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The Sublime and the

Intellectual Effort: The
Imagination In Bergson and
Kant
a

Valentine Moulard-Leonard
a

The University of Memphis

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Valentine Moulard-Leonard (2006) The Sublime and the
Intellectual Effort: The Imagination In Bergson and Kant, Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, 37:2, 138-151, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2006.11006577
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2006.11006577

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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 37, No. 2, May 2006

THE SUBLIME AND THE INTELLECTUAL EFFORT:

THE IMAGINATION IN BERGSON AND KANT 1
VALENTINE MOULARD-LEONARD

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Either metaphysics is only this game of ideas, or else, if it is to be a serious occupation of the
mind, it must transcend concepts to arrive at intuition.
Henri Bergson

Matter and Memorys endeavour to overcome the theoretical difficulties that

necessarily plague dualism2 can be read as Bergsons original staging of the
very problem that Kants Critical method was tackling namely that of the
relationship between thought and things. While Kants invaluable contributions
to modern thought have become inseparable from the idea of a Copernican
revolution (i.e., Let us suppose that objects are a function of our cognitive
faculties, rather than assuming that our knowledge must adjust itself to
objects),3 it has been suggested that the Bergsonian methodology that Matter
and Memory introduces also constitutes, in its own right, yet another
Copernican revolution.4 In fact, I want to add, it amounts to a Copernican
revolution of the Copernican revolution, as Bergson shows that Kants division
between the phenomenal and the noumenal and his consequent affirmation
that knowledge cannot possibly reach beyond sensible experience are
themselves contingent. Relying on his groundbreaking notion of duration (la
dure) to rework the differences and relations between matter and perception,
consciousness and memory, spirit and experience, Bergson concludes that it is
only abstractly that we can separate brain, body and world (BKW, 12).
Immeasurable consequences follow from this. The main consequence of the
Bergsonian revolution is that the conditions and the status of experience no
longer fit into the Kantian or the phenomenological framework. Since for
Bergson, the conditions of experience are no longer external to it, he in effect
provides us with a radically new conception of experience as integral
experience.5 This means that his account of knowledge and intuition, and
correlatively, of the role of the imagination, will also be very different from
Kants. In what follows, I want to show that while Bergsons dispute with
Kantianism lies at the source of his new philosophy, it also continuously
informs the development of his thought. This, in turn, suggests that the point of
diffraction between the two thinkers must be seen to arise against the backdrop
of a fundamental convergence, in spirit at least, between the two systems.
However, if experience is no longer limited by some abstractly posited a priori
forms, then knowledge is no longer irremediably reduced to so-called
phenomena. In short, through Bergsons overcoming of the dead ends of
classical dualism, the very meaning of the transcendental is transformed.
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1. From Possibility to Virtuality; an overview of the Bergsonian Critique of

