Henri Bergson’s contribution to the invention of a psychology in duration

Psychology as a scientific discipline

Our analysis of psychology from Bergson’s point of view is relevant in that thus we may understand the fragility of this scientific discipline, given its object of study: subjectivity. Bergson shows the impossibility to fully capture the psychological field using the methods and instruments of science. The attempt of psychology to reach the very nature of subjectivity is always a generalization that does not correspond to the particularity of a psychological experience. That is why psychology needs to create epistemological alternatives. This section tries to clarify some mistaken conceptions of psychology as a scientific discipline in order to establish possibilities of searching for other ways to think psychology and science.

We know psychology has, from its birth, looked to reformulate itself based on the functioning of the natural sciences so as to articulate a whole apparatus which may support the conditions to erect natural laws about the human being. The determination of quantitative relations, the building of hypotheses and the experimental verification are at the disposal of such methodological apparatus. Even though Psychology may seek to abandon its naturalistic objectivity—and we are well aware that many lines of thought seek to escape that somehow—we fall back into the process of answering to these problems, or more precisely, of responding to the difficulties which are met with in everyday practice, such as school failure, mental illness, and work adaptation. Truly, this movement we make towards approaching these practices ensures a status of natural science, positive, objective, and it is what actually produces this contact with reality. However, there is no way one may put this naturalistic objectivity into effect, since what Psychology does unintentionally (given the fact it originated thus) is to build itself in the field of contradictions, that is, to create a Psychology of the human being with its laws and general rules based on

an analysis of the abnormal, of what is pathological, conflictive, a reflection on the contradictions of man with himself. And if it becomes a Psychology of the normal, of the adaptive, of what is organized, it is in a secondary way, as though by an effort to dominate these contradictions. (Foucault, 1994/2006, p. 135)

For all these reasons, with Bergson (1992) we can place the error of the human sciences or, as regards our interests, the error of psychology in following the same precepts of the natural sciences: an earlier mistake which this philosopher realizes about the very spirit of modern philosophy, and which equalizes philosophy and science at the method level and as research object. The building of this idea is personified in Descartes, who held method as fundamental to reaching the truth. Yet, we will find the same movement in modern mentality, for instance, in Bacon, Kant, and Comte. So, it would be interesting, firstly, to try to understand the distinctions between philosophy and science to Bergson, as a way of knowing an object first, and then continue our debate on psychology.

Philosophy, through the exercise of metaphysics, should seek an absolute knowledge about a particular object of interest, making use of intuition as the method to its apprehension. Seeking an absolute knowledge is understood here as the attempt to coincide with the object, to enter in it, to sympathize with it on a level which goes beyond speaking of a particular place or a particular point of view of an object, but rather being inside of it.

This way of knowing a thing, by not putting oneself into any vantage point, is not supported by any symbols as well, that is, there is no translation except for the attempt to possess the original (Bergson, 1992). And this is what characterizes and differentiates the craft of philosophy as opposed to other fields of knowledge, being very close to what Deleuze and Guatarri (1994) called “the discipline that involves creating concepts” (p. 5), considering the idea of creation and the very creation of concepts in philosophy to be singular, as described to us in Deleuze’s (Boutang, 1988) L’Abecedaire: “I need a word, apparently a barbarian one. … it is outstanding to Philosophy. We need, at times, to invent a barbarian word so that we can thoroughly embrace a notion with a new intention.” And he goes further with Félix Guattari, in What is Philosophy? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), elucidating that “some concepts must be indicated by an extraordinary and sometimes even barbarous or shocking word” (p. 7) to constitute “a philosophical language within language” (p. 8).

Science, however, seeks a relative knowledge about the object it looks upon and has analysis as its preferred method, founded as it is on intelligence, which refers to “the realms of the faculty of abstracting and generalizing, that is, to judgment and rational thought” (Almada, 2007, p. 29). It is a relative knowledge because instead of entering into the object, it surrounds it—in the sense of being dependent on a point of view, on a reference point where it positions itself as well as on the symbols through which it expresses itself.

