While he may not be a particularly popular philosopher today, I have gotten great insights from the work of Henri Bergson. Sometimes taken to be a materialist, sometimes a monist, sometimes even a dualist and vitalist/obscurantist, I think he could be described as a non-dualist.
He is famous for his concept of the Elan Vital, a vital current inherent in matter to account for the apparent spontaneous self-organising characteristic of the material of the sensible universe, perceivable in the formation of biological structures, or more fundamentally, as life.
The philosophical context in which Bergson was forming these ideas was a complicated one. Physics and the other sciences had put paid to the defensibility of the belief in the fixed ‘substances’, immutable essences, and immutability generally of the old scholastic/Aristotelian paradigm. This included the belief in an enduring substratum for the accidental change of properties of an object. The problem of ‘matter’ however was still hotly debated. Some, like Ernst Mach, were quite insistent in denying the existence of atoms. Matter itself was treated with varying degrees of significance. That it was emphasized as a sensible constituent of the world, taking priority over a supposedly immaterial ideal, was a concept in the ascendant. Whether treated empirically and (in actual fact, not-unbiasedly) by the scientific establishment, or dialectically by revolutionary thinkers, it was nevertheless taken as a problem for the “intellect” or the intellectual capacity of human understanding. The old dualism, whether acknowledged or carefully circumvented between matter and thought loomed large. With Bergson, however, matter and thought were unified through a paradoxical diversification of the properties of human understanding;
no longer simply and brutally a severance between intellect and sense perception, but contrary functions of the same human understanding as intellect, and instinct as intuition.
Suffice to say here that the yawning gulf that opens up between a mechanistic view of the natural world and the experience of living as a part of the whole life of the natural world, seeing it’s diverging developments in other life forms and yet being sensible to a unity in the entirety of nature necessitates a more complex, and at the same time, more holistic, fuller, more immediate account of human understanding.
In evolution, Bergson saw, (if only in terms to my liking!) a contradictory identity of unconscious matter and conscious life. And he did so according to a view of a contradictory identity of intellect and instinct, and intuition. What Bergson meant by intuition was the self-awareness which appears when instinct is turned inwardly away from the world external to the organism (in our case, the human being). Intellect for Bergson is understanding the relations between things, while instinct, and then intuition, grasps things immediately as they are. Intellect and intuition, though both aspects of human understanding, go in different directions. Intellect breaks experience down and understands the relationships between the broken down parts, hence scientific, even dialectical understanding. Intuition sees and knows immediately, but cannot go far in articulating into abstract thought. According to Bergson, ‘matter' is the domain understood according to intellect, ‘life’ is the domain for the understanding of intuition.
In Bergson, I see not a reification of new metaphysical entities or principles outside of experience, but a way of understanding the experience of reality from within reality. Therefore, through Bergson’s filling out of human understanding as a holistic diversification of function, we can get a picture of further contradictory identities;
the world as the contradictory identity of unity and plurality, of freedom and determinism, life as the contradictory identity of matter and consciousness, society as the contradictory identity of the collective and the individual, the individual consciousness as the contradictory identity of intellect and intuition, the individual as the contradictory identity of subject and object.
And- of form and emptiness to put an entirely compatible Buddhist gloss on it.
Something I’ve been thinking on lately is an application of the logic of contradictory identity to questions of culture, or more precisely, cultural identity which I feel is a swiftly intensifying field for friction and thus suffering in modern society, particularly in the west. Cultural identity is often predicated on an understanding or view of human collective memory. What I propose is that while there are uses – even beneficial uses- in affirming a sense of shared history and common experience in community building, the fact that it might be useful should not obscure it’s relative and arbitrary nature. Objectified, such an account of cultural identity is a construction, a product of the intellect. Furthermore, what is relatively useful, if taken as absolute in the sense of something static and transcendent, in contradiction to the absolute nature of relative change as immanent, these concepts of cultural identity will be fetters and dangerous vice-grips rather than enabling and vivifying.
I begin with Memory;
memory exists in the present, not separate from the present. It is real to the extent it is not treated objectively. When treated objectively, it becomes (so to speak) an abstraction, second order product. Even treating memory as the apparent crest of some great unconscious force a la Jung, or as constituting nodes in the network of immanent tradition a la Burke, is to abstract it and objectify what paradoxically is supposed to be grounded in the subjective. Better (in the sense of seeing the reality) to observe the non-separation of memory and present phenomena as the tissue of experience. Seeing the relative nature of the self and its dependence on conditions, both discernible at a local level, while incomprehensible in terms of the totality of the universal concatenation of causes and conditions, memory and the present are revealed in the form of a contradictory identity. What is objectified is properly regarded as a tool either for creative and/or beneficial social sentiment.