not... ballasted with variability and intelligence." (20) Hence, as Bergson observes, human society differs from a beehive or an ant hill in that it is "variable in form, open to every kind of progress" (19).
From the "Closed" to the "Open" Society

At this point, Bergson brings up his famous distinction between "closed societies" (in the plural) and the "open society." His first mention of the open society is in the following passage:
We have said...that underlying moral obligation there was a social demand. Of what society were we speaking? Was it of that open society represented by all mankind? We did not settle the matter, any more than one usually does when speaking of a man's duty to his fellows; one remains prudently vague; one refrains from making any assertion, but one would like to have it believed that "human society" is already an accomplished fact. (22)
From Bergson's initial formulation of the "open society" idea, it appears to have been conceived as temporal and spatial. The open society is a temporal concept because it remains to be realized in the future; it is a global or spatial concept because it includes everyone presently living. Thus, the "civilized" societies in which we presently
HENRI BERGSON live are only potentially open ones 2 ; in reality, they are "closed societies." Our societies are closed because "their essential characteristic is...to include at any moment a certain number of individuals and exclude others" (22). Although empires or large nations may be "very extensive compared to the small agglomerations to which we were drawn by instinct," they are nevertheless closed to a part of humanity presently living on the globe: The introduction of the closed-open society distinction by Bergson represents a dramatic turn in the argument. Thus far, he had sounded in places like Emile Durkheim and other sociologists who make the individual a mere "cell" of society. With the introduction of this concept of the open society, the whole question of obligation becomes enormously complicated. What are we to do when the two sources of obligationthe closed and the openconflict? For the present, Bergson is silent on this point. All he does is to introduce the terminology and to emphasize that "a moral philosophy which does not emphasize this distinction misses the truth; its analysis will thereby be inevitably distorted." Such a philosophy will not recognize that "when we lay down...the duty of respecting the life and the property of others" as a "fundamental demand of social life," it is the closed society which we have in mind. To verify this conclusion:
We need only think what happens in time of war. Murder and pillage and perfidy, cheating and lying become not only lawful, they are actually praiseworthy. The warring nations can say with Macbeth's witches: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." Would this be possible, would this transformation take place so easily, generally, and instantaneously, if it were really a certain attitude of man towards man that society had been enjoining on us up till then? (23)
Bergson clearly intends to shock the reader into recognizing as a self-deception the common assumption of international politics: viz., that the duties enjoined by "society" are "indeed, in principle, duties towards humanity, but that under exceptional circumstances, regrettably unavoidable, they are for the time being, inapplicable." Instead, as we have seen, those duties are to the closed society into which we are born. Far from being the norm, peace between nations has always been a "preparation for defense or even attack, at any rate for war." Our social duties "aim at social cohesion"; whether we like it or not, they foster in us an attitude of "discipline in the face of the enemy."
2. They are potentially open because, while purely instinctive or animal societies, they are "open to every kind of progress." (19) Later he is to introduce a third category: societies "on the way to becoming open."
(23) Nonetheless, it is not mere hypocrisy that makes contemporary nations (or "closed societies") speak as if they were generally faithful to and recognized their obligations toward humanity at large: if they did not do so, they would block the route to the progress of "another morality" which is "not derived from it" and which it "has every inducement to honor" (23,F.1001). Having begun with the insight that we derive our ideas of morality from society and having established there are two radically different concepts of society, the "closed" and the "open," Bergson proceeds to a discussion of two types of morality. However, it should be emphasized that he purports to be dealing with "facts" of our consciousness and not with abstract ideals. The evolution of the closedopen distinction is alleged to be in line with and ultimately to be based on the evolution of man as a biological species. Before one can proceed to a discussion of that "other" morality which is "not derived" from the first one, however, one needs to consider more fully what the author says about the "society" on which it is based. This society, called humanity, may not be understood as the result of a mere expansion of our experience of the closed society or nation.
For between the nation, however big, and humanity there lies the whole distance from the finite to the indefinite, from the closed to the open. We are fond of saying that the apprenticeship to civic virtue is served in the family, and that in the same way, from holding our country dear, we learn to love mankind. Our sympathies are supposed to broaden out in an unbroken possession, to expand while remaining identical, and to end by embracing all humanity. This is a priori reasoning, the result of a purely intellectualist conception of the soUl. (24)
Humanity in general," then, is the third and largest group to which we can "attach ourselves." In order to reach it, however, we cannot "expand" our original consciousness but must acquire a new one. The two sentiments, love of country and love of mankind, are so different, Bergson maintains, that the latter can only take root with the help of religion and philosophy, or faith and reason.
[I]t is only through God, in Godthat religion bids man to love mankind'; and likewise it is through reason alone that Reason in whose communion we are all partakers, that philosophers make us look at humanity in order to show us the 3. Actually, Bergson here uses le genre humain rather than his usual! 'humanite.
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pre-eminent dignity of the human being, the right of all to command respect. Neither in the one case nor in the other do we come to humanity by degrees, through the stages of the family and the nation. We must, in a single bound, be carried far beyond it, and, without having made it our goal, reach it by outstripping it. (25)
The "Open Morality"

Bergson is now prepared to pass on to a discussion of "another kind of obligation" greater than that originating in "social pressure." This is the obligation to the "open society"; it results in an "open morality." Using the "same method" as beforei.e., that of penetrating to the origin of a moralityBergson sets out in search of the source of open morality. Whereas before when he invited us to join him in proceeding from the starting point (our present moral consciousness) "downward" as it were into our basic instincts for survival, he now beckons us to follow him "upwards to the extreme limit" of our moral potential. Whereas primitive man showed us what we were like, the mystic saint or philosopher shows us what we could resemble:
In all times there have arisen exceptional men, incarnating this open morality. Before the saints of Christianity mankind had known the sages of Greece, the prophets of Israel, the Arahants of Buddhism, and others besides. It is to them that men have always turned for that complete morality which we had best call absolute morality. (25-26)
Here begins a series of contrasts between the closed or incomplete and the open or complete moralities: whereas the former is reducible to "impersonal formulae," the latter is "incarnate in a privileged person who becomes an example." We pass from the general acceptance of a law to a "common imitation of a model" (26). Whereas we can best understand the closed morality as an, undifferentiated block, whose particular commands often seem arbitrary and irrational, in the case of the open society we witness the reverse. By beginning with an abstract, intellectualist appreciation, say, of the Sermon on the Mount or the sayings of the prophets, we do not succeed in acting on them: rather only when we consider them and their counsels in their multiplicity and in relation to the unique personality of the originator does the open morality become a moving force in our lives by working on our wills (27). It would be inadequate to describe the new morality as based on the "love of humanity," for humanity if conceived as a mere expansion
THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER of the family and nation, is hopelessly abstract. On the contrary, it is through recognizing in the mystic saint, prophet, or philosopher the prototype of what each of us could become that we grow to love the like potential in every other person. Our souls are flooded with emotion from the encounterwhether in person or through his teachings left to posteritywith such a rare individual (28-29). The spiritual individual of the open morality is altogether different from the robot of the closed morality, however. In the closed morality the "individual" (so-called) moves about in the circle of society: his psyche is concerned only with self-preservation, which means that, just as a part of it desires to escape society's demands, another part recognizes that it draws strength and vitality from society just as a cell does from an organism. The ultimate "utilitarianism" of the closed morality is its counsel that even apparent sacrifices eventually redound to the individual's own interest. In the case of the "open soul," [1' ame ouverte (Fr. 1006)] all calculation is thrown to the winds. Such a soul "embraces all humanity" as well as "animals, plants...and all nature." None of these things is capable of defining that soul, however, for its form is independent of its content. "We have just filled it; we could as easily empty it again. 'Charity' would persist in him who possesses 'charity' though there be no other living creature on earth." (30). Bergson is at pains to distinguish the love (or charity) which is infinite in its contentthe love which forms the "open soul"from those forms of love which are dependent on their content such as love of family or country. He grants that it is much easier for us to understand the closed morality, because of its fixed nature: its "duties are a matter of current practice,...have a clear precise formula, and it is therefore easy for us, grasping them where they are entirely visible, and then going down to the roots, to discover the social requirements from which they sprang." By contrast, the "other half" of our morality "expresses a certain emotional state" and is the result of yielding to an "attraction" rather than a "pressure" (41). Today the two moralities, the closed and the open, are intermingled and may not be found in their pure state. The closed morality has lent the open morality "something of its imperative character," while the open morality has leavened the closed so that it is "less strictly social, more broadly human" (41). Thus, "civilized" morality is a mixture of the closed and the open; or better, it is a "morality on the way to becoming open." The "maxims" of the second, or open morality,
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do not work singly, like those of the first: as soon as one of them, ceasing to be abstract, becomes filled with significance and acquires the capacity to act, the others tend to do the same: at last they all fuse in the warm emotion which left them behind long ago, and in the men, now come to life again, who experienced it. (42)
Whereas the closed morality is impersonal, the open morality is per-
sonal:
Founders and reformers of religion, mystics and saints, obscure heroes of the moral life whom we have met on our way...they are all there: inspired by their example, we follow them, as if we were joining an army of conquerors. They are indeed conquerors: they have broken down natural resistance and raised humanity to a new destiny. (42)
Although Bergson characterizes the open morality as "triumphing" over nature, in a deeper sense it too is responding to a drive or push by that very same nature acting indirectly rather than directly:
[I] f we went down to the roots of nature itself we should perhaps find that the same force which manifests itself directly, rotating on its own axis, in the human species, once constituted, also acts later and indirectly, through the medium of privileged persons, in order to drive humanity forward. (42)
If we examine in their "pure" states (in which we today, however, almost never find them), we shall observe the following contrasts between the two moralities (or the two halves of the same morality):
Closed morality Based on pressure Aims at self-preservation Static, immobile Gives feeling of pleasure, well being Derived from society Applies to one's fellow-citizens Repose Open Morality Based on aspiration Aims at fuller life Dynamic, progressive Gives feeling of joy Derived from God Applies to all men and all life Movement
Contact with the Elan Vital