Kant
Bergsons first published book, Time and Free Will,6 already presents itself
as a radical rewriting of the transcendental aesthetics. There, against Kants
reduction of time to a homogenous milieu, a container indifferent to what it
contains and thereby indistinguishable from space, Bergson introduces the
notion of duration, which will subtend all of his subsequent philosophical
innovations. Bergson suggests that from Kants reduction of time to space
arise all the shortcomings of Transcendental Idealism, from its inability to
think concrete freedom (i.e., the antinomies) through to its confinement of
knowledge to a phenomenal world of appearances irrevocably alienated from
the realm of the things-in-themselves.
This becomes even clearer in the 1907 Creative Evolution,7 where Bergson
introduces the notion of virtual multiplicity to account for the creative, hence
unpredictable changes that continuously inform the evolution of life. He
contends that if one allows for the reality and efficacy of time, then one must
substitute virtuality for the notion of possibility that subtends the Kantian
system. If the Kantian transcendental coincides with conditions of possibility
(i.e., homogenous time and space) that are copied from what they condition
(i.e., empirical experience) and then projected back, then this notion of
possibility forecloses any production of the new from the outset.8 While
possibility befits a closed system such as Kants Critical architectonic, it
cannot account for the real open system of the evolution of life. As intelligent
beings, we do to some extent belong to the Kantian system of science; but as
living beings, we equally pertain to the open system of life. Because the
evolution of life is imbued with creative unpredictability, it is true that the
intelligence cannot grasp it, that the real extends beyond the intellect. But
Bergson and Kant draw very different implications from this.
Kant equates the intellect or the understanding with the necessary forms of
all possible experience, thereby concluding that all intuitions must be
sensible or infra-intellectual (CE 359/391) that, in other words, in the
confrontation between the real and the intellect, the intellect, in its fixing,
delimiting and symbolizing activity, has the last word. In contrast, Bergson
shows that the intelligences negative activity must be the negation of
something, and that we must in some sense perceive this something in order
to delimit it in the first place. In other words, Kants reliance on possibility
implies an unbridgeable gap between contingency (or the possible; the
conditioned; experience; knowledge; sensibility) and necessity (the
unconditioned conditions; reason; the unknowable; the supersensible). On the
contrary, Bergsons appeal to virtuality allows him to establish a passage
between contingency and necessity: because consciousness necessarily
involves memory, it coincides with duration; because duration, like life, is a
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virtual multiplicity, it is our point of contact with the vital order of evolution;
because evolution is creative, it involves a vital impulse which cannot be
reduced to material determinism. For Bergson, then, the relation between
thought and things cannot simply be accounted for in terms of the
understanding imposing its a priori categories on the real. More profoundly,
it must and can be traced to an intuition of the vital itself an intuition that
the understanding would analyze, translate and symbolize, but that would in
itself extend beyond the intellect. Ultimately, it is for the sake of this
affirmation of the reality of a supra-intellectual intuition (which nonetheless
remains continuous with sensible intuition) that Bergsonism repudiates
Transcendental Idealism. In short, while Transcendental Idealism is right to
claim that its access is limited to one aspect of the real, it is wrong to pretend
that this kind of experience is the only one we can have. I believe that it is
here, in their divergent conceptions of the relation between contingency and
necessity (or their respective positions on the status of intuition) that the most
significant point of diffraction between the two thinkers must be located; that
ultimately, it is from this difference that all their other conflicting
metaphysical and epistemological claims unfold.
2. The Sublime, the Abyss, and Reflective Judgment
Here, I would like to approach this issue of the divergence between Bergson
and Kant through the latters conception of aesthetic judgment. I contend that
the space Kant has reserved for reflective aesthetic judgment that space
between intuition (qua empirical perception) and understanding, where the
imagination is most free in fact coincides, for Bergson, with the space in
which all philosophy must be rooted. For if, as Bergson sees it, metaphysics
must be defined as going beyond the human condition a rigorous task that
his method of intuition aims to ensure then it appears that the Kantian
experience of the sublime precisely provides that milieu. I will therefore begin
this investigation with the specific case of the unbridgeable gap Kant sees
between apprehension and comprehension and that, in his view, is constitutive
of the experience of the mathematical sublime. In the Analytic of the
Sublime Kant writes,
Hence nature is sublime in those of its appearances whose [perceptions] carry with it the idea
of their infinity. But the only way for this to occur is through the inadequacy of even the
greatest effort of our imagination to estimate the objects magnitude. In the mathematical
estimation of magnitude, however, the imagination is equal to the task of providing, for any
object, a measure that will suffice for this estimation, because the understandings numerical
concepts can be used in a progression and so can make any measure adequate to any given
magnitude. Hence it must be the aesthetic estimation of magnitude where we feel that effort,
our imaginations effort to perform a progressive apprehension in a whole of intuition, and
where at the same time we perceive the inadequacy of the imagination [comprehension]
unbounded though it is as far as progressing is concerned for taking in and using, for the
estimation of magnitude, a basic measure that is suitable for this with the minimal expenditure