In other words, the object is understood from the outside: we speak of it from several places through which we position ourselves in space; we make a representation, relating to it from the referential which we already possess and which we are familiar with—thus the idea of a translation of an object. We may therefore say that, instead of approaching the object, in fact we distance ourselves from it, for we are always working by similitude, comparison, and analogy.

Keeping these notions of science and philosophy (intelligence and intuition will be dealt with later on), lets us now turn our regard to psychology, when it is born as a scientific discipline. We know that its “official” birth as a science dates back to the turn from the 19th century to the 20th century, with Wilhelm Wundt. If we follow a sort of history of sciences, we will realize that the debates are limited to a chronology that delineates the different theoretical edifications without an interest for the study of the historical conditions of possibility which constitute the singularity of psychology. For us, more important than having this timeline in mind is to realize that the historical contingencies for the emergence of such discipline are strictly connected to a perspective of thought which we may call modern. For the emergence of modern discourse to take place, it was necessary to have the power of the renaissance and the enlightenment ideals and the advancement of rationalism and modern science, marked mainly by Descartes. The theological explanations gradually lose their place to Reason, which occupies and, at the same time, grants man a central place as the regulator of nature. Psychology, as well as the human sciences, in order to gain a certain status of scientificity, has to necessarily go through a scheme of knowledge disciplinarization through the order of modern discourse.

In this context, psychology characterizes itself “as a positive knowledge of the individual and as a particular form of speaking the truth about humans and of acting upon them” (Rose, 1996, p. 22). Regardless of the theoretical approach, there has always been an effort, and attempt, as Rose would put it, “to unify the conduct around a sole model of appropriated subjectivity” (1996, p. 28).

Through an effort to dominate its own contradictions—as we mentioned in the beginning of this section—psychology tries to create laws and general rules, exactly like the natural sciences. The impossible game of psychological science becoming a natural science is formed just in the impermanence of its object of study and the impossibility of making it become unique from a universal, natural model. But why this instability of the object? Because one thing is the representations we make of this object and another is the object per se. We must make assumptions, use reason and say that, about the thing in itself, we can only speak through representations. Unfortunately, the scientist deludes herself (even when saying that her truths always must or may be refuted), believing that through her analyses she is speaking about the thing per se, or at least about a part of it. And what we are trying to say with Bergson is that the scientist does not even approach the object, but she rather departs from it. The scientist gets further from it because, through the representations she creates and those which she supports her theory on, she links certain representation schemes to other representation schemes. Thus, the scientist understands that she must reconstitute the object by connecting all of these parts as though they really were parts of the object studied. Yet she does not realize that she is only dealing with elements—that is, with symbols, translations—which produces, therefore, a process of analysis that goes on ad infinitum.

To explain the problem of the analysis method, Bergson (1992) makes use of psychology. He says that for us to speak of a psychological self we must dissolve this self, by analyzing its elements: feelings, actions, representations, among others. ¹ The experience we have of our self, the self that lasts, can only be expressed in psychology by means of these elements, which are cuts of a whole set that, in turn, are not the genuine experience we live of our self. The philosopher offers us an excellent example of the scientist’s analysis method when he speaks of an artist who draws a sketch of the Notre Dame tower. The tower is connected to the whole Paris, but it is necessary to separate them. The tower is made of a particular material, but the artist makes an exterior schematic recomposition, using a reference point over the object and a way of representing it. In spite of having carried out all this work of disassembling what was once united, the artist writes on his sketch, “Paris,” just as the psychoanalyst writes, based on a psychological state extracted from the whole of a person, “personality structure.” Hence, he creates a model, a “law,” which may be applied to another person. The problem is that the experience we have of the self as a whole does not mirror the created models: “the error is to believe that with all these schemes we would recompose the real” (Bergson, 1992, p. 32).

In order to round off this brief explanation of psychology as a scientific discipline, we would like to open a parenthesis. It is concerned with the psy disciplines, which produce more than a type of representation about the so-called subjective reality, as we have tried to develop here. It is through the psy disciplines’ knowledge and authorities—which have been spreading more than ever in the social net—that regimes of thought are delineated. They conform the human being in her way of conducting herself ethically and morally in her everyday life.