At this point Bergson introduces a symbol with which readers of his earlier books, and especially Creative Evolution (1911), will be familiar: l'elan vital, variously translated as "vital impulse," "impetus of life," or the like. (Among the many meanings of elan are
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"start, spring, flight, glow, soaring, burst, outburst, transport.' ' 4 It has always been from the "generative principle of the human species" (le principe generateur de I ' espece humaine) that one derives the "strength to love mankind" (46,Fr.1021). Those leaders of mankind who have by a sudden break with the closed morality of defensiveness and war "broken down the gates of the city" have "placed themselves again in the current of the vital impulse (L 'elan vital)" so that it might continue its work of "creative evolution" (49, Fr. 1023). "There is a genius of the will as there is a genius of the mind." "[B]etween the first [or closed] morality and the second [or open] morality lies the whole distance between repose and movement." The elan resumes its movement again, for the open morality "is a forward thrust, a demand for movement; it 'is the very essence of mobility." (50). The mobile nature of the open morality means that it is all the more difficult to express it in final propositional form:
For our intelligence and our language deal...with things; they are less at home in representing transitions or progress. The morality of the Gospels is essentially that of the open soul: are we not justified in pointing out that it borders upon paradox, and even upon contradiction in its more definite admonitions? (50)
Thus, "turn the other cheek" makes a mockery of justice, and giving to the poor all we possess would make the rich burdened with the same temptations as we were formerly. Yet, the "intent of these maxims" is all-important. That intent is to "create a certain disposition of the soul." The rich man is to become poor "in spirit" and the just man should be beyond requiring restitution so far as his own soul's health is concerned. Bergson maintains that the resumption of the movement of the elan toward the creation of a complete humanity and a complete morality takes place decisively only with the Gospels. Stoicism, which might have provided for such resumption was still bound by the old static morality:
The Stoics proclaimed themselves citizens of the world, and added that all men were brothers, having come from the same God...If...[the Stoics] did not succeed in drawing humanity after them, it is because Stoicism is essentially a philosophy. (52)
4. John Joseph Kelly, Bergson's Mysticism (Fribourg, St. Paul's Press, 1954), p. 24,
n. 1.
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With Socrates, we are closer to the origin of the open morality. This is because he was greater than any system or than any of the rational arguments which Plato put in his mouth. Socrates' mission "is of a religious and mystic order...his teaching, so perfectly rational, hinges on something that seems to transcend pure reason" (53). Had he not seen it as his first mission to overcome the "moral empiricism" of his time and the "incoherences" of Athenian democracyhad he not largely refused the Oriental, intuitive, lyrical side of his nature in favor of the Greek, rational, dialectical sidehe very possibly would have been the great teacher of the West rather than Jesus. For a time it was "Socrates against Jesus" as Christians and Neo-Platonists battled it out for supremacy (54-55). Despite all the credit he gives Socrates and other ancient teachers for their contributions to the development of the open morality, Bergson insists that by itself Greek philosophy would never have advanced beyond the "half-virtue" of contemplative detachment. Ancient philosophy saw brilliantly the evanescent character of bodily, material pleasures and the greater enduringness of intellectual ones; it could lead men from the infra-intellectual to the intellectual, but not to the supra-intellectual realm. Much as he is to be praised, Socrates is not an open soul as much as a soul "in the process of opening" (55). In the end, Greek philosophy is elitist; its universalist implications become clear only from hindsight through the lenses of Christianity. A purely intellectualist philosophy cannot succeed in explaining "how a moral motive can have a hold upon the soul of men" (57). Behind each moral motive there are two forces, one "social" and the other "supra-social," which endow it with strength. Thus, if we say that we act from "self-respect," or from the "dignity of man" we have further to inquire of the source of this dignity and respect. The "higher" self to which the average personality defers is the "social self." We feel the social pressure of our group or country. However, beyond this social pressure which is experienced as impersonal is the attraction of the open society, an attraction which is quintessentially personal.
...the great moral figures that have made their mark in history join hands across the centuries, above our human cities; they unite into a divine city which they bid us to enter. We may not hear their voices distinctly... [but] something answers from the depths of our soul; from the real society in which we live we betake ourselves in thought to this ideal society; to this ideal society we bow down when we reverence the dignity of man within us, when we declare that we act from selfrespect. (59)
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Why do we obey the commands of reason? It is not enough to speak of reason abstractly: as, for example, when we say that "reason constitutes the dignity of man" and the like. Rather, it is because that behind reason there are the
men who have made mankind divine, and who have thus stamped a divine character on reason, which is the essential attribute of man. It is these men who draw us to an ideal society, while we yield to the pressure of the real one. (60)
Here the open society becomes in effect, the "true city," the City of God, of Augustine. In part, at least, the resemblance is there; but in using the terms "real" and "ideal" society, he is using a language different from that of Augustine. The latter would call the City of God the truly "real" society. Bergson's Theory of Moral ObligationRecapitulation The final section of the opening chapter on "Moral Obligation" is devoted to a recapitulation of the book's main thesis: viz, that there are two sources of morality, and that it is inadequate to say that moral obligation is a dictate of pure "reason." Behind the "rationality" of a moral imperative, there is either the habit making for social discipline (a command of the "closed morality") or the aspiration to emulate the example of a "mystic hero" (the appeal of the "open morality"). Philosophers from Plato to Kant have failed to adumbrate the key features of moral obligation, Bergson insists, and he writes with the excitement of someone who claims to be, in the words of Kant applied to Rousseau, the "Newton of the moral world." Bergson is well aware that his method has the obvious drawback of seeming simplistic when applied to the actual human conditions where we find neither the pure animality of the closed society nor the quasidivinity of the open society. Nonetheless, he insists, it is necessary to use his method of disentangling sources that have become intermingled if we are rightly to comprehend the subject of moral obligation. II. STATIC RELIGION The second great theme of the Two Sources is religion. Although man has been defined ever since the Greeks as a "rational animal," he could with at least equal justification be called a "religious animal":
We find in the past, we could find today, human societies with neither science nor art nor philosophy. But there has never been a society without religion. (92)
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Religion, we like to say, is a product of a human faculty called "imagination." This observation helps us little, however, because science, art, and philosophy are also inconceivable without imagination. With greater precision we might say that religion is the product of the act of fabulation (Fr. 1066, 1067), a word which the English translator renders as "myth-making." In its "original and elementary form" the myth-making faculty both "plays a social role" and "brings added strength to the individual." To illustrate how it works for the individual, Bergson gives an example from the contemporary psychic research, concerning a lady whose instinctive or "somnambulistic self" prevented her from plunging to her death down an elevator shaft: the gate to the elevator shaft was open as if the elevator was there. Instead, unknown to her, it was out of order and on another floor. Just as she was about to fling herself through the gate down the gaping void of the elevator shaft, she experienced a life-saving hallucination: it was as if the elevator man appeared and pushed her backwards onto the landing (110). Had the lady followed only her intelligence (which correctly reasoned that if the gate on her landing were open the elevator was there) she could have met her death. Instead, the "instinctive or somnambulistic self which underlies the reasoning personality...had seen the danger...inducing in a flash the fictitious, hallucinatory perception" best fitted to "evoke and explain the apparently unjustified movement" (110). Analogously, in primitive and rudimentary societies, a "penumbra" of instinct survives in a being otherwise ruled by intelligence to prevent the individual from taking the destructive course of egoism counselled by unbridled intelligence. The myth-making function of the mind easily embroiders upon the material it is given by nature, and we witness, in the name of religion, the emergence of countless absurdities and monstrosities. To allay the fear of death, the idea of a deathless "spirit" or "shade" is called forth. From there people will devise ways of winning over the spirits and seeking their aid.
Once started on this road, there is hardly any absurdity into which intelligence may not stumble. The myth-making function works well enough by itself alone: what will it not do when it is spurred on by fear and necessity! To avert a danger or secure a favor the living are ready to offer anything they fancy the dead man may want. They will go so far as the cutting off of heads, if it may be pleasing in his sight. (125-126)
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Evil and monstrous actions such as head-hunting and human sacrifice are probably later refinements of primitive man, however. "The true primitives were probably more reasonable..." (126). Over time, through the "double effect of repetition and exaggeration and irrational passes into the realm of the absurd, and the strange into the realm of the monstrous" (127). Magic, Religion, and Science Continuing his reconstruction of the primitive consciousness, Bergson hypothesizes that "primitive intelligence divides its experience into two separate parts.":
There is, on the one side, that which obeys the action of the hand or the tool, that which can be foreseen and relied on: this part of the universe is conceived physically, until such time as it is conceived mathematically; it appears as a concentration of causes and effects...; we need only look at what intelligence does in order to know what it implicitly thinks. Then, on the other hand, there is that part of experience upon which homo faber feels he has entirely lost his grip. This part is treated no longer physically, but morally. Since we can exert no power over it, we hope it will exert some power in our behalf. (153)
Within the second, or unknown part of experience on which "homo faber feels he has entirely lost his grip," there is room for the mythmaking function of our mind:
For the pressure of instinct has given rise, within intelligence, to that form of imagination which is the myth-making function. Myth-making has but to follow its own course in order to fashion...gods that assume more and more exalted form than those of mythology, or deities even more degraded, such as mere spirits or even forces which retain only one property from their psychological origin, that of not being purely mechanical, and of...bending to our will. The first and second directions are those of religion, the third that of magic. (154)
Magic, then, is that product of the myth-making function of the mind which claims to make "non-mechanical" forces of nature comply with our wishes. It is a mechanism of control through the knowledge of secret forces of nature. The Melanesian mana, the orenda of the Iroquois Indians, the wakanda of the Sioux are all examples of magic forces that were believed to permeate nature (154). Throughout his analysis of "static" religionand magic is treated as a manifestation or quasi-perversion of such a religionBergson emphasizes the primacy of the practical or utilitarian over the theoretical. "Before any man can philosophize he must live," he insists. "Scholars and philosophers" he declares
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are too much inclined to believe that the mind works in all men as with them, for the sheer love of thinking. The truth is that the mind aims at action, and that, if there really is any philosophy to be found in the uncivilized man, it is certainly in action rather than in thought...(154-155)
In other words; the magical action came first and then the symbol (mana, orenda or whatever) to designate the force in nature "impregnated with humanity," which resulted in the change in the outside worldover and beyond the mechanical, physical laws of its operationdesired. Magic enabled man to "extend his actions further than physical laws permitted" (155). The origin of a practice such as voodoo is in the desire to punish an enemy who is absent but who can be impersonated by a puppet or dummy (158) just as the sorcerer's ritual rain dance originates as a response to the very real practical problem of drought (159). Magic, then, resolves itself into two elements:
the desire to act on a thing, even on that which is out of reach, and the idea that things are charged, or can be charged, with what we should call human fluid. We must revert to the first point to draw the comparision between magic and science, and to the second to show the connection of magic and religion. (159)
Magic is the "reverse of science" (161). Science "measures and calculates with a view to anticipation and action. It first supposes, then verifies, that the universe is governed by mathematical laws" (159). Science "demands a twofold effort, that of a few men to find some new thing and that of all the others to adopt it and-adapt themselves to it" (160). Bergson continues significantly:
A society may be called civilized when you find in it such a power to lead and willingness to be led....What was lacking among the uncivilized was probably not the exceptional man...but the chance for such a man to show his superiority and the readiness of other men to follow him. (160-161)
What sets a society on the "road to civilization"? Perhaps the "menace of extermination, such as that created by the discovery of a new weapon by an enemy tribe" (161). Societies which are not challenged and for whom life is too easy become "contaminated by the products of their own laziness"i.e., by magic (161).
For magic is the reverse of science. So long as the inertia of the environment does not cause it to proliferate, it has its function to perform. It temporarily calms the uneasiness of an intelligence whose form exceeds its content, which is vaguely aware of its ignorance and realizes the danger of it, which divines, outside the
