Order, Disorder, and Nothingness in the Philosophy of Henri Bergson

The French philosopher Henri Bergson considers most of language and symbolic thought to be oriented towards the solution of practical problems. Due to the practical orientation of most of language, it can create illusions when applied to metaphysical or philosophical problems.

As Bergson says, concepts "have most often been elaborated by the social organism in view of an object which has nothing to do with metaphysics. In order to form them society has cut out reality according to its needs." When one tries to use concepts initially created to solve practical problems to solve metaphysical problems, they will no doubt encounter paradoxes and dilemmas due to the reality that has been "cut out." For Bergson, the concepts "order," "disorder," and "nothing" are three such concepts.

According to Bergson, "nothing" is not the absence of being in an ontological sense. Instead, "nothing" refers to the presence of something, but it is something other than what is being sought. The concept of "nothing" is relative to a something that is the object of our attention. It is equivalent to "this is not what I am looking for" and as he describes it himself, this nothing is "our disappointment being expressed when we call this presence absence."

Likewise, negation does not signify the removal or absence of something in the absolute sense of a total void, rather negation is relative as well. Something may be negated, but that does not mean that absolutely nothing is there. For example, "Jimmy is not tall" does not mean "Jimmy has no height" rather it implies that "Jimmy is something other than tall."

For Bergson, nothingness is an impossibility. Absolute nothingness would amount to the total absence of any content of our experience and since to be conscious is to be conscious of something, absolute nothingness is equivalent to unconsciousness or death. Even in the seemingly empty spaces of the universe, far out of sight of any galaxy or planetary object, a person would still experience qualities such as blackness. The idea of an absolute nothing, according to Bergson, is not found within our experience. It is an illusionary idea created by the use of imprecise concepts that were developed for practical purposes.

As Sarah Richmond explains in her article about Jean-Paul Sartre and Bergson, Bergson claims that "negation has no immediate grounding in reality, but involves a 'subjective' point of view that can be sustained only by beings with sophisticated faculties (of memory, for example), and that its use is primarily social." The ability to imagine "nothingness," then, is merely the result of the ability of our imagination to always imagine a something other than.

Bergson's dismissive view of nothingness was criticized by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Although Sartre only mentions Bergson by name near the end of the chapter of Being and Nothingness entitled "Negations," according to Sarah Richmond, he is actively arguing against Bergson throughout the chapter. Sartre attacks Bergson's view of nothingness by using the example of looking for francs in a wallet:

"We believed for a moment that the negation could arise from the comparison instituted between the result anticipated and the result obtained. But let us look at that comparison. Here is an original fact: 'There are 1300 francs in my wallet.' Then there is another which is again, no more than an establishing of fact and an affirmation: 'I expected to find 1500 francs.' There we have real and objective facts, psychic and positive events, affirmative judgments. Where are we to place negation?

According to Sarah Richmond, this example is meant to show that negation cannot be replaced by affirmative judgments. The statement "I found something other than 1500 francs" is not equivalent to "I did not find 1500 francs" because, according to Richmond, "it fails to record, as the negative judgment does, the negative 'fact': that there are not (as I had thought) 1,500 francs in my wallet." If it is assumed that the statement "finding something other than 1500 francs" excludes the possibility of finding 1500 francs, then this something other than is an implicit negation. The term "not" has merely been replaced by "something other than" without removing the essential meaning of negation. It is true that something other than 1500 francs has been found, but it is also necessarily true that this something other is not 1500 francs.

This criticism fails to acknowledge the ontological nature of Bergson's view of nothingness. Although Bergson does not explicitly state that he is concerned with nothing and negation in a strictly ontological sense, his criticism is almost exclusively ontological in nature. Sartre, on the other hand, is concerned here with the logical meaning of negation. The something other than, for Bergson, is not a logical statement, it is a perceptual description. Bergson does not appear to be concerned with the relation of negation and nothingness in the realm of symbolic thought. On the contrary, he is concerned with the empiric nature of nothing (or the absence of its empiric nature.) One visually sees something other than what one expected or desired to find, but this something other is not perceptually devoid of content.

Even if we did encounter a total perceptual void, Bergson contends that "it would be limited, have contours, and would therefore be something." Nothingness and negation in a logical sense is one thing, in an empirical or perceptual sense, it is something quite different. Bergson argues that the former sense of nothing has useful applications, but that the latter is merely the confused and misapplied use of the former.

The concepts of order and disorder receive similar treatment to that of nothing. Analogous to nothingness, Bergson considers disorder to be "simply the order we are not looking for." Like nothingness, disorder is not the absence of something in the world. What we consider ordered and what we considered disordered is based upon what representative schema we are using. "All disorder thus includes two things: outside us, one order; within us, the representation of a different order which alone interests us." A similar line of though appears in a rather inconspicuous place, the Principia Discordia:

"The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered."

Although the authors of the Principia Discordia believe that chaos, which they consider to simply be information that a mind has not yet developed a "grid" or representation for, to precede both order and disorder, both the authors of the Principia Discordia and Bergson believe that order and disorder are relative concepts. Something appears ordered when it conforms to our expectations, while something that does not conform to our expectations appears disordered.

References:

Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2007).

Sarah Richmond, "Sartre and Bergson: A Disagreement about Nothingness," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15(1), 2001.

Malaclypse, Robert Anton Wilson, Kerry Thornley, The Principia Disordia (Loompanics Unlimited, 1980).