The concept of duration and the space–time problem

Following the goal of this article, we shall now cast our glance upon the Bergsonian concept of duration. When we speak of duration, we approach the matters of time and space and the interconnections between them both. When developing these two constructs, we are, essentially, dealing with the ways of knowing or producing reality, and therefore, truths about life. So, for our initial purpose, it is necessary to understand that duration is the real time, time in itself, essential and continuous change, which goes on incessantly changing everything and which is the essence of psychical life. Nevertheless, we do not see reality this way. We see it as something still and capable of fragmentation, which makes our action on the world easier, particularly by a spatial interference. Given the existence of a confusion between space and time, an illusory and spatialized time is created (Bergson, 2001). ²

This confusion may be connected to a historical movement, which involves art, literature, philosophy, and, with great power, physics. This movement is grippingly presented by Margareth Wertheim (2001) in her History of Space. We realize, from the beginning of the Middle Ages until the end of the 20th century, that the “elevation of space as an ontological category is now completed” (Wertheim, 2001, p. 158). “A characteristic of Western physics which has been little talked about is that its undertaking may be characterized by the gradual ascent of the space in our existential scheme” (p. 159).

This process of space ascent is such—from renaissance painters to hyperspace physicists of the “theory of everything” ³ at the end of the 20th century, who consider that the mathematical symmetry is the highest aesthetic ideal—that it results in a strong homogenizing tendency. “We no longer have any distinction between matter and space, for there is now one, and only one, category of existence” (Wertheim, 2001, p. 158): space.

Let us now examine an extract from her book which talks in a clear and direct manner about the problem of time in relation to space:

But the problem is deeper even than the denial of other reality plans, because, by making space the only category of the real, we are also denying what Edwin Burtt calls “time as something lived.” With the “theory of everything,” time is effectively frozen, since it becomes only another dimension of space. Subdued by the indifferent hand of geometry, the “lived time,” the “flux of time,” the “variable time,” are all destroyed in the crystalline claws of the eleven dimensions’ symmetry. In the hyperspace physicists’ view of the world, time is no longer an attribute of the subjective human experience: it becomes a mere artifact of mathematical manipulation. Thus, not only are the atoms of our body deprived of their independent status and reduced to merely spatial origami, but also our most fundamental experience of time as something lived and personal is abolished. In the complex of the eleven dimensions of the several “theories of everything,” our very being disappears in a “structured nothing.” We are dissolved in space. … Here, everything is equal, everything is homogeneous, everything is space. (Wertheim, 2001, p. 159)

Now let us try to understand the two lines of thought about time or duration: one, of a time which is pure, and the other, of a time which is spatialized. One of the forms used by Bergson (2001) to explain this difference starts with a criticism of the psychology of his time, particularly psychophysics, since it tried to explain the psychic life through a parallel between the physical and the psychological, between mind and brain. The psychic explanations were found in its physical part: thus, it was intended to quantify the psychological phenomena from their presumed physical causes. Psychophysics scholars ended up reducing the mind down to the brain, especially due to the confusion between time and space, not realizing the impossibility of explaining the psychological states as a quantitative multiplicity of the numeric and spatial juxtaposition. The inner states of consciousness are a qualitative multiplicity of the psychological states which are in a constant state of change and relation to each other, that is, of pure duration. This would be only one example of the power of the natural sciences over the human sciences, or, to be more precise, as Foucault (1979–80/2007) would say, it would be an example of the power of the tripod of the several knowledges that dominate the logic of modern thought: physical-mathematical thought, empirical sciences, and philosophy. The so-called time as something lived and personal could only be constituted as knowledge if it were taken as a spatialization; it is formed in the intersection of the plan of the mathematization of existence (submitting the empirical to a mathematical look), of life philosophy (language, literature), and thought formalization (logic)—the in-between dwelling place of the human sciences. It is what Kleber Filho (2005) calls the discipline of frontiers, “because it has no place of its own, forming itself in the surroundings and in relation to other fields of knowledge” (p. 81).

