Postcolonial Bergson

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Lindsay Turner

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780823285846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial Bergson traces the influence of Bergson's thought through the work of two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Poets and statesmen as well as philosophers, both of these thinkers—the one Muslim and the other Catholic—played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson's work, important support for their philosophical, cultural, and political projects.For Iqbal, a founding father of independent Pakistan, Bergson's conceptions of time and creative evolution resonated with the need for the "reconstruction of religious thought in Islam, " a religious thought newly able to incorporate innovation and change. For Senghor, Bergsonian ideas of perception, intuition, and élan vital— filtered in part through the work of the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—proved crucial for thinking about African art, as well as foundational for his formulations of African socialism and his visions of an unalienated African future.At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson's philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson's thought in a postcolonial context.

1

BERGSONISM IN THE THOUGHT OF LÉOPOLD SÉDAR SENGHOR

Across the writings of the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, we find the names that make up his literary and intellectual genealogy. These include Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Claudel, and Charles Baudelaire; he explains that despite the connections between his work and Saint-John Perse’s, he only discovered the latter late in his career. On the African side are the poets he calls his “Three Graces” or sometimes his “Muses”: three female poets from his homeland, inspired composers of gymnique songs in honor of Serer wrestlers, Serer being the ethnicity to which Senghor belonged. Philosophers he cites include Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, of course Karl Marx, Jacques Maritain, Gaston Berger, occasionally Friedrich Nietzsche, and always Bergson. Senghor takes every opportunity to remind us that his thought is born out of what he calls the “1889 revolution.”

The year 1889 marked the publication of Henri Bergson’s doctoral thesis, Time and Free Will. Here is Senghor’s description of that year’s significance for the history of thought and poetic creation: “1889 is … an important date in the history of philosophy and literature, as well as the history of art. This is the year of two major works: Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will and Paul Claudel’s Tête d’or, to which I would also add Arthur Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, which foreshadowed them in 1873, so to speak.”¹

It would be too simple to say that Bergson influenced Senghor’s philosophical thought while Rimbaud and Claudel influenced his poetic writing. For Senghor, Bergson represented what we might call the “spirit of 1889” in its totality and brought into being a philosophical truth that was diffused as much in literature as in philosophy, the arts, and even the sciences. Bergson’s oeuvre was the 1889 revolution.²

Let us turn to Time and Free Will to examine what in it seemed so revolutionary to Senghor and many others. These “others” include Bergson himself, who was perfectly conscious of the profound rupture that his first book made in the course of the history of philosophy after Aristotle. The revolution of 1889 is not among those movements that become conscious of themselves only after the fact. On the contrary, in the book’s concluding lines, after having completed “the analysis of the ideas of duration and voluntary determination”—“the principal object of this work,”³ as he writes—Bergson affirms that what he has proven has only been possible because he has put an end to the “mistake” of “tak[ing] time to be an homogenous medium” without paying attention to the fact that “that real duration is made up of moments inside one another, and that when it seems to assume the form of a homogeneous whole, it is because it gets expressed in space.”⁴ This error, which he specifies is also Kant’s, is the direction most generally taken by Western thought, led by the Eleatics and their paradoxes about time. These paradoxes, Bergson explains, are born out of a conception that thinks space under the concept of time—or rather, over it, that only thinks time by turning it into spatial extension. For example, time is the distance that separates the moment when I am speaking to you from the one when I will have lunch. We will return in slightly greater depth to this notion of spatialized time, and the problems it entails, when we address the question of Muhammed Iqbal’s Bergsonism.

