H Bergson Quotes

Eliot's own reflections on the primitive mind as a model for nondualistic thinking and on the nature and consequences of different modes of consciousness were informed by an excellent education in the social sciences and philosophy. As a prelude to our guided tour of the text of The Waste Land, we now turn to a brief survey of some of his intellectual preoccupations in the decade before he wrote it, preoccupations which in our view are enormously helpful in understanding the form of the poem. Eliot entered Harvard as a freshman in 1906 and finished his doctoral dissertation in 1916, with one of the academic years spent at the Sorbonne and one at Oxford. At Harvard and Oxford, he had as teachers some of modern philosophy's most distinguished individuals, including George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim; and while at the Sorbonne, he attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, a philosophic star in Paris in 1910-11. Under the supervision of Royce, Eliot wrote his dissertation on the epistemology of F. H. Bradley, a major voice in the late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century crisis in philosophy. Eliot extended this period of concentration on philosophical problems by devoting much of his time between 1915 and the early twenties to book reviewing. His education and early book reviewing occurred during the period of epistemological disorientation described in our first chapter, the period of "betweenness" described by Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, the period of the revolt against dualism described by Lovejoy. 2 Eliot's personal awareness of the contemporary epistemological crisis was intensified by the fact that while he was writing his dissertation on Bradley he and his new wife were actually living with Bertrand Russell. Russell as the representative of neorealism and Bradley as the representative of neoidealism were perhaps the leading expositors of opposite responses to the crisis discussed in our first chapter. Eliot's situation was extraordinary. He was a close student of both Bradley and Russell; he had studied with Bradley's friend and disciple Harold Joachim and with Russell himself. And in 1915-16, while writing a dissertation explaining and in general defending Bradley against Russell, Eliot found himself face to face with Russell across the breakfast table. Moreover, as the husband of a fragile wife to whom both men (each in his own way) were devoted, Eliot must have found life to be a kaleidoscope of brilliant and fluctuating patterns.

Though other cultures-like the Sumerian, the Mayan, and the Indic-coupled human destiny with long vistas of abstract calendar time, the essential contribution of the Renascence was to relate the cumulative results of history to the variety of cultural achievements that marked the successive generations. By unburying statues, monuments, buildings, cities, by reading old books and inscriptions, by re-entering a long-abandoned world of ideas, these new explorers in time became aware of fresh potentialities in their own existence. These pioneers of the mind invented a time-machine more wonderful than H.G. Wells' technological contraption. At a moment when the new mechanical world-picture had no place for 'time' except as a function of movement in space, historic time-duration, in Henri Bergson's sense, which includes persistence through replication, imitation, and memory-began to play a conscious part in day-to-day choices. If the living present could be visibly transformed, or at least deliberately modified from Gothic to a formalized Classic structure, so could the future be remolded, too. Historic time could be colonized and cultivated, and human culture itself became a collective artifact. The sciences actually profited by this historic restoration, getting a fresh impetus from Thales, Democritus, Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria.

For Serres, everything exists in at least three distinct broad temporalities (At 126–7) which can be further subdivided and combined in different ways. The fi rst time is the reversible, clockwork time of the classical age, when no fundamental law was thought to dictate the direction of time’s flow. The second time is the globally entropic time of the second law of thermodynamics, of Carnot’s heat engine that carries everything towards death. This thermodynamic principle was formalised in 1865 by Rudolph Clausius who, drawing heavily on Carnot’s work on heat engines, coined the term ‘entropy’ to describe the irrecoverable heat inevitably lost from any mechanical system. Laplace brings this irreversible time into the natural sciences with a cosmogony that supplements Newton’s reversible cosmology with a dimension of becoming (JVSH 36), and Darwin inscribes irreversible time at the heart of the natural sciences (JVSH 39). The eternal universe of Pascal is no more: ‘Immersed in time the universe likewise is born, develops, evolves, wears out and, perhaps, will die’ (JVSH 36).133 Time enters into science. The third time is the locally negentropic time of codes and information, preserving complexity against the general decay of order (H4 287).134 The idea of negentropy was developed in the 1930s, describing a pocket of information preserved in a wider context of entropic decay (see JVSH 136). It is a time encrusted in the living beings who ‘follow an evolution that Bergson called creative, of which we can at least say that it runs in the opposite direction to the thermodynamic arrow’ (H5 79) (Watkin 2020: 132)

If one is too confined by physicalist prejudices, e.g., believing at the outset that one is trying to fit the empirical observations into one’s model of reality (i.e., that the brain creates the mind), they risk completely missing the deeper lessons of the journey. As with any attempt to gain a deeper understanding of something as fundamental as “consciousness,” any partitioning of the subject matter is guaranteed to lead to confusion and misinterpretation. The problem is in our mindset, and is an inherent problem with the conventional scientific approach of reductive materialism. The brain is clearly related to consciousness—the fallacy is in believing the brain creates consciousness out of purely physical matter. The emerging scientific view, far more powerful in its explanatory potential, relates to the notion of the brain as a reducing valve, or filter that limits primordial (infinite?) consciousness down to the minuscule trickle of the apparent here-and-now of our physical human existence. This idea (filter theory) enables the possibility that the soul survives bodily death, and is attributed to the brilliant masters of the human psyche who worked mainly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably Frederic W. H. Myers, Henri Bergson, and William James.3 Physicalism and atomism (the idea of the separation of objects within the universe) often go hand in hand—and both introduce distortions in trying to understand how humans fit into the universe as a whole. The act of separating parts of the universe from the whole is artificial and detracts from approaching the deeper truth of reality. This is one of the fundamental problems with our predominant scientific model of reductive materialism that relies largely on such false separations. In spite of the wonders the world has seen from the advances of modern science and technology, there is a dark underbelly related to that progress in the form of the destruction of our planetary ecosystems, modern warfare, thoughtless homicide and suicide, etc.—much of it due to the artificial removal of human spirit from the predominant physicalist worldview. The false conclusions of physicalist science that consciousness is manufactured by physiological processes occurring in the brain, that we are nothing more than “meat computers,” automatons or zombies, that free will itself is a complete illusion, are vastly destructive as a predominant worldview. The emerging scientific view of consciousness as fundamental in the universe also incorporates the Oneness of all consciousness,16 and the importance of appreciating the connectedness of all elements of the universe in reaching fundamental truth. I foresee this top-down approach to understanding as being much more fruitful.