In the face of this knowledge, we are able to understand that the concept of duration unfolds itself into two lines of thought: homogeneous duration and heterogeneous duration. In the homogeneous duration, as we said before, we reduce the real psychic time to physical space images or to unities of the mathematical logical space.

There is, for example, an attempt towards the comprehension of consciousness states using space, that is, using some parameter of exteriority (positivism) to represent phenomena of consciousness. To capture certain phenomena, we seek to align them in space, taking them off time so that we may measure them. We may, thus, distinguish one phenomenon from another, classify them according to their intensity (psychophysical), recognize forms of association between some phenomena and others (associationism), but we are not operating the nature of the studied object. We are solely acting on the differences of degrees of a certain object, we are making analyses, creating representations of the object of study (Bergson, 1992, 2001). For example, in the brain mapping techniques, as Anne Beaulieu (2003) says, “maps link the life of the mind and the space of the brain. … Rather than a focus on processes of mind in time, brain mapping redirected attention to patterns in the space of the brain” (p. 562). It is by removing some phenomena of time and imprisoning them in space, or else, by investigating them in an already delimited space–time diagram that we may build certain truths about the individual. It is thus that a field of knowledge is created, by gaining the status of science: developing a rationalism of a mathematical order, eternizing or universalizing certain findings.

If we take the case of the Health Sciences, the positions between health and sickness are understood in terms of numerical distinctions: possible forms which can be measured, quantified, weighed as superior or inferior with regard to a standard of stability, of normality. From this perspective we can move towards a model that understands the madman as the one who indicates what is right and what is wrong, for instance, within a space of time. We try to capture the movement of lived time or duration of an “I” which is not interrupted between past, present, and future. This apprehension is immovable, it is only one fragment of the subjective experience, and it stops running in the flux of pure duration. Thus, we could say that even this extract does not approach the subjective experience which flows in duration. In the case of insanity, we create models which do not reach singularity, but which are often taken as such.

The effort of this type of Psychology is, therefore, found in the valuing of models and in the task of distinguishing which are the most faithful copies to the standard models and to create tools that may help the maintenance and the improvement of this image of thought. The exercise takes place in the process of realization of possibilities, that is, from a given set, we work on the object, or else, the human, based on what makes it similar and limited in relation to its mold. What is realized are the possibilities given a priori. For a homogeneous duration, what distinguishes us one from the other are the degrees, the intensities, the quantities, which are classified and catalogued in the psy disciplines and practices. In the face of this, we understand that the ontology of space “never considers the movement, only the successive positions of bodies, never the forces, but only its effects” (Bochenski, 1968/2009).

It is in this panorama that any specific sciences should follow the paradigm of the positive sciences—whose model was physics—and thus work with empirical and measurable data submitted to the law of causality (Rossetti, 2001). Psychology or the psychic life begins to be treated always in reference to an external substratum such as, for example, in the parallelism between the psychic and the brain: modeling truths always relate to space, always relate to comparisons of phenomena, where we try to isolate temporal interferences, such as heterogeneity. Thus, the truths produced by sciences which follow this line of thought never reach the differences of nature of phenomena or the object studied, but only those differences of its degrees, for they work on a view of the world with properties such as extension, numerical multiplicity, and a causal determinism in a process of juxtaposition and continuous comparison.

In heterogeneous duration we speak of an existence time, because it operates an ontological order, due to the fact that in duration (or time per se) the same feeling is never repeated (Bergson, 2001). This reality possesses an intensity that is purely qualitative, because it is composed of absolutely heterogeneous elements; still they interpenetrate themselves and still they keep continuity:

We may, for example, give an identical name to the different phases of sadness, of happiness or vision, but, to the intimate look of consciousness, one is irreducible from the other. It is not the same sadness which invades my soul today and the sadness which I experienced yesterday, though they may be produced by the same cause, because between yesterday and today, I have continued living and I have modified myself. (Trevisan, 1995, p. 51)

In this ontology, the real is variability; we value the movement and not the immobility. After all, as Bergson (1992) would say, it is not in the letters of a poem that we find its signification, nor in the spaces between them that the meaning we aim at will be found. The elements are part of the symbol and not of the thing itself. So, what idea would it be to recompose variability, which is the real, by means of the invariability of the element?