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very small circle in which action is sure of its effect, where the immediate future is predictable and within which therefore science already prevails, a vast area of the unpredictable such as may well discourage action. (161)
Magic is separated from science by the "whole distance between wishing and willing. Far from paving the way for science...it has been the greatest obstacle against which methodical knowledge has had to contend" (162). "Civilized man" is distinguished from "non-civilized man" by his eagerness to encroach, through science, on "that magic which was occupying the rest of the field." By contrast, non-civilized man, "disdaining effort" conceals "incipient science" and replaces it with magic to the greatest extent possible. What, in summary, is Bergson's argument regarding "static religion"? It is that this religion which appeared in varying forms over millennia, is grounded on man's primal experience of the world beyond the control of his intelligence as composed of "semi-personal powers" or "efficient presences." (185) This experience itself posited a "fundamental demand of life" which in turn called forth the "myth-making faculty." The myth-making function of the mind was called forth as a necessity to balance the narrowness of man's "toolcontriving intelligence." (186-187) Static religion, which originated as a practical need of life (man must live before he can philosophize, Bergson is fond of repeating) then runs away with itself and piles absurdity upon absurdity, even to the point of sanctioning the torture and sacrifice of humans to appease the avenging gods. One of Bergson's objectives in this chapter is to explain how static religion, with its countless monstrosities and absurdities, could have appealed to an intelligent being. This he does as follows:
Man is the only animal whose actions are uncertain....He is alone in realizing that he is subject to illness, alone in knowing that he must die...But this is not saying enough. Of all the creatures that live in society, man alone can swerve from the social line by giving way to selfish preoccupations when the common good is at stake; in all other societies the interests of the individual are inexorably coordinate with and subordinate to the general interest. This twofold shortcoming in man is the price paid for intelligence. (193-194)
Nature, which ordained intelligence, also took the precaution that the condition of order, disturbed in the above respect by intelligence, should be re-established by the myth-making function. The role of this function fabulatrice, which "belongs to intelligence" but which is not the same as intelligence, is to
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elaborate that religion we have been dealing with up to now, that which we call static, and of which we should say that it was natural religion, if the term were not used [presumably in the Eighteenth Century Englightenment] in another sense. We have then only to sum up what we have said to define this religion in clear terms. It is a defensive reaction of nature against what might be depressing for the individual and dissolvent for society, in the exercise of intelligence. (194) (Emphasis added)
The particular aim of static or "natural" religion in the evolution of mankind has been to "preserve" and "tighten" the traditional bond which holds together the members of a given society and which makes it possible for each of them to "defend the group against other groups and to set it above everything." Religion in this primal sense has the following characteristics: it is common to the members of a group it associates them intimately with each other in rites and ceremonies it distinguishes the group from other groups it guarantees the success of the common enterprise, and [it] is an assurance against the common danger. (195-196) Static religion will appear absurd and illogical if we look at it from some abstract point of view. If we "place man back in nature as a whole," however, we will perceive intelligence in need of being balanced by something akin to instinct that will help man to recover the serenity and tranquility enjoyed by other created things. This is the function of religion:
Unrest and myth-making counteract and nullify each other. In the eyes of a god, looking down from above, the whole would appear indivisible, like the perfect confluence of flowers unfolding to the spring. (197)'
III. DYNAMIC RELIGION Given the centrality of the chapter on "Dynamic Religion" to
5. In his exposition of static religion's "cunning of reason"to use Hegel's termBergson even claims to show the "rationality" of human sacrifice. It was doubtless an offering made to turn away the wrath or to buy the favor of a god. "If so, the greater the cost and the more valuable the thing sacrificed, the more acceptable it was likely to be." In addition, it took place in the context of a meal in which the god and his worshippers were supposed to partake in common. Finally, there was the element of blood. "As the principle of life, it gave the god strength, and enabled him the better to help man..." (191-192)
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Bergson's argument, it is surprising that it is barely more than half the length of the chapter on "Static Religion." (The former is 56 pages whereas the latter is 105 pages.) Indeed, the chapter consists primarily of a rather sketchy treatment of mysticism (and even here only Christian mysticism is dealt with fully). The result is to leave most of the burden of explaining Bergson's theory of the open society to the final chapter. More than anywhere else in the book, in this chapter the reader is made aware of the extent to which Bergson's moral, social, and political reflections rest on his biology as expounded in his book Creative Evolution. It is his contention that the evidence of biology and mysticism intersect with and confirm each other, with mysticism enabling him to go beyond the conclusions of his much earlier book Creative Evolution in dealing with fundamental philosophical questions. We left man in the possession of static religion, or natural religion, which is "that element which, in beings endowed with reason, is called upon to make good any deficiency of attachment to life." (199) Intelligence itself caused man anxiety, for as an "intelligent being" man was not "living in the present alone; there can be no reflection without foreknowledge, no foreknowledge without inquietude, no inquietude without a momentary slackening of the attachment to life." "Above all, there is no humanity without society, and society demands of the individual an abnegation which the insect, in its automation, carries to the point of an utter obliviousness of self....A new species coming on to the scene brings with it...all the elements that impart life to it. (199)
Thus, along with intelligence man was equipped with the function fabulacitrice, or myth-making function, which "elaborates religions" 6 (presumably "static" religions). The "office" and "significance" of static religion, then, is to make up for any deficiency, caused by the possession of intelligence, of attachment to life. There is another way out, however, for that mind which, having perceived that man is the "purpose of the entire process of evolution" (200), aspires to establish contact with the elan vital itself. This contact cannot be established through intelligence, for intelligence
6. Fr. 1154. The English text has "contrives the pattern of religions" for elabore les
religions.
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would be more likely to proceed in the opposite direction; it was provided for a definite object [tool-making], and when it attempts speculation on a higher plane, it enables us, at the most, to conceive possibilities, it does not attain any results. But we know that all around intelligence there lingers still a fringe of intuition, vague and evanescent. Can we not fasten upon it, intensify it, and above all, consummate it in action, for it has become pure contemplation only through a weakening in its principle, and if we may put it so, by an abstraction practiced on itself? (201)
Here we see the extraordinary emphasis Bergson placed on action: the mystical impulse is conceived of in contemplative fashion, "only through a weakening in its principle" and by an "abstraction practiced on itself." What is to be noted in this hypothetical account of the genesis of "dynamic" religion is that
A soul strong enough, noble enough to make this effort would not stop to ask whether the principle with which it is now in touch [i.e., the elan vital] is the transcendent cause of all things or merely its earthly delegate [i.e., whether it is God or a force originating in God]. It would be content to feel itself, pervaded, through retaining its own personality, by a being immeasurably mightier than itself, just as iron is pervaded by the fire which makes it glow. Its attachment to life would henceforth be its inseparability from this principle, joy in joy, love of that which is all love. (201)
Thus we witness the anomaly of two nations at war, each declaring that it has God on its side, each thinking that it is invoking the God of mysticism, the "God common to all mankind." In reality, they are invoking the "natural god of paganism," i.e., god of the static religion. Despite the absurdity of this situation, we should not overlook the great potential influence of the mystical, universal spirit and the fact that its existence has created a new epoch in human history. Needless to say, if a true version of the mystic God could be attained by all men it would "mean the immediate abolition of war" (204).
From the Mysteries to Mysticism
Leading up to the "indivisible act by which dynamic religion is posited" are various events which in retrospect appear as preparatory stages. Nonetheless, Bergson says, the final achievement of dynamic religion was marked by a saut brusque or "sudden leap" (Fr. 1159,
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205). He proceeds to discuss the pagan mystery religions (they contributed the Dionysian element of religious enthusiasm, in contrast to the "serenity of the gods upon Olympus") (207). It is probably to the mystery cults (Orphism, Pythagoreanism, etc.) that we owe the quality of Greek philosophy that transcends logic and dialectic; indeed "at the origin of this great movement [Platonic philosophy] there was an impulsion or a shock which was not of a philosophic nature" (208). Plotinus, who is the culmination of the philosophical movement begun by Socrates and Plato, was "unquestionably" a mystic. What, then, is "complete mysticism" and did Hellenic philosophy achieve it?
In our eyes, the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a contact, consequently of a partial coincidence, with the creative effort which life manifests. This effort is of God, if it is not God himself. The great mystic is...an individual being, capable of transcending the limitations imposed on the species by its material nature [!this sounds like gnostic second-reality language], thus continuing and extending [l] the divine action. Such is our definition. (209)
Using such an exalted definition, Bergson, unsurprisingly, finds Plotinus to have flunked the test:
He [Plotinus] went as far as ecstasy, a state in which the soul feels itself...in the presence of God, being irradiated with His light; he did not...reach the point where, as contemplation is engulfed in action, the human will becomes one with the divine will. (210, emphasis added)
What draws the Bergsonian condemnation, it turns out unsurprisingly, is Plotinus' statement (in Enneads viii, 4) that "action is a weakening of contemplation." Here "Greek intellectualism" won out over genuine or complete mysticism (210). Similarly deficiencies are discovered in non-Western speculation, whether we have in mind Indian, Persian, or Chinese religious thought (210,ff.). The "Hindu soul" strove to make the "leap" beyond the religion of nature and the city in two different ways. One was through taking soma, the drug that produced a "divine rapture, somewhat like that which the devotees of Dionysos sought in wine," and practicing yoga, a "set of practices designed to inhibit all sensation, to dull mental activity, in a word to induce states similar to hypnosis" (212). Another was through speculation, for Hinduism (and Bergson includes "Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism" under this category) was "both a philosophy and a religion" (210-211). Hindu thought led neither to a full-fledged philosophy nor a complete mysticism. It was not a philosophy because it did not lead to
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knowledge capable of unlimited development. Knowledge for it was a means rather than an end, the end being to escape from the unremitting cruelty of life. Deliverance from the cycle of birth and death (and therefore, suffering) could be won only by a renunciation which amounted to "absorption in the whole as well as in self." Even Buddhism, which gave a "new turn to Brahmanism,"
did not modify it in essentials. It made it...into something more elaborate. Till then human experience had shown indeed that life meant suffering; the Buddha worked back to the cause of this suffering; he found it in desire of every kind, in the craving for life. Thus the road to deliverance could be more accurately traced... [In Buddhism] the state toward which...the soul [is guided]...is beyond joy and pain, beyond consciousness. It is by a sense of stages, and by a whole system of mystical discipline, that it leads to Nirvana, to the abolition of desire during life and of Karma after death. We must not forget that the origin of the Buddha's mission lies in the illumination that came to him in his early youth. Everything in Buddhism which can be put into words can doubtless be considered as a philosophy; but the essential is the final revelation, transcending both reason and speech. (213-214; emphasis added)
This "final revelation" which is the "essential" of Buddhism, is "an experience closely resembling ecstasy"; it is "an effort at oneness with the creative impetus [PeIan createur]." Thus, we should not hesitate to see Buddhism as a kind of mysticism (214; Fr. 1166). It is, however, an incomplete form of mysticism. A complete form would be "action, creation, love" (214). While Buddhism did not ignore charity, it lacked "warmth and glow" [chaleur] in its recommendations and examples. It alsoheresy of heresies"did not believe in the efficacy of human action."
It had no faith in such action. And faith alone can grow to power to move mountains. A complete mysticism would have reached this point. It is perhaps to be met with in India, but much later. That enthusiastic charity, that mysticism comparable to the mysticism of Christianity, we find in a Ramakrishna or a Vivekananda....But Christianity...had come into the world in the interval. Its influence on India...was superficial enough, but to the soul that is predisposed a mere hint, the slightest token is enough. But let us suppose even that in the direct
action of Christianity, as a dogma, has been practically nil in India. Since it has i mpregnated the whole of Western civilization, one breathes it, like a perfume, in everything which this civilization brings in its wake. Industrialism itself...springs indirectly from it. (214-215, emphasis added.)
In this remarkable blending of mysticism, Christianity, and industrialism, Bergson finds the explanation for the unleashing of the burning, active complete mysticism of Ramakrishna and Vivekanan-
