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)