The ways of apprehending duration: The concepts of intelligence and intuition

Bergson considers homogeneous duration a very natural and spontaneous concept, and this naturalness is not criticized, because the faculty which thinks through it is intelligence, and it allows itself to be thought, by itself (Trevisan, 1995). All this discussion we have been developing may be synthesized in Bergson’s sentence: “Thinking consists, ordinarily, of going from concepts to things, and not from things to concepts” (1992, p. 30). Or, when he says it in another way: “from intuition we may go on to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition” (p. 32). Therefore, this means we may not believe that from certain symbols, from certain representations—be those visual, tangible, linguistic, etc.—we will reach the thing in itself, but only by inverting this logic.

To sum it up, the faculty which is operated in the analysis is intelligence, and it produces knowledge in a logic of homogeneous duration; intuition, however, is a metaphysical operation, and has heterogeneous duration as a means of knowledge apprehension. With regard to metaphysics, it is enough to consider, in the scope of this essay, that it “is, therefore, the science which intends to dismiss symbols” (Bergson, 1992, p. 12), as though it was overcoming them.

Our intelligence, when it follows its natural course, acts by means of solid perceptions, on the one hand, and stable conceptions, on the other. It departs from the immovable; it does not conceive nor express movement other than in relation to immobility. It installs itself in pre-established concepts, and it makes an effort to capture, as though it were a net, something of the reality it conveys. (Bergson, 1992, p. 37)

This is one experience or a way of knowing through which all of us operate. It is also the way through which positive science, so criticized by Bergson, worked. We make use of the sensitive observation for the obtainment of material with a view to having an elaboration which belongs to the realms of intelligence (Almada, 2007). From that results the exercise of removing all variability or the maximum of variables of the object to be studied, so that it may be controlled. This control removes duration from that which is being researched, it extracts what Bergson considers to be life. The use of intelligence, and therefore, the method of “empirical analysis implies the substitution of the very movement by its imitation” (Almada, 2007, p. 29). From the faint memory we retain of such an object based on the procedure, we cannot deny that a whole universe of a practical or useful order is produced in our daily life, nor can we deny the importance of this type of knowledge apprehension.

Nevertheless, there is another experience in the ways of knowing, which seems to be neglected. Perhaps this occurs due to the natural character of intelligence, which relegates intuition to a second plan.

We call here intuition the sympathy through which we transport ourselves to the interior of an object so as to coincide with what makes it unique, and consequently, inexpressible. On the contrary, analysis is the operation which reduces the object to previously known elements, that is, those common to this object and others. Analyzing consists, thus, in expressing one thing as related to what is not it (Bergson, 1992, p. 20).

So, breaking the naturalness of thinking would be making use of intuition as a method. It would be, precisely, realizing time passing without being divided. This anti-natural exercise connects thought with all those times which have been fragmented and separated by spatialization, with all those movements which have been immobilized by abstraction, with all those variables which should be wiped by purification so that the object of study could be better dealt with. Intuition intends to apprehend the absolute reality. This is to say that it allows us to visualize the representation nets through which we are caught in this process of thinking naturally. It allows us, as we understand it, to denaturalize the net of representations which constitutes us, and which are considered by us as reality, in the sense of what has always been there.

Psychology in duration

At the beginning of this article, we raised the idea of a Bergsonian psychology. We are involved with the idea of duration in an attempt to provoke some problematizations, thus producing infinite movements of thought and invoking new ways of thinking about psychology. Deleuze (1999) sums up Bergson’s thesis about duration by saying: “duration is what is different from itself” (p. 103). Thus, to think about this perspective is to produce a difference, escaping from any dialectic tendency transforming the point of view of the negative—a line of thought pertaining to dialectics. To do so, the problems must be put forth in relation to time, promoting the liberation of it in relation to space, and only thus finding differences in nature, not in degrees. A difference in nature is the internal difference of a particular thing, and not what is differentiated from externality, that is, duration is what is different from and in itself. The very nature of duration is difference, and so, it is indivisible. In this sense, if it had been divided, it would have already changed its nature. Therefore, what differs are not the things, nor the state of things, but the virtual quality which every actualization carries—the moving field of pre-individual singularities which ensure its situation in what is becoming.