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da. "This burning, active mysticism could never have been kindled when the Hindu felt he was crushed by nature as when no human intervention was of any avail." It was this "pessimism" this "helplessness" in the face of famine and other forms of disaster, which "prevented India from carrying her mysticism to its full conclusion, since complete mysticism is action" (215). The Gospel According to Bergson: Christianity as "Activist Mysticism" It is at this point that the quite literal meaning of "dynamic" in the characteristics of Christianity as a, or rather the, dynamic religion becomes clear in Bergson's teaching. The formula he employs is as follows: Christianity = "activist mysticism" = industrialism = the global or "open" society. That he never seriously questioned this equation either as a whole or in its parts is remarkable. Bergson's interpretation of Christianity completely ignores its whole contemplative dimension, the emphasis of Eastern theology, and numerous other problems such as the Reformation and the rise of capitalism, just as his characterization of industrialism fails even to consider the morally ambiguous side-effects of the industrialization process on both human institutions and the natural environment. The transition from mysticism to mechanism is accomplished with breathtaking ease. It was pessimism, he remarked, which "prevented India from carrying her mysticism to its full conclusion, since complete mysticism is action."
But then, with the advent of machines which increased the yield of the land, and above all moved the products from place to place, with the advent also of the political and social organizations which proved experimentally that the mass of the people was not doomed...to a life of grinding labor and bitter poverty, deliverance became possible in an entirely new sense; the mystical impulse...was no longer going to be stopped short by the impossibility of acting; it was no longer to be driven back into doctrines of renunciation or the systematic practice
of ecstasy; instead of turning inwards and closing, the soul could open wide its gates to a universal love. (215, emphasis added)
In the above quotation, openness is no longer conceived as inwardseeing of divine Being with the eye of the mind; such inward-seeing instead is viewed as a hindrance, as a form of closure. Bergson's emphasis on activism, on external action on the world is so powerful here that we might conclude that he is denying the contemplative moment altogether did we not know that his idea of complete mysticism in-
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cludes both a turning away from the world and its prioritiesthe priorities of "closed" or "static" religionand a turning back to the world again to act out of universal compassion and love. Incomplete mysticism is a half-turn from the world, whereas complete or activist mysticism is thought of as a full-turn back to the world again. Because of his extreme emphasis on activism and industrialism, however, he has scarcely guarded against the danger of the cooptation by a worldly attitude of the original mystical impulse and of an eclipse of openness as an experience of world-transcendent Being in favor of a worldimmanent reality of Becoming. That mysticism and Christianity are both in danger of being coopted by an essentially secular activismhowever much against Bergson's intentions is not fully clear from the passagesis apparent from the passages that follow those we have just cited. The "inventions" and "organizations" which make possible the liquidation of age-old famine in India and elsewhere
are essentially Western; it is they who [sic] in this case [i.e., in India] have enabled mysticism to develop to its fullest extent and reach its goal. We may therefore conclude that neither in Greece nor in ancient India was there complete mysticism, in the one case [Greece] because the impetus was not strong enough, in the other case [India] because it was thwarted by material conditions or by too narrow an intellectual frame. It was its [i.e., complete mysticism's] appearance at a given moment that enables us to follow in retrospect its preparatory phases, just as the volcano, bursting into activity, explains a long series of earthquakes in the past. (215-216)
The "volcano" of activist mysticism, of course, turns out to be Christianity. Bergson's conception of "Christianity" is vague. On the one hand, it appears to be synonymous with complete mysticism in which case non-mystical "Christians" would be imposters; on the other hand, Christianity seems to have been a religion of which mysticism is a partthe leaven or spark as it wereand which in its entirety as a sociological phenomenon is a "mixture" of mysticism and static religion (ecclesiastical organization, dogma, etc.). In any event, it is the "great Christian mystics" alone who represent complete mysticism. It is true that "most of them passed through states" similar to those of the incomplete mystics of ancient Greece and India.
But they merely passed through them: bracing themselves...for an entirely new effort, they burst a dam; they were then swept back into a vast current of life; from their increased vitality there radiated an extraordinary energy, daring,
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power of conception and realization. Just think of what was accomplished in the field of action by a St. Paul, a St. Teresa, a St. Catherine of Siena, a St. Francis, a Joan of Arc, and how many others besides! (216)
Astonishingly, Bergson throws out this eclectic list as if it were selfevident why each and all of them should be considered mystics. To be fair to Bergson, however, he does refer to several books on mysticism in a footnote which he claims either support or were influenced by his own treatment of mysticism; the books, by Henri Delacroix and Evelyn Underhill are cited because they "call attention to the essentially active element of the great mystics" (212, no. 2). It is surprising that Bergson ignores the later editions of Underhill's now classic work on Mysticism where she made very clear the primarily contemplative emphasis of mysticism. In the 1926 edition, for example, Underhill declared mysticism to be "wholly transcendent and spiritual" rather than aiming at "rearranging or improving anything in the visible universe.'" It is strange that in his (quite short) list of authorities on mysticism, he did not cite William James' great chapter on mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908). This is all the more strange because in the Two Sources itself (p. 143), Bergson had quoted extensively from another work of James, whose work he admired and whom he declared to be "a master of psychological science." Perhaps his reticence may be explained in part by the fact that James had listed "passivity" along with "ineffability," "noetic quality," and "transiency," as a key characteristic of mysticism. Far from feeling called upon to act in the world (as a result of the mystical experience per se), the mystic, says James, testifies to a suspension of his or her own will, "as if he or she were grasped or held by a superior power," during the experience itself (James, op. cit., p. 382). Bergson scornfully rejects the classification of the great mystics as mentally deranged. Instead, he discovers "an exceptional, deeprooted mental healthiness, which...is expressed in the bent for action, the faculty of adapting and re-adapting to circumstances" and other qualities making for "supreme good sense" in the ordinary meaning of the term as understood by a man of action (217). Delusions of grandeur and hallucinations are parodies of mysticism. The great mystics have regarded their own "ecstasies, visions, raptures" as of
7. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (New York, Dutton, 1926; Meridian Book, 1960), p. 81.
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"secondary importance, as wayside incidents; they had to go beyond them...to reach the goal, which was identification of the human will with the divine will" (218, emphasis added). (It is in such language as this that Bergson comes close to representing the gnostic "godded man"; in general, he seems quite ignorant of gnosticism as a current of thought and of the need to distinguish mysticism from gnosticism.) Having established that our mystics are in robust phychic health, Bergson proceeds to give a clinical account of what happens to the mystic psyche at the level proper to its genius:
Shaken to its depths, by the current which is about to sweep it forward [presumably, 1 9 elan vital], the soul ceases to revolve round itself and escapes for a moment from the law which demands that the species and the individual should condition one another. It stops, as though to listen to a voice calling. Then it lets itself go, straight onward. It does not directly perceive the force that moves it, but it feels an indefinable presence or divines it through a symbolic vision. Then comes a boundless joy, an all-absorbing ecstasy or an enthralling rapture: God is there, and the soul is in God. Mystery is no more. Problems vanish, darkness is dispelled; everything is flooded with light. (219)
Bergson's account of the mystic visio Dei, although in a sense moving, is strangely abstract. No specific examples are given from the rich literature available; neither the Cloud of Unknowing by the anonymous Fourteenth Century English author nor the work of St. John of the Cross is cited. Nonetheless, Bergson does proceed to an account of what John had called the "dark night of the soul." Though the soul becomes "in thought and feeling, absorbed in God, something of it remains outside; that something is the will," from which the soul's "action" would proceed.
Its life, then is not yet divine. The soul is aware of this, and hence its vague disquietude, hence the agitation in repose of what we call complete mysticism: it means that the impetus [I 'elan] has acquired the momentum to go further...that there is, besides [seeing and feeling, both affected by the ecstasy], the will, which itself has to find its way back to God. When this agitation has grown [and]...the ecstasy has died out, the soul finds itself alone again...Accustomed for a time to a dazzling light, it is now left blindly groping in the gloom. It does not realize the profound metamorphosis which is going on obscurely within it. It feels it has lost much; it does not yet know that this was in order to gain all. Such is the "darkest night" of which the great mystics have spoken, and which is...the most significant thing...in Christian mysticism. (219-220)
At this point, significantly, Bergson resorts to a technological analogy. The soul of the mystic is compared to an instrument of tempered steel. The final phase of the experience of a great mystic is described as follows:
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Let us confine ourselves to suggesting that a machine of wonderfully tempered steel...[had become] conscious of itself as it was being put together. Its parts being one by one subjected to the severest tests...it would have a feeling of...pain all over...The mystic soul yearns to become that instrument. It throws off anything in its substance that is not pure enough, not flexible and strong enough, to be turned to some use by God. Although it had sensed the presence of God,...had thought it beheld God in a symbolic vision,...had even been united to Him in its ecstasy...none of this rapture was lasting, because it was mere contemplation; action [at first] threw the soul back upon itself and thus divorced it from God. Now it is God who is acting through the soul, in the soul; the union is total, therefore final. (220) (Emphasis added(
From this point on, for the soul of the great mystic, now wedded to activism in the service of God, there is a "superabundance of life. There is a boundless impetus. There is an irresistible impulse which hurls it into vast enterprises." Merely contemplative visions are "left far behind: the divinity could not manifest itself from without to a soul henceforth replete with its essence" (221). In "divine humility," the mystic experiences himself as the prototype of a new humanity. He is now the "agent" of God to proclaim a newly perceived reality, God's love for all men. At this point, Bergson introduces the practical question: can mysticism succeed in transforming humanity, in resuming the creative effort of life with the end of creating a "divine humanity" animated with the love of God for mankind? "If possible at all," he writes, "it can only be by using simultaneously or successively two very different methods," viz., "mechanics" and mysticism itself. The "mechanical" methoddiscusses at greater length in the final chapter
would consist...in intensifying the...work [of instrumental intelligence] to such an extent...that the simple tool would give place to a vast system of machinery such as might set human activity at liberty, this liberation being, moreover,
stabilized by a political and social organization which would ensure the application of the mechanism to its true object. (224, emphasis added)
One only wishes that Bergson had expressed himself more definitely about the obscure "political and social organization" that would insure the application of this "vast system of machinery" to its "true object." Presumably, (for we know that Bergson was an enthusiast for the League of Nations) he is referring to some form of world government. True, Bergson concedes, such a solution would open a Pandora's box of troubles; there is the ultimate danger that
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"mechanism...might turn against mysticism." This, however, is a risk that should be taken. There is in nature some kind of law of recompense, apparently, by which an "activity of a superior kind" (i.e., mysticism) will at first have to call forth one of a lower order (mechanics) even at the cost of having the lower activity try to monopolize the room. The superior activity "will profit by this, provided it has been able to survive; its turn will come again, and it will then benefit by everything which has been done without its aid, which has been energetically developed in strict opposition to it" (225). In the meantime, while mechanics is pursuing its anti-mystical coure, the "mystic impetus" would be kept alive in a
tiny handful of privileged souls which together would form a spiritual society; societies of this kind might multiply; each one...would give birth to one or several others; thus the impetus would be preserved and continued until such
time as a profound change in the material conditions imposed on humanity by nature should permit, in spiritual matters, of a radical transformation. (225, emphasis added)
As suggested in the chapter on "Dynamic Religion," Bergson insists that there is a vital link between the "mysticism of the West" and the West's "industrial civilization." At least at its moment of origin, industrialization was a moment of openness, of progress, of mobility, as compared to the closed static society. For a long time indeed, it was thought that modern industry would bring happiness (bonheur) to mankind. (280, Fr. 1223) Today, on the other hand, all the ills from which we suffer are attributed to technology. "An irresistible force" seems to draw humanity more and more violently "towards the satisfaction of its basest desires." Let us, however, return to the "impulsion" or impetus at its origin. A "slight deviation" at the beginning [of industrialization] may have been enough to produce a "wider and wider divergence between the point aimed at and the object reached." If that be so, "we should not concern ourselves so much with the divergence" as with the impetus. Indeed, perhaps humanity has "already prepared the means of rectifying its course, and may be "nearer the goal than its units." (280-281) With these remarks, Bergson proceeds to examine "more closely" the charges levelled against industrialism or mechanismor what today, following Jacques Ellul, we would call the "technological society." There are certain tendencies toward a dichotomy in contemporary industrial societies wherever the parliamentary regime prevails. The parliamentary regime, with its loyal opposition, encourages the alternation of parties, encourages dissent against the prevailing policies,