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on the part of the understanding. Now the proper unchangeable basic measure of nature is the
absolute whole of nature, which, in the case of nature as appearance, is infinity
comprehended. This basic measure, however, is a self-contradictory concept (because an
absolute totality of an endless progression is impossible). Hence that magnitude of a natural
object to which the imagination fruitlessly applies its entire ability to comprehend must lead
the concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (which underlies both nature and our ability
to think), a substrate that is large beyond any standard of sense and hence makes us judge as
sublime not so much the object as the mental attunement in which we find ourselves when
we estimate the object.9

It thus appears that, according to Kant, it is the gap between apprehension and
comprehension that allows for and indeed demands the sublime experience
as the necessary yet hopeless effort of the imagination to estimate the
magnitude of the sublime object (e.g., a tempest). In order to yield the only
concept adequate for a proper estimation of this apprehended magnitude
hence a successfully determinate judgment capable of producing knowledge
the intuitive comprehension of this object would also have to encompass the
absolute, unconditioned whole of nature. However, Kant adds, such a concept
of infinity comprehended is logically impossible, since the infinity of nature
implies at once the contradictory attributes of 1) an absolute, hence complete
totality; and 2) an open-ended progression or evolution. Therefore, he
concludes, the absolute whole of nature must be a supersensible concept,
pertaining to reason rather than the understanding. For Kant, then, this gap
between apprehension and comprehension is what makes it de jure impossible
for us to know the whole. Thus, from the point of view of the unconditioned
whole, knowledge is contingent.
However, Kant continues, if this cannot be a case of an objective judgment
of cognition, it is nevertheless a case of a subjective judgment of reflection.
For, from the point of view of the limited power of the imagination and its
consequent inability to bridge the gap between sensible perception and
intellectual understanding by means of schematization, something positive
happens. From the point of view of the subjects limited sensibility, what
happens in this abyss is a certain mental attunement, a quickening or
enlivening of the faculties, which is experienced as a difficult yet pleasurable
effort. On the one hand, the feeling that arises from the imaginations inability
to match an idea of reason, such as the idea of the boundlessness of nature,
gives us a sense of our own inadequacy and is therefore frightening. On the
other hand, this same dwarfing feeling that arises from the realization of our
own inadequacy is highly and most nobly pleasurable. For this fruitless effort
is also, at the same time, a striving toward rational ideas; and this striving
toward rational ideas is still a law imposed on us by reason (CJ, Part I, Book
2, 27, p. 115). Thus, the feeling of the sublime is respect for our own
vocation, which is thinking. In short, the feeling of the sublime is none other
than the pleasure to think.
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Finally, the sublime is an aesthetic rather than a determinative judgment for

two reasons: 1) because it involves a complex pleasure that is no mere
sensuous agreeableness; 2) because although the presence of the great object
may be its occasion, it is not its cause. In the end, the claim of the type this
storm is sublime is not really a judgment about the object-storm out there;
rather, it is about the subjective, pleasurable effort of the imagination that the
perception of the storm demands of me.
Now, what would Bergson have to say about this?
3. Duration and Pure Perception: Bergsons Rethinking of the Subject/Object
Distinction
From a Bergsonian point of view, we could say that the irremediable
inability of the imagination to comprehend the understandings potentially
unlimited apprehension of the infinitely great object in Kant stems from the
latters confusion of time with space. We suggested above that, as Kant sees it,
the abyss of the sublime and the concomitant effort of the imagination are due
to the fact that on the one hand, the understandings numerical concepts can
be used in a progression and so can make any measure adequate to any given
magnitude (CJ, Part I, Book 2, 26, p.112). But on the other hand, this openended progressive apprehension is conceptually incompatible with the
imaginations instantaneous comprehension of its object and its taking a
measure all at once (i.e., the tempest and the infinite whole of nature). In short,
situated as it is between sensibility and the understanding, the imagination
finds itself stretched to its own limit and unable to schematize or to match
its sensible with its intellectual poles properly. This forces the imagination
into a free play which, although aesthetically productive, remains doomed to
epistemological failure. The result is that freedom is sacrificed to reason. But
what happens if, with Bergson, we replace the imagination where it belongs,
i.e., within the flow of duration? I believe that what happens is that the radical
incompatibilities and sacrifices that characterize Kants account fade away.
Let me explain.
Bergsons revaluation of the transcendental aesthetics in Time and Free Will
relies on his original distinction between a quantitative, discrete, actual
multiplicity akin to number on the one hand; and a qualitative, continuous,
virtual multiplicity on the other. Consciousness lived duration is a continuous
and qualitative multiplicity because it enfolds a confused plurality of
interpenetrating terms. It is only by means of an intellectual abstraction from
this incessant flow that we can even begin to speak of discrete states and
well-defined discontinuous objects. Now, at first sight it seems that we could
superpose Kants division between apprehension and comprehension onto this
one. On the one hand, we would have the progressive apprehension coinciding
with Bergsons discrete and quantitative multiplicity; and on the other hand,
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we would have the at once comprehension corresponding to consciousness