As we can see, psychology in duration apprehends a reality first by intuition, such as the self which lasts:

It is a succession of states in which each one announces the one that is coming up and which contains the previous one that preceded it. To put it accurately, they only constitute multiple states when, having been overcome, I turn around to observe its features. While I was experiencing them, they were so solidly organized, so profoundly animated with such an ordinary life, that I would not have been able to tell where any of them finished or started, but all of them are prolonged in one another (Bergson, 1992, p. 22).

This way, psychology in duration, upon putting forth problems in relation to time, causes a movement—which was interlinked and had a particular space–time order—to take a tumble, thus losing its axis. The movement’s hard line that involves time, from a concept of beginning, middle, and end, fades away. Past, present, and future no longer follow a straight line. It is as though some of its movements escape its seriation; one who was guided by a chronological time (of calendars and clocks), who went along a natural biological time (of life seasons), who respected times of learning and development, who pursued a special type of life movement, finds himself asking where one has come to. It is like one of his movements escaped that seriation; a step is now a stumble, and the movement becomes bizarre and frightening. This movement is perceived as bizarre in that it sets time free—it is freed from a movement it was previously subordinated to (Pelbart, 2004).

We could say a Bergsonian psychology happens only when time has emancipated itself from movement, when it has freed itself from the prison which intelligence has imposed on movement. It is, thus, in this decisive movement when the loss of concatenated movement takes place, that an infinity of worlds is present at one sole time. This net of different times may sound like failure to the one who lives solely under the immobilization of movement and its binarisms. An awkwardness, a faux pas, remains, thus, something one may understand as an error, something which has deviated from the right track, which has gone off-track from the illuminated thought. Notwithstanding, in our way of seeing things, all of these errors are statements of the false—a potency, which fights against discipline and judgment, since it is yet to come, and it is a struggle of forces—and these errors are what we need to question the desperate quest for the truth, the insane reaching towards the truthful (Pelbart, 2004).

To round it off, we would like to group a few ideas we have developed in this essay, which will help to clarify what we understand so far as psychology in duration. This type of psychology is in agreement with Virginia Kastrup (1999)—Foucault called it the ontology of the present—a line of thought which was created by Kant and which takes time as a fundamental problem, be it in the form of historical investigation (Hegel, Marx, Weber, the Frankfurt School), be it in the form of the inopportune and what is yet to come (Nietzsche, Bergson). “It is constituted as a criticism of all invariable categories, both traditional metaphysics and the theory of knowledge and science, and it applies time to such categories” (Kastrup, 1999, pp. 32–33).

For this reason, this psychology reaches the point of asking how this reality has been produced, or else, how it has become what it is. Words or things, any of them, are not the thing in itself. We are never truly before a real concrete object, without asking ourselves why words and things gain a universal tenor and why they lose their history thereby going through a process of formalization which institutes them as natural. To present how objects are historically constituted is the purpose of denaturalization.

The matter is not whether we believe in the origin and the end, in the truthful and the false, in the real and the unreal. This is not a relativist argument, since we do not claim everything is relative. If this were so, we could refute the absolutist premise of relativism itself. Even though Bergson speaks of an intention towards the absolute, this does not mean that he seeks the truth. His work is particularly concerned with emphasizing the care we must have with regard to the true and universal statements which we usually make about our objects of study, since there is a series of historical, specific conditions that regulate our creations of truth, because “the symbol corresponds here to the most deep-rooted habits of our thoughts” (Bergson, 1992, p. 33).

Psychology in duration may provide us with the tools to conceive theories which transcend the epistemological and the ontological aspects involved in their constitution. It may also further the production of discourse, practices, and techniques which are spread in our daily lives, as though they were a simple evolution and progress of the human being. Psychology in duration may relinquish the shackles of time with its arsenal of categories, concepts, names, and forms to which we accrue meaning as our reality, thus reconstituting their conditions of existence in our present.