For now, concerning the 1889 revolution’s influence on Senghor, let us instead focus on the specific faculty in us that is able to grasp time as interpenetrating moments—in other words, as duration—rather than moments aligned or juxtaposed in a series. To perceive this faculty, Bergson tells us, supposes that, “digging below the surface of contact between the self and external objects, we penetrate into the depths of the organized and living intelligence.”⁵ More than anything else, this is what composes the “1889 revolution” for Senghor: the illumination, beneath the analytic intelligence—the faculty that understands by analyzing and separating parts external to each other (partes extra partes)—of the faculty of vital knowledge, which in a single immediate and instantaneous cognitive gesture can comprehend a composition that is living, not mechanical, and therefore cannot be decomposed. If beneath our conception of time is the understanding of duration—or if, more generally, underneath the apparent immediacy of things (beneath their “bark,” as Senghor says) is their reality (for Senghor, “subreality”)—this is because beneath the intelligence that analyzes and calculates (in the etymological sense of arranging things as if they were pebbles) there is the intelligence that always synthesizes and that always comprehends (here again in the etymological sense).

To recognize the rupture that Bergsonism brings about in the history of Western philosophy, then, as Senghor does, is also to celebrate the fact that this rupture made audible the speech of the comprehending intelligence, first revealing it to itself. Indeed, for Senghor, it is especially—although this is not to say exclusively—in the language of the comprehending intelligence that the thoughts and conceptions of the African world are expressed, particularly those that come from works of art. We will return to this. We know what Bergson says about the difficulty of speaking this language, of clearly and distinctly defining a concept such as “duration” in the language of philosophy received from the Aristotelian tradition. We might, though, approach such a concept via metaphor, since the language we ordinarily speak is that of the intelligence-that-separates, for which the idea of time is immediately thought, according to Henri Gouhier, in words and concepts that pertain to the “false immediate” “of useful and useable time, calendar-time and watch-time.” The task is therefore to make the language of the intelligence-that-comprehends audible—or, rather, audible again. For the Hellenist in Senghor, as well as the Catholic attentive to matters of faith, never fails to remind us that before the analytic turn of thought, toward the ratio, there was the reality of what the poet calls the “humid and vibratory” logos—which has, so to speak, now dried up.

Ratio on the one hand and logos on the other: In two different ways, first in Latin and then in Greek, Senghor translates what is ultimately almost the same thing, presenting two possible approaches to the real. Perhaps more clearly, he also speaks of that difference as between a “reason-eye” and a “reason-embrace.” Constant here is the establishment of two ways of knowing: first, an “analytic” cognitive approach, which involves the digging-out of distance between the perceived object and the perceiving subject and which sees the object as the sum of its parts; second, a cognitive approach we will call “synthetic,” for symmetry. This approach locates us immediately at the heart of the object, no longer defined in opposition to the subject, at the heart of its “subreality” that is its own rhythm—hence Senghor’s frequent play on words in speaking of thinking [penser] the object as a manner of dancing it [dancer].

This brings us to a remark about Senghor’s philosophy as a philosophy of dance. Since dance is very present in Senghor’s theoretical writings, as well as his poetry, it is tempting to see it as simply an African motif. But such an understanding risks missing precisely what Senghor’s thought owes to Bergson, from whom Senghor learned to think and formulate the notion of a “corporal cogito,” as a movement among the movements of things, a notion that we can also find in contemporary work in neuroscience. Alain Berthoz, for example, shows that the world is not our representation but rather our action, revealing the nature of the brain as a “projector,” a “simulator and an emulator” of reality, constructing the world it perceives as a function of the actions it projects.⁶

A name for the other approach Senghor explores, following Bergson, is “emotion,” whose etymology (e-motion) is always present in the poet’s mind when he writes it. This term underscores the primacy of movement in the act of knowing, as opposed to the idea that it is necessary to immobilize in order to grasp. It is important to insist that emotion is not simple feeling but a real cognitive movement, as Jean-Paul Sartre lays out in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Moreover, we know how important Sartre’s thought was for Senghor’s philosophy, in terms of his analyses of “being-in-the-world” and of emotion, and of course via his influential “preface,” Black Orpheus, written for Senghor’s 1948 poetry anthology that brought together African, Madagascan, and Caribbean poets.

