by Lewis R. Gordon
I have been reading the thought of Henri Bergson on a variety of issues of late. Much is due to the unfortunate turn of world events, where there is little room for humor and much threat to life. The great secular Jewish philosopher and Nobel Laureate was a thinker of profound insight. In his day, commentators spoke of “Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Bergson.” His unfortunate unplanned debate with Albert Einstein in 1922 followed by World War II dropped Bergson’s name from this roster of the greatest “western” philosophers (see Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time [Princeton UP]).
Yet for reasons I would have to save for another entry on this blog that encounter was not conclusive, and as developments continue to emerge in quantum physics and contemporary crises in physics, some revisiting of Bergson, among others, may be in order.
It is not philosophy of time that occasions this entry, however. It is, as stated at the outset, concerns about life.
I’m not alone in thinking through this trend. The Congolese philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi offered a wonderful recent study entitled Bergson ou l’humanité créatrice (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2013).
Yala Kisukidi is not the only scholar in Africana thought to offer a detailed study of Bergson’s influence over the past decade. Donna V. Jones’s The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism and Modernity (Columbia UP, 2010) stands as another.
I will focus on Jones’s text in this entry since the readers of this blog are primarily Anglophonic and hers is available in English. Readers of French are highly encouraged to consult Yala Kisukidi’s text, however, since it addresses pressing issues of creativity for our times. I will explore that text in French elsewhere should an English translation not come to print.
Jones’s book could be re-titled “Henri Bergson’s Influence on the Thought of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire.” Her argument is as follows.
Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy) emerged as a response to the scientific effort to demystify life as a mechanistic process or, in chemical terms, the reproductive capacities of certain molecular chains. Lost is the poetry of life as it is subordinated, drawing upon distinctions from Greek antiquity, to zoë versus bios. In effect, the elision of the two terms led to the presentation, under the rubric of biology, of what would have been in antiquity zoology. The living processes we share with animals and plants, in other words, are not identical with the broader terms of existence exemplified by the worlds of meaning and culture.
This distinction plays itself out in recent European continental thought, ranging from ideas drawn from Gilles Deleuze to Giorgio Agamben, with concerns of bare-life and otherwise, to offer a genealogical portrait of two strains—Nietzschean and Bergsonian—and their limitations. The primary limitation is a form of incoherence about the subject matter at hand, where life is not so much defined as offered in terms of its negation, namely, death.
Thus, life is extolled in terms of what it is not, and as such, its dependence on its negation finds correlates in social and political practices—such as, e.g., fascism’s effort to be life affirming through the rage it unleashes on what is supposedly the weak and the antithesis of life—namely, supposedly racially inferior subjects.
Although not the intent of a thinker like Bergson, the vagueness of the philosophy made it susceptible to a spectrum from left to right, from altruistic to selfish-egoistic, the result of which was a celebration of the irrational and the assertive.
This aspect of the book reminds me of the concerns of Ernst Cassirer in Myth of the State (Yale UP, 1946), but the concerns of Jones go beyond the question of the valorization of myth and the celebration of passionate man. The struggle against scientific rationality paved the way for Bergson’s critique, which offered alternatives of vital life forces and conceptions of experiential time, durée, rich with existential insights and which had an enormous influence on European thought in the first half of the twentieth century.
Jones offers a wonderful exegesis of Bergson’s thought, rich with historical contextualization beyond the framework of the dry philosophical associations to which readers have become accustomed and into that of the occult and the imagined resources of primitivism. By doing this, she shows his influence on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Placide Tempels, two architects of approaches to the study of Africans, the former ethnographic and the latter ethnophilosophical.
The debates occasioned by these Bergsonian-influenced responses to scientific rationality achieved their zenith in the crisis of European civilizations raised by World War I and World War II, which occasioned as well a crisis of reason and exploration of responses offered by sites of unreason—ultimately, colonized subjects.
Among the chorus of responses, argues Jones, were those from the colonized subjects themselves, among which was the focus of the last part of the book, although working throughout as a leitmotif: Négritude.
Both Senghor and Césaire, the most known proponents of Négritude, were influenced by Bergsonian vitalism, but the former collapsed into forms of essentialism because of investments in the dualisms wrought from the ethnographies that accompanied that form of vitalism. Négritude is a philosophy premised upon affirmation of the nègre’s (no equivalent in English, so context must suffice) lived experience and the centering of Africa. Césaire’s Négritude reached beyond Bergson, however, back to Nietzsche and raised concerns of return and Messianism that enabled him to reach beyond the conflation of life with time (Bergsonism) to articulate a more complex intellectual project of possibility.
The road taken to this path in The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy is a richly layered one. The condensed version I have offered here is for the sake of getting to the point. Here are some of the virtues of the book: it establishes its thesis well, that Bergsonism influenced the formation of Négritude. That point isn’t original, since scholars such as Abiola Irele (The Negritude Movement [Africa World Press, 2011]), Gregson Davis (Aimé Césaire [Cambridge UP, 2011]), and D.A. Masolo (African Philosophy in Search of Identity [Indiana UP, 1994]), among others, already stated the same. What this book offers is a detailed explication of what exactly Bergsonian philosophy is, its relation to other forms of vitalism, and a critique of its limitations, especially from the perspective of postcolonial and Africana critical theoretical concerns with colonization and race.
In fact, what the work adds here is the importance of understanding vitalism in race theory and also its importance in philosophical anthropology—indeed, in the emergence of philosophical anthropology as a first philosophy among theorists from the global south.
The human that haunts the figure of “man,” for instance, is a function of transcendental reflection on conditions of bios over the scientific assertion of zoë, whose correlates in varieties of distinctions, often confused as dualisms, emerge in the scientific assertion of extension/behavior/reference over intension/action/sense. Jones is correct, in other words, in identifying life philosophy also as a philosophy of cultural life.