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and guarantees dissatisfaction with the government in power. However, such as oscillation of parties and forces is the "result of certain very simple contrivances set up by society"; it is "not the effect of a paramount necessity...towering above the particular causes of alternation and dominating human events in general" (282). Does such a towering "necessity" exist? Bergson's answer is ambiguous:
We do not believe in the fatality of history. There is no obstacle that cannot be broken down by wills sufficiently keyed up, if they deal with it in time. There is thus no inescapable historic law. But there are biological laws; and the human societies, in so far as they are partly willed by nature, pertain to biology on this particular point...[It is] the essence of a vital tendency to develop fan-wise, creating, by the mere fact of its growth, divergent directions, each of which will receive a certain portion of the impetus. (282-283) (Emphasis added)
After a lengthy excursus in which, building on his earlier book,
Creative Evolution, Bergson proclaims his two "laws" or evolutionary tendencies of "dichotomy" and "double frenzy," he turns to the case of materialism and asceticism to show how the two laws apply. Today we see the "race for comfort" proceeding at a "faster and faster" pace until it is now a "stampede." We might be tempted to project an indefinite progression of this very tendency:
But should not this very frenzy open our eyes? Was there'not some other frenzy to which it has succeeded, and which developed in the opposite direction, an activity of which the present frenzy is the complement? (287)
To document his law of "frenzy" Bergson cites the "asceticism" of the Middle Ages and the modern movement opposed to it for an improvement of material conditions beginning in the fifteenth century. From this ever-increasing complexity of modern life, we should now expect a "return to simplicity." The return is not a certainty; the "future of humanity" remains indeterminate since it is "on humanity that it depends" (288). Without this apparently irrational oscillation of two tendencies, there would not have been true progress, the possibility of the "maximum of creation, both in quality and quantity. It is necessary to keep on to the bitter end in one direction, to find out what it will yield; when we can go no further, we turn back, with all we have acquired, to set off in the direction from which we had turned aside" (286, emphasis added). Without once mentioning Hegel in the bookindeed in all of Bergson's collected works there is only one fleeting mention of Hegel
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(Fr. 1290)Bergson proceeds here, in his so-called law of double frenzy to give a replica (or parody?) of the Hegelian dialectic. The victorious party, society, or movement does not simply route the defeated opponent, but preserved and suspended (aufgehoben) in its victory, is what was positive in that which was overcome. There is thus "oscillation and progress, progress by oscillation." Nothing is lost or wasted in any one particular "frenzy"; the "asceticism" of the future will be at a higher level in quantity and quality, thanks to having superseded and negated the materialism of modernity. Thus, there are "two opposing manifestations of one primordial tendency" which "contrived to evolve from itself, in quantity and quality, everything that it was capable of, even more than it had to give, proceeding along each of the two roads, one after the other, getting back into one direc-
tion with everything that had been picked up by the way of the other." (288, emphasis added) The latter sentence expressed Bergson's view
that progress occurs "by the law of double frenzy": there is one direction of progress, emanating from a single "primordial tendency" but making its way along "each of two roads, one after the other," getting back into one direction with everything that had been gained via the other. At this point, the reader may be inclined to ask, "what happened to openness in history?" Bergson's version of the dialectic may be less iron-like than Hegel's, but it certainly is not a model of spontaneity or receptivity to the unexpected. Indeed, are openness and historical "laws," however much disguised as "tendencies," compatible? What about the possibility that some parties, principles, movements are dead losses, or monuments to nonsense? How could Nazism have fitted into the "law of double frenzy" where each antithesis profits from the other? What would the victims of the Holocaust say about such speculation? Especially in our own time, after the appearance of agonizing criticisms of the "technological society" and its seemingly irreversible tendencies (Jacques Ellul), Bergson seems much too urbane and cheerful about the resolution of the modern imbalance in man's spiritual condition. There is, he informs us blithely, "nothing improbable in the return to a simpler life. Science itself might show us the way." Physiology and medical science may proceed to uncomplicate things at a rate equal to that which physics and chemistry encouraged us to "multiply our needs." (289) Perhaps we shall all become vegetarians, for example, if science shows that we are slowly poisoning ourselves by eating meat. Similarly, our whole civilization is said to be organ-
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ized around the arousal of sexual passion: Toute notre civilisation est aphrodisiaque, he pungently concludes. (Fr. 1232) Whereas "nature" is sparing in what she requires of sex (for procreation), modern civilization constantly arouses the senses so that at present "humanity" takes the "violent, but paltry sensation" of sex as fundamental. Science can have something to say on this subject too: "there will no longer be pleasure in so much love of pleasure." Woman will come into her own instead of being treated as a sexual object to be pampered. In general, with the asceticism, "luxury, pleasures and comfort" will sharply recede in importance. There will be "less waste, and less enviousness" (291). Why is Bergson so confident that the present (1930) emphasis on sexuality and creature comforts will be reversed? Because of the "law of the double frenzy":
We know that one frenzy brings on the counter-frenzy (292).
However, it is not evident from Bergson's discussion what gain there will have been for the new asceticism by virtue of the extreme development of libertinism and gluttony. Rather, he emerges here sounding simply like a fussy Victorian moralist and a Scrooge-like enemy of sensuality. Now nearing the end of the volume, Bergson approaches what he calls the "essential point of our discussion: i.e., whether mechanical invention (the technological explosion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) is not irreversible, and whether in that event there will be any end to the satisfaction of old needs and the creation of new ones. Science, after all, cannot stop. The new mysticism-asceticism must be new precisely in this sense: it will not mark a return to the illiteracy and technological poverty of the Middle Ages. How then, can it be ascetic at all? How can it be limited? His answer is that the "spirit of invention" must come to act creatively on its own instead of in the service of "artificial"i.e., surplusneeds (293). The truth is that "man has always invented machines" and that mechanical invention is a "natural gift." In fact, antiquity had "remarkable" machines and "many a clever mechanical device was thought of long before the development of modern science, and at a later stage, independently of it: even today a mere workman, without scientific culture, will hit on improvements which have never occurred to skilled engineers" (293). The difference which modern science has made is this:
HENRI BERGSON
[The effects of mechanical invention] were limited so long as it was confined to utilizing actual, and as it were visible, forces: muscular effort, wind or waterpower. The machine developed its full efficiency only from the day when it became possible to place at its service, by a simple process of releasing, the
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potential energies stored up for millions of years, borrowed from the sun, deposited in coal, oil, etc. But that was the day the steam-engine was invented.
[It is true that]...the progress made...assumed giant proportions as soon as science took a hand. [Nonetheless]...the spirit of mechanical invention, which runs between narrow banks so long as it is left to itself, but expands indefinitely
after its conjunction with science, remains distinct from it, and could, if need be, do without it. (293-294, emphasis added)
Bergson appears to have anticipated the contemporary ecology movement and "soft energy path" people. He wants again to secure the "independence" of mechanical invention from science, to reduce technology to a smaller scale, where it ministers to the real or "natural" needs of man instead of plying him with "artificial" needs. To some extend, he reminds one of Herbert Marcuse's attack on contemporary industrial society, although he probably would reject any Marxist (so say nothing of Freudian) influence. (Marx is never cited even once in his collected works!) Perhaps his similarity is closest to "radical" Christian and Jewish communitarian groups. Bergson on the Impact of Technology and "Mechanization" Unfortunately, the final few pages of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion are dominated by what in my review-essay in the 1979 Political Science Reviewer on Karl Popper I called the "insidious we"not the editorial "we," not the royal "we," but the monolithic "we." "Humanity becomes conceived as a massive block akin to Rousseau's "general will," so that dissent over what is "humanity's" "central, organizing thought" becomes the equivalent of immorality and treason. Bergson, who was the first person to use the term "the open societey," becomes at the end a proponent of something strange: a cross between Turgot's masse totale and a gnostic divinized "mankind." Perhaps the most alarming of the many passages invoking "humanity" at the end of the book is the following:
Generally speaking, industry has not troubled [itself] enough about the greater or lesser importance of needs to be satisfied. It simply complied with public taste, and manufactured with no other thought than that of selling. Here, as elsewhere, we should like to see a central, organizing intelligence, which would coordinate industry and agriculture and allot to the machine its proper place, I mean the place where it can best serve humanity. (295)
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In the French text, the words are actually "une pensee centrale, organisatrice" (Fr. 1236)a central, organizing thought." The political naivete of the French philosopher here is breath-taking: as if there were a single "thought" or "mind" of "humanity" which could "allot to the machine its proper place," where it can "best serve humanity." Who is to say, without question or debate, what is technology's "proper place" in the world, conceived of as a global society? Also, who is to say, infallibly, what are the "real" as opposed to the "surplus" or "artificial" needs of human beings? Bergson responds that the real need obviously is that human beings must eat, but who is to say again infallibly, what, on a world scale, are the best means of fulfilling such an end? Again, Bergson can reply that "the fact is simply that, production in general not being properly organized," there is no mechanism of exchange on a world-wide bases; therefore, there is so-called "overproduction" in one part of the world and starvation in the other (295, n.). Perhaps, although not necessarily, if there were a single "organized intelligence" or central world government, such a problem could be more easily solved than under the conditions of the present state system, but who is to say, given the ubiquity of incompetence and corruption, that so complicated a problem both from the technical and economic point of view can be so simplistically solved as Bergson suggests? Henri Bergson gives short shrift to cultural criticisms of industrialization, as promoting a standardized, levelled "mass mind." He cites the standard pro-industrialization position, viz., that the assembly line and the factory system actually give the working man more leisure time in which to be creative, rather than alienating and degrading him to the status of a "thing." Doubtless, this view could be ably defended if it were accompanied by a concern with the humanizing of the work place, and if it took more seriously the centrality of work in many people's lives as a source of meaning. Aristotle's distinction between "leisure" and "recreation" needs to be recalled here as another complicating factor. Once again, however, Bergson resorts to a simplistic analysis of a complicated problem (pp. 295-296). The Americans, he observes, have been criticized for all "wearing the same hat." "Allow me to furnish the interior of my head as I please, and I shall put up with a hat like everybody else's," he remarks wryly. Unfortunately, Bergson has failed to see that there may well be a relationship between the "hat" and the "head." Instead of the above considerations, Bergson's indictment of "mechanization" is as follows:
HENRI BERGSON
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We reproach it with having too strongly encouraged artificial [needs]..., with having fostered luxury, with having favored the towns to the detriment of the countryside, lastly with having widened the gap and revolutionized the relations between employer and employed, between capital and labor. These effects...can all be corrected, and then the machine would be nothing but a great benefactor. But then, humanity must set about simplifying its existence with as much frenzy as it devoted to complicating it. The initiative can come from humanity alone, for it is humanity and not the alleged force of circumstances...which has started the spirit of invention along a certain track. (296)
Once more, one sees the astonishing naivete and uncritical thinking of Bergson as he approaches contemporary practical problems. Far from being "open" to a variety of possibilities, with his "law of double frenzy" he has narrowed the range of options to those which con* form to a Communist-style Puritanism. Thus, there can be no frills or "luxuries" in the new "ascetic" civilization, the cities are to be emptied, Cambodia-style, the gap in income and prestige between employers and employed collapsed. Then, presumably, Mecca would have been reached: the "bad" effects of industrialism can be eliminated, and "then the machine would be nothing but a great benefactor." (Emphasis added) Is any material force or development "nothing but a great benefactor"? Are there no troublesome side effects, even to the prolongation of life by medical science, for example? Finally, one witnesses the invocation of "humanity" as if it were a personality. Does this mean every living human being will participate in the new ascetic "frenzy" against materialism? Apparently not. Well, then, are those who continue to enjoy "luxury" and the amenities of city life non-human, not a part of "humanity"? All of this is rather terrifying in its implications. Bergson, however, apparently had not thought through any of them.
Conclusion: "A Machine for the Making of Gods"