qualitative multiplicity. Not so.
The radical novelty of Bergsons approach here lies in his connection of the
continuous with the heterogeneous (duration), on the one hand, and of the
discontinuous with the homogenous (space), on the other.10 In a somewhat
counter-intuitive way, Bergson shows that duration is heterogeneous because
it is continuous. As a virtual multiplicity of interpenetrating states, it is
essentially indivisible, which means that as soon as we try to analyze it (break
the continuity), it changes in kind hence the qualitative heterogeneity. Thus,
if the Kantian distinction between progressive apprehension and at once
comprehension could be matched onto the Bergsonian distinction, then the
incompatibility between apprehensions quantitative succession and
comprehensions qualitative unity would not arise. One could pass insensibly
from one to the other.11 The logical incompatibility arises in Kant because for
him both the quantitative (apprehension) and the qualitative (comprehension)
moments of consciousness are rooted in one homogeneous multiplicity. Thus,
no effort of the imagination, however free and creative it may be, can yield a
concept that would adequately harmonize the two. Instead, heterogeneity has
to be located between the two moments; hence the abyss, and the merely
aesthetic experience of the sublime merely because in Kants greater
scheme of providing a ground for scientific knowledge, it is a sign of
inferiority.
Thus when, in Time and Free Will, Bergson criticizes Kant for confusing
time with space, his contention is at least twofold. First, he reproaches Kant
with failing to distinguish between two kinds of multiplicities (the
homogeneous and the heterogeneous). Second, Bergson notes that this
amounts to a failure to account for the specificity of consciousness alogical
temporality. In response, Bergson introduces a virtual dimension of psychical
reality, whereby unity and heterogeneity are compatible. This virtual
dimension he names duration.
How does this amount to a rethinking of the subject/object distinction on
Bergsons part? In fact, we have to turn to his later works for a satisfying
answer to this question. While the 1889 Time and Free Will still confines
duration or virtuality to the subjective workings of consciousness, by the 1907
Creative Evolution the virtual will sustain a full-blown ontology of selfalteration, encompassing the evolution of Life or Nature as a whole.
As I mentioned above, Matter and Memory explicitly endeavours to
overcome the theoretical difficulties that always beset dualism. It remains,
however, frankly dualistic, as Bergson wishes to uphold both the reality of
matter and the reality of spirit (MM 1/9). This should suffice to reassure those
who worry that Bergsons intuitionism and his concomitant affirmation of
the absoluteness of knowledge may collapse into some pernicious version of
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idealism. Nevertheless, Bergson does not hesitate to base this ambitious