I do, however, have some critical concerns about the text. Although this may not have been her intention, the book reads as part of a tendency against which I have been critical regarding studies of Africana thought. Quite often, the modus operandi is to explain black thinkers through the lens of white thinkers. Thus, there is a spate of scholarship on whether W.E. B. Du Bois was Emersonian, Hegelian, Husserlian, Weberian, etc. And similar kinds of bad classifications emerge on whether Frantz Fanon was Gramscian, Hegelian, Lacanian, Marxist, or Sartrean.
What is often lacking in studies of black thinkers is a careful evaluation of influence versus overdetermination. In other words, while it is clear that white thinkers influence black thinkers who studied in the Euromodern academy, it doesn’t follow that those are their sole influence. Indeed, more work needs to be done on black and other people of color’s often-unacknowledged influences on white thinkers.
Now, Jones doesn’t say this, and she does bring up the critical literature that raises the question of African influences on Senghor, but the text would have benefited from some discussion of the cosmologies and ontologies from various African communities. Whether among the Akan, Ibo, Luo, Serer (Senghor’s ethnicity), Tallensi, Wolof, or Yorúbà, there are concepts focusing on notions of life force without appeals to European vitalism. Their status as African forms of vitalism, and the extent to which they were available in the syncretic religions of the Caribbean, would pose important questions about their amenability and synthesis in recent Caribbean thought.
These are concerns in the history of philosophy mentioned not only by Paget Henry in his Caliban’s Reason (Routledge, 2000), but also by Kwame Gyekye in his Essay on African Philosophical Thought (Temple UP, 1987; revised edition, 1995) and this author in such works as Existentia Africana (Routledge, 2000) and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 2008).
The upshot is that influence here functions no differently than would, say, what the predecessors of Kant or Hegel had on them, in addition to the cultural and intellectual resources offered by, say, Lutheranism and the array of mythological resources that brought meaning to Prussian and German life. There are expectations on how to produce texts for the Western academy that place constraints on such studies, and Jones’s is commendable for how much it is a synthesis, but in the end, the narrative remains a very much European text throughout, which raises the question of its lacunae.
An additional consideration is the question of alternatives to the rejection of appealing to life as a normative ideal. Of course, the fetishizing of life collapses on itself, as does the fetishizing of time, as Jones points out. But perhaps a discussion of the notion of, for example, existential seriousness would bring to the fore the paradox of what is involved in taking life too seriously. Perhaps life is lived the extent to which it is not valorized or is at least not overly serious. The paradox here is that life is nevertheless centered, and could it be afforded not to be for those who have faced genocide and degradation of their humanity? Is, in other words, it really the case that African Diasporic vitalism falls into the same trap as (white) European vitalism?
This concern is all the more apparent when one considers the near deontological rejection of race in The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy. As the move into a race discourse is treated as a form of jeopardy, an African Diasporic response is that racialized subjects who fail to take race into account will leave themselves imperiled, as contemporary world events echo the fascism Bergson found himself standing up against at the end of his life. Informed he was exempt from wearing the yellow Star of David armband because of his high achievements, Bergson insisted on wearing it in solidarity with fellow Jews in Vichy France. He stayed in France, facing those terrible circumstances, into his death in 1941. He set by way of example that respecting life means being willing to face death.
In a wonderful section of the book, Jones brings nuance to this discussion in a fascinating way when she points out the associations of Jews with mediation and blacks with immediacy. The question to the latter is that of the problematic of black intellectual history in the first place, of the project of African Diasporic thought, and also the realization of the utopian hopes of reason, for, as the situation of Jews (and the presence of Jews in classical Frankfurt School critical theory) attests—the achievement of mediation does not entail that of liberation. It is a lesson those who are now complicit with American white assimilation practices may wish to remember as familiar signs of fascism return.
I address the question and fallacies of thought as white in my books Existentia Africana and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. To this list we should add (among others) Leonard Harris’s classic anthology Philosophy Born of Struggle (Kendall Hunt 1983).
Addressing intellectual history, Jones at times laments some issues as not receiving attention in the critical literature, though the evidence reveals otherwise. Fanon’s critique of the applicability of Hegel’s Lord–Bondsman relationship to the racialized and colonized subject has, for example, received much attention in Africana philosophy, especially in my writings on Fanon. I take it she is referring to the attention of European or white authors. On that score, the conclusion should serve as evidence of a lack of academic rigor on the part of such scholars instead of a failure of scholarship in and of itself since, after all, nonwhite scholars’ work should count in the orbit of scholarship. If so, the best thing to do is to acknowledge their work and build on their achievements.
Another critical consideration is that the Jewishness of some thinkers in the text is also downplayed, such as Spinoza’s, Adorno’s, and even Bergson’s, for example, and attention to the complexity of Jewish identity in the French world would have perhaps brought Simone Weil into the discussion since she, like Bergson, was Jewish with an affection for Catholicism—and she, as is well known, took refuge in mysticism while making public protests against injustice.
These considerations are not, however, condemning. In fact, that they are raised is one of the virtues of The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy. It deserves a place in seminars on its subtitled areas: Négritude, vitalism, modernity, and, to them I would add studies of Bergson and existentialism. It does so much that it makes the knowledgeable reader ache for more. As the travails of our times unfold, Jones has done her part to assure that more explorations of Bergson’s insights in conversation with Africana thought are no doubt destined to come.
Lewis R. Gordon is Executive Editor of Black Issues in Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; the 2018–2019 Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair in Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal; Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa; and chair of the Awards Committee for the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