It should be recalled that in the chapter on "Dynamic Religion" Bergson had defined mysticism in an "activist" fashion,' to such an extent that he denies to a contemplative mystic such as Plotinus the title of a "complete" mystic. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that he
8. "In our eyes, the ultimate end of mysticism is the establishment of a contact, consequently of a partial coincidence, with the creative effort which life itself manifests. The effort is of God, if it is not God himself. The great mystic is to be conceived as an individual being, capable of transcending the limitations imposed on the species by its material nature, thus continuing and extending the divine action." (209)
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finds his own variety of mysticism compatible with a new "democratic" civilization. Indeed, modern democracy, which originated in the Renaissance and the Reformation contemporaneously with the modern "spirit of invention" is only superficially antiChristian, insists Bergson. Rather, it reacted "against the form taken until then by the Christian ideal" (i.e., it reacted against medieval asceticism). The Christian ideal itself persisted, only we were now able to see its "other side." True, complete and active mysticism aspires to reach beyond a chosen few to radiate its love to all men (297). Today, mankind, no longer necessarily threatened by starvation, can "use matter to rise above materialism." Today, the "mystical summons up the mechanical" (298). The "body" having greatly expanded relative to the soul, must now, having reached its limit, make way for an expansion of soul. From material energy we must move to moral energy. In fact, today "the body, now larger, calls for a bigger soul," and "mechanism should mean mysticism" (299).
The origins of the process of mechanization are indeed more mystical than we might imagine. Machinery will find its true vocation again, and it will render services in proportion to its power, only if mankind which it has bowed still lower to the earth, can succeed, through it, in standing erect and looking heavenwards. (299)
Today, the "mystery of the supreme obligation" has been resolved. Such an obligation is response to the "appeal" or the "call" of the mystic "genius" or "hero" to resume the forward movement of life after its arrest by the human species. If a "hero" or "great privileged soul,'"does not appear howeverand perhaps it is "just as well not to count too much" on his adventthen "some other influences might divert our attention from the baubles that amuse us, and the vain shadows for which we fight" (301). These "other influences" have to do with "psychic science" (hi science psychique, Fr. 1244), mental telepathy and other concerns of what is today called "parapsychology." These new "scientific" discoveries of a reality "beyond" the sensory would be sufficient to "turn into a live, acting reality a belief in the life beyond," so that most men would become "absolutely sure" of survival (of the soul or consciousness) after physical death (305-306). Such results of the new "psychic science" would be sufficient to effect a mass conversion to the new mysticism:
9. Bergson N clear, if not sufficiently emphatic, about the distinction between a spiritual "hero" or mystic and a pseudo-mystic or imperialistic dictator. True mysticism is "incompatible with imperialism" or Nietzsche's "will to power." (300)
HENRI BERGSON
Our [sensual] pleasures would still remain, but drab and jejune...They would pale like our electric lamps, before the morning sun. Pleasure would be eclipsed by joy. Joy indeed will be that simplicity of life diffused throughout the world by an ever-spreading mystic intuition; joy, too, that which would automatically follow a vision of the life beyond Ed 'au-dela] attained through the furtherance of scientific experiment [dans une experience scientifique e'largieliterally, "in an enlarged scientific experience"]. Failing so thoroughgoing a spiritual reform, we must be content with shifts and submit to more and more numerous and vexatious regulations, intended to provide a means of circumventing each successive obstacle that our nature sets up against civilization. (306-Fr. 1245)
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In any event, insists Bergson, a crisis is upon us. Humanity cannot continue as it is, "crushed beneath the weight of its own [material] progress." It is to mankind that belongs the responsibility of deciding whether it merely wants to live, or to "make just the extra effort required for fulfilling" even on this "refractory planet the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods [une machine a faire des dieux]" (306, Fr. 1245). Thus, Bergson concludes his extraordinary, but flawed, masterpiece in the position of the gnostic savant, who knows the "essential function of the universe," which is to produce, in effect, the godded man. What is new with him is his emphasis on the way this result is to come about through machinery. Indeed, the universe itself is allegedly a "machine" for the manufacturing of mystics who will be in touch with or coincide with God.
Final Remarks: Openness and Closure in Bergson