project in a term borrowed from the idealist tradition, namely the image.
By image, Bergson means a certain existence which is more than that
which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist
calls a thing an existence placed halfway between the thing and the
representation (MM 1/9). I will not insist here on the obvious similarity we
can already note between Bergsons localization of the image and the in
between function Kant ascribes to the imagination. The important point is
that, for Kant, the imagination is always already located on the side of the
transcendental subject; in the end, it is therefore necessarily subjected to the
authority of the other faculties. Even in the aesthetic experience of the
sublime, the imagination is the site of a struggle that only reason can pacify.
In contrast, in Matter and Memory the image precedes subjectivity, and in fact,
conscious perception is deduced from it.
Bergson shows this by means of his theory of pure perception. Beyond
both idealism (even in its Transcendental form) and realism, Bergson aims to
show that our knowledge of things, in its pure state, takes place in the world,
amongst the things it represents rather than in the mind. One can already
see that Bergson will not need to appeal to a priori forms of time and space
to account for conscious representation. For him, perception is continuous
with matter. Bergson in effect reattaches perception to the real; this
reattachment takes place through my body, and in particular, my brain. The
theory of pure perception thus allows Bergson to affirm that the difference
between the material brain and (the abstract notion of) a purely objective
reality is not one of nature, but of degree. This obviously goes against all
Cartesian dualisms.
But Bergson is well aware that pure perception is ideal or in principle
perception. The function of this hypothesis is to show that in fact, conscious
representation is really a diminution of the whole of images, a selection of
those images that interest me for practical purposes. For him, then,
consciousness adds nothing to the real; rather, it literally slices it up the
etymological meaning of discernment (MM, 38). This cutting up of the real in
accordance with my vital interests is not the result of some abstract imposition
of transcendental forms that would then irremediably separate my subjective
experience from the objective whole of the real, as Kant would have it. Instead,
Bergson shows that this discernment arises from my concrete bodily activity.
Pure perception is ideal and cannot account for our actual experience of the
real because duration has been abstracted from it. The next move will thus
require the reintroduction of the duration essential to any conscious
experience. In short, it requires the reintroduction of memory. Ultimately,
then, Bergsons account of the perceptive experience fundamentally differs
from Kants and from Phenomenologys because, as Leonard Lawlor puts it,
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what properly defines that experience is not so much the perception of matter
as it is the memory of matter.12
4. Memory and the Planes of Experience
In Time and Free Will, duration remains confined to the psychological
realm. It appears that a strict difference in kind between objective reality and
the subjective realm still holds. But Matter and Memory pushes the elementary
insight of the heterogeneous multiplicity further, so as to complete a
fundamental displacement of the subject-object distinction. There, Bergson
considers the possibility of extending duration to things Do things endure in
their own way? Creative Evolutions answer will be a definite yes. Put
otherwise, Bergson wants to uphold the reality of a spectrum of experience
ranging from material unconsciousness to human self-consciousness, and
from intent attention to life (or contraction) to intense dreaminess (relaxation).
The distinction between those different planes of consciousness must be
accounted for in terms of the essential function that memory, in its diverse
forms, plays in the constitution of experience.
Consciousness coincides with duration for in fact, there is for us nothing
that is instantaneous, since the very notion of instantaneity already requires
the work of memory, which prolongs into each other the abstractly discrete
moments of time (MM 72/69). For Bergson, then, subjectivity consists above
all in the import of memory, whose work consists mainly in contracting a
multiplicity of real moments of things into a simple moment of our
consciousness (ibid). Thus, memory coincides with the continuous and
heterogeneous multiplicity that defines duration. This ultimately implies that
the sensible qualities would be known in themselves, from within and not
from without, could we disengage from that particular rhythm of duration
which characterizes our consciousness (ibid). If pure perception was the
theoretical removal of duration from perception, pure intuition will consist in
the methodological disengagement from ones particular rhythm of duration so
as to access experiences or rhythms of duration other than our own. According
to Bergson, this is possible because as a continuous and heterogeneous
multiplicity, memory virtually contains the infinite whole of the past, and
eventually, of Nature as well.
Notice that here, with the introduction of the unconscious or virtual past,
Bergson is able to solve the Kantian dilemma rooted in the incompatibility
between apprehension and comprehension! As we noted above, Kant confines
the two dimensions of experience (namely, the at once comprehension and
the progressive, hence indefinitely open apprehension) to the same
homogeneous plane of mathematical logic; that is why he is necessarily
conduced to an irreducible incompatibility between them. Now, like the
transcendental, the virtual constitutes a ground for actual experience. But the
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transcendental ground is a flat and impervious limit designed to insure our