Two consequences follow from Senghor’s Bergsonism, understood as this duality between “reason-eye” and “reason-embrace.” The first concerns a critique of his thought as ultimately only a reprise of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s theories of “primitive mentality.” The second demonstrates why all of Senghor’s thought leads back to a reflection on African art.

What is this supposed Lévy-Bruhlism on Senghor’s part, the object of one of the two major critiques of his work? Before quickly returning to this, let us briefly evoke the other critique, which accuses the poet of the mortal sin of essentialism. In this view, Senghor is seen to have presented the meeting—or perhaps the face-off—of cultures as occurring between pure and massive identities in a sort of exaltation of radical difference—in a word, to have simplified the world into black and white. This critique essentially recapitulates an idea already expressed by Sartre in Black Orpheus, in which he contended that the movement initiated by Senghor, Césaire, and Damas in the 1930s in Paris corresponded to the figure of the negation of negation, a moment of radical opposition that he even called an “antiracist racism.” Such a moment would then ultimately need to transcend itself dialectically into a later moment that would see the advent of a human society without race. For Sartre, the only agent of this advent is the proletariat, which—in the Marxist logic that that structures Black Orpheus—is the class that is the bearer of the universal to come.

It is undeniable that Senghor’s language is often essentializing. And Sartre is partially correct: In the very principles of the movement that called itself Negritude is what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would call a “strategic essentialism”—that is, essentialism as response and resistance. But this language is also continually shadowed by the language of hybridity and fluid identity, and we must be careful not to forget that before he is the poet of Negritude, Senghor is a theorist of métissage conceived not as biological accident (what happens to essence, or rather essences, when they meet) but as horizon and norm. Thus, he declares that “each person must be métis in their own way.”

Returning to the critique that accuses Senghor of Lévy-Bruhlism: Admittedly, the Senegalese poet himself provided grounds for this in one of his first publications. To have written that “emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic” [l’émotion est nègre comme la raision hellène] purely for the pleasure of crafting an alexandrine! This phrase first appeared in “What the Black Man Contributes,” published in 1937, and as it would be “that through which the occasion comes,” so to speak, Senghor would find it difficult to shake, the phrase coming almost mechanically to mind whenever Negritude is evoked. Senghor himself would come back to it often, often simultaneously insistent and palinodic.

But let us examine the accusation, which this phrase might seem unfortunately to prove, that Senghor has only reproduced Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s premises, taking the latter’s characterization of a prelogical primitive mentality as his own—or, rather, on behalf of African peoples. First, a note on Lévy-Bruhl’s method. Philosopher before all else, Lévy-Bruhl set out to establish proof that the study of ethics and moral science (this is the title of his 1903 work [La Morale et la Science des Moeurs]) can only happen in given singular societies and that there is no such thing as a universal ethics that would apply to “man in general.” This conviction leads him to ethnology, a discipline to which he arrives with absolutely no interest in what we call “fieldwork.” He is indifferent to what others actually are and has no use for them other than to know them as part of a foreign world. Indeed, he might have written the famous opening of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques: “I hate travelling and explorers.” It is not out of interest in others that he turns to ethnology but rather in order to establish their radical alterity, to make them even more other. This is accomplished by setting on one side “our” logic, by which we think within a framework of the principles of identity, contradiction, and excluded middle, and on the other side a prelogic that is so strange to us that it is practically impossible to speak about. All that can be known about it is that it functions according to a “law of participation,” which explains its indifference to the principle of contradiction: a sort of “alter-logic” in which it is simultaneously possible to be on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Locating the Postcolonial Idea
• Introduction
• 1. Bergsonism in the Thought of Léopold Sédar Senghor
• 2. Senghor’s African Socialism
• 3. Bergson, Iqbal, and the Concept of Ijtihad
• 4. Time and Fatalism: Iqbal on Islamic Fatalism
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index