Bergson's emphasis upon the reality of the non-metric dimension of experience and on the creative potentiality of human beings open to that dimension marked a significant contribution to the theory of the open society, as did, of course, his use, apparently for the first time, of this very term. However, this contribution wa gravely compromised by his overemphasis upon the active, as opposed to the contemplative, mode of relating to reality. It is perhaps significant that in another work, Creative Evolution, which preceded the Two Sources by some twenty years, he had suggested man be defined as Homo faber instead of Homo sapiens.' While his activism tended to close off the
10. Henri Bergson, L 'Evolution Creatrice in Oeuvres (Paris, P.U.F., 1970), p. 613.
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autonomy of the contemplative, his scientism tended to close off the autonomy of the non-metric or spiritual realm by drawing it into the metric, as it were. As Henri Gouhier declared in his Introduction to the Centenary Edition of Bergson's Collected Works "in Bergson's eyes, philosophy is a science"; and Bergson himself had declared in the Two Sources that philosophy, "thanks to its method, can lay claim to an objectivity as great as that of the positive sciences. ' Thus we have his overly credulous, indeed naive, belief in the scientific status of parapsychology, as expressed in the Two Sources, which was itself but a continuation of his interests in so-called "psychophysics" in his doctoral dissertation (Essai sur Les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience) of 1889. 12 In claiming to deny "any place to what was merely personal opinion" in his "objective philosophy,"" Henri Bergson ignored the fides or pre-intellectual, personal disposition of the philosopher who, in Anselm's words, "seeks understanding"
(fides quaerens intellectum).