pragmatic scientific knowledge; as such, it irremediably separates the
phenomenal and the noumenal realms. Alternatively, Bergson provides us with
a virtual dimension whose constant interaction with the actual constitutes a
depth that allows for passages and transitions between different planes of
experience which would remain inconceivable in terms of pragmatically
oriented logic. It is in this sense that I could claim earlier that the virtual
transforms the very meaning of the transcendental.
In fact, I contend that Bergsons account of the intellectual effort as the
privileged locus of the transition from one plane of experience to another
provides us with the key to the essential point of diffraction between Kants
Transcendental Idealism and Bergsons Virtual Empiricism.
5. The Intellectual Effort and the Imagination
We have seen that, for Kant, the positive aspect of the experience of the
sublime is that it necessitates a violent effort on the part of the imagination.
This effort is intellectual even though it is rooted in an aesthetic experience.
As we pointed out above, this experience is categorized as aesthetic, precisely
because is yields a pleasure and this pleasure is none other than the pleasure
to think. For Kant, then, the effort is deemed fruitless not because it fails to
produce thinking; on the contrary, it is the very fruitlessness of the effort of the
imagination to produce a concept of the understanding that necessitates the
thinking. Simple understanding, or the imposition of ready-made concepts
onto the sensible, does not in itself produce any thinking. Rather, thinking
requires a striving toward ideas of reason. More precisely, thinking for Kant
requires the harmonizing of the imagination with indeterminate ideas of
reason (CJ, Part I, Book 2, 26, p. 113).
Similarly, what characterizes the intellectual effort for Bergson is a certain
felt tension. In contrast, automatic recognition and automatic recollection are
accompanied by a state of relaxation. The central hypothesis Bergson proposes
in order to account for this difference between relaxation and the feeling of
effort is that if the recollection is accompanied by an effort, it is because spirit
moves from one plane to another (EI, 159; my emphasis). As is typical for this
philosopher of mobility, the central question that will guide his account of the
intellectual effort is which direction? Does the movement of spirit involved in
the intellectual effort begin with individual perceptions or images and reach
out for a unified schema that would provide them with sense? Or does it
proceed from a vague intuition of the schematic idea to be developed into
separate images? The answer, for Bergson, will be: both. At the end of The
Intellectual Effort, he writes,
All we are asking is that none of the parts of experience be neglected. Besides the influence of
the image over the image, there is the attraction or the impulsion exercised on the images by

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the schema. Besides the development of spirit on one plane, along the surface, there is the
movement of spirit which goes from one plane to the other, in depth. Besides the mechanism
of association, there is the intellectual effort. The forces at work in these two cases do not
simply differ in their intensity; they differ in their directions (EI, 189).

In Bergsons view, both these directions are necessary for what he calls full
recognition as opposed to automatic recognition. Now, what is the
significance of this twofold movement of spirit? Ultimately, for Bergson, this
twofold movement of spirit testifies to a reciprocal adaptation of form and
matter. He suggests that nowhere is this twofold movement as clearly at play
as in the highest form of intellectual effort, namely, the effort of invention.
There, he says, we have the neat feeling of a form of organization which may
be variable, but which must be prior to the elements to be organized; then the
elements themselves concur with one another; finally, if the invention
succeeds, we have the feeling of an equilibrium, which is the reciprocal
adaptation of form and matter (EI, 182).
Quoting Ribot, Bergson maintains that we must distinguish between two
forms of the creative imagination, the one intuitive and the other reflective.
The first goes from the unity to the details , the second proceeds from the
details to the vaguely entertained unity. It begins with a fragment which serves
as a primer, and then completes itself progressively (EI, 176). For Bergson,
this means that instead of a unique schema that one would give oneself a
priori, from the outset, and whose forms would remain immobile and stiff,
there can be an elastic or mobile schema, the contours of which spirit refuses
to ascertain, because it awaits its decisions from the very images that the
schema must attract in order to flesh itself out (ibid).13 I endeavoured to write
this paper on the basis of a strong yet vague idea as to how to think through
the difference between Bergson and Kant. The demanding, at times frustrating
but mostly pleasurable effort it took for me to actually write it testified to the
diversity of states my mind had to go through. According to Bergson, each of
those states corresponds to as many tentative strivings, on the part of some
specific images (i.e., confusing phrases and puzzling thoughts) to insert
themselves into that original schema. But also, in some cases, those states
corresponded to so many modifications accepted by the schema in order to
flesh itself out into distinct, and hopefully comprehensible words (EI, 177). I
believe everyone has had this experience of having a great idea that it took
them a lot of effort to actualize into a concrete piece of work; and that the end
result, especially when they found it successful, indeed surprised them in
many ways, precisely because the actualization of the idea necessitated
unpredictable transformations. In a word, it appears that the key to the success
of the intellectual effort lies in the elasticity of the schema. Finally, in
Bergsons account of the intellectual effort, unlike in Kants, the unity or
heterogeneous continuity of the idea becomes compatible with the quantitative
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multiplicity of the representations that develop it. In fact, this compatibility

arises from the self-altering, transformative quality that is the essence of the
virtual.
I contend that in the end, what is missing in Kant is the elasticity of the
schema an elasticity which testifies to the necessary mutual adaptation of
form and matter. Even in the judgment of the dynamical sublime, where the
imagination is most productive, what is produced is at best the experience of
might, which is resolved into a rational feeling of respect or the basis of
morality. The effort remains inadequate because it is simply a reflection on and
of natures inadequacy to ideas however indeterminate those ideas may be.
Now, Kant adds, this inadequacy
constitutes what both repels our sensibility and yet attracts us at the same time, because it is a
dominance that reason exerts over sensibility only for the sake of expanding it commensurately
with reasons own domain (the practical one) and letting it look toward the infinite, which for
sensibility is an abyss (CJ Part I, Book 2, 29, p.124).

Put otherwise, what is missing in Kant is the distinction that Ribot introduces,
and that Bergson appeals to (all the while insisting on their complementarity)
between intuitive imagination (which moves from the unity to the details) and
reflective imagination (which moves from the details to the unity). While it
could be argued that Kant, like Bergson, allows for a twofold movement
informing the experience of the intellectual effort, I contend that this
movement remains stifled by an impoverished conception of the imagination.
Because Kants imagination is at best reflective, its productivity never attains
the power of constituting ideas that it is ascribed in Bergson.14
6. Conclusion: Truth and Intuition
Ultimately, it is this creative power of the imagination that allows Bergson
to affirm the absoluteness of knowledge. In fact, this is reflected in his original
conception of Truth. In Bergson, Key Writings, Ansell-Pearson and Mullarkey
underline the many points of contact between William Jamess Radical
Empiricism and what I have been calling Bergsons Virtual Empiricism. But
they also point out a crucial difference between the two thinkers. This
difference lies in their respective conceptions of truth. In one of the many
letters he wrote to William James, Bergson writes,
I began to read your Pragmatism the moment I received it by post and I have not been able to
put it down before finishing it. It is the admirably drawn programme for the philosophy of the
future. When you say that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all
eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, you give the very formula of the
metaphysics which I am convinced we will come to, which we would have come to long ago
if we had not remained under the charm of Platonic idealism. Would I go so far as to affirm
with you that truth is mutable? I believe in the mutability of reality rather than that of truth.
If we can make our intuition accord with the mobility of the real, would not this accord be
something stable, and would not truth which can only be this accord itself participate in
this stability? (BKW, 362).15