Although at times he came close to conceptualizing the open society as universal mankind under Goda "society" which extends from the first "man" to the lasthe often allows his version of the open society to debauch into a world-immanent project to be achieved at some (perhaps imminent) future time. In other words, he did not grasp clearly enough a distinction which was to be elucidated with satisfactory philosophical thoroughness only in our time by Eric Voegelin: the distinction between globalism or "ecumenicity" and "universality." Ecumenicity is the dream of organizing all human beings presently living under one rule: although it claims to be universal, it is not and cannot be, for there is no way to include under such an organization the countless generations of mankind who preceded such an organizationand who are "counted" only to the extent that they are stepping stones to the presentand those in the unknown future who may or may not be organized under this single political community or world state, animated by a fictitious "single will." It is, of course, a grandiose illusion to think that such an organization would resist disintegration for all future time. Henri Bergson was eloquent in his symbolization of the non-metric spiritual dimension of reality; he properly criticized a narrow "intellectualist" epistemology and stressed that the apprehension of
11. Quoted in Gouhier's Introduction to Ibid., ix. 12. in Ibid., pp. 47-49.
13.Ibid., ix.
HENRI BERGSON
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spiritual reality must occur as the result of a passion of the soul illumined by the noetic or "rational" properties of man. The experience could not be the result of reason alone. His philosophy constitutes a perennially important corrective to a so-called political "realism" which brackets out or ignores the reality of the spiritual domain. However, Bergson fails sufficiently to stress the force of the "counterpull" (to use Plato's formulation of human existence as a field of forces in tension between openness and closure, life and death, eternity and-time) within the process of reality. The great "spiritual realism" of Plato or Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, wherein we can see the intimation of an overcoming of the forces of the counterpull in a way now shrouded in mystery but beyond time and the world, is forsaken by Bergson for activist mysticism. Bergson has made an unforgettable contribution to the theory of the open society, but his theory is in need of thoroughgoing revision. Looked at in terms of the four original modes of openness (myth, philosophy, revelation, and mysticism), Bergson may be judged to have been wide of the mark in describing myth as such a force for closure instead of as a relatively undifferentiated mode of openness to reality, but a mode of openness nonetheless. He also tended to ignore relevation altogether, collapsing it into a form of mysticism, so that we may say that Bergson's theory of openness and the open society suffers from an imperialism of activist mysticism. Despite its many faults, Bergson's analysis of the open society has the great merit of having developed out of the author's philosophical quest for the ground(s) of moral obligation. By contrast, Karl Popper's study, which uses a deformed concept of the open society, was engendered by the author's self-confessed polemical intent of discovering an "enemies list" of thinkers in the past who allegedly spawned fascist and communist totalitarianism. For Popper, the open society was a synonym for a particular, questionable interpretation of democracy. That Popper's unphilosophical treatment of the "open society" idea has received wider attention than Bergson's critical and theoretical treatment is a measure of our time's decadence of the mind and spirit.
University of Virginia
DANTE GERMINO

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HENRI BERGSON: ACTIVIST MYSTICISM AND THE OPEN SOCIETY

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

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From the "Closed" to the "Open" Society

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The "Open Morality"

Whereas the closed morality is impersonal, the open morality is per-

Contact with the Elan Vital

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After a lengthy excursus in which, building on his earlier book,

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

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Conclusion: "A Machine for the Making of Gods"

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Final Remarks: Openness and Closure in Bergson

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(fides quaerens intellectum).

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