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Strangely enough, I conclude that it is here, in this slightly twisted parallel

between Bergson and James, that we must also locate the point of diffraction
between Bergson and Kant, or between the virtual and the transcendental. On
the one hand, Kant sees absolute knowledge as a suspicious notion which risks
driving us to the kind of dogmatism that the Critical method aims at warding
off. In the twofold hope of justifying scientific knowledge and of rescuing
moral truths from reductive determinism, he designs a stiff intellectualized
frontier between the two, which he calls transcendental conditions of all
possible experience. The effect of the transcendental is therefore to limit
knowledge and experience so as to liberate reason and morality. On the other
hand, Bergson finds that this excessive confidence in the monolithic
imperviousness of the intellect is itself contingent on habit and utility. As such,
it ultimately fails to liberate moral truths from the threat of determinism.16
Alternatively, he shows that this intellect is constitutively penetrated with
infra- and supra-intellectual tendencies which, together, form a virtual
dimension that grounds human (or intellectual) knowledge. By pursuing those
tendencies in opposite directions, he finds that knowledge and experience can
indeed be reintegrated into the virtual mobile whole that informs them. But
what is needed for securing this reintegration, this passage between different
planes of experience, cannot be a stiff, impervious limit of a purely intellectual
nature (the transcendental). It must be an instance that is mobile or creative in
essence, since in the end it is mobility itself that ensures the stability of the
bond between the real, intuition, and absolute knowledge (i.e., truth). This
instance, Bergson calls duration or the virtual. Indeed, when, at the end of
The Introduction to Metaphysics he writes that metaphysics could be
defined as integral experience, what he has in mind is no less than this
integration of knowledge and reality by means of the virtual.
The University of Memphis
References
1. I would like to thank the Critique of Judgment reading group we had at the University of
Dundee during the fall semester 2004. In particular, James Williams and Rachel Jones
invaluable comments and insights helped me think through a lot of the ideas developed in
what follows. Of course, any mistake is my own. Also, I was given the opportunity to present
the first version of this paper at the 2004 BSP conference in Oxford. James Williams and
Frdric Worms insightful comments were particularly helpful to me to revise it.
2. See Bergsons introduction to Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer, New York: Zone Books 1991, p. 1/9; Matire et Mmoire, Paris: PUF 1997; hereafter
referred to in the text as MM.
3. See Bergsons Leons sur la Critique de la raison pure in Cours III, Henri Hude ed. Paris:
PUF 1995, p. 39.
4. In their excellent introduction to Bergson, Key Writings (hereafter BKW), Keith AnsellPearson and John Mullarkey explain that William James compared the effects of Matter and
Memory to a Copernican revolution on a par with Berkeleys Principles of Human
Knowledge and Kants Critique of Pure Reason (Bergson, Key Writings, Keith Ansell-

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5.

6.
7.

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8.

9.

10.

11.
12.
13.

14.

Pearson and John Mullarkey, ed., New York and London: Continuum 2002, p. 12; hereafter
BKW. See also William James letter to Bergson dated December 14th, 1902 in Mlanges,
Paris: PUF 1972, p. 567).
Bergson, Introduction la mtaphysique in La pense et le mouvant, Paris : Librairie
Flix Alcan 1934, p. 255. Introduction to Metaphysics in The Creative Mind, trans.
Mabelle L. Andison, Totowa : Littlefield, Adams and Co 1975, p. 200.
Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience, Paris: PUF 2001; Time and Free Will,
trans. F. L. Pogson, New York: Harper and Row 1960; hereafter referred to as TFW.
Lvolution cratrice, Paris: PUF 1998; Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell, New York:
Random House 1944; hereafter referred to as CE.
For a full elaboration of this claim, see Bergsons 1930 Le Possible et le Rel in La Pense
et le Mouvant, pp. 91-134; The Possible and the Real in The Creative Mind, pp. 91-107.
For example, Bergson writes, If we leave aside the closed systems, subjected to purely
mathematical laws, isolable because duration does not act upon them, if we consider the
totality of concrete reality or simply the world of life, and still more that of consciousness,
we find there is more and not less in the possibility of each successive state than in their
reality. For the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its
image back into the past, once it has been enacted. But that is what our intellectual habits
prevent us from seeing (126-127/99-100).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company 1987, Part I, Book 2, 26, p.112, my emphases; from now on
referred to as CJ.
In their introduction to Bergson, Key Writings, Ansell-Pearson and Mullarkey note that
although the use of the term multiplicity refers to Riemannian geometry, Bergson wants to
show that time that is, life or change is psychical in essence; as such, it is not of a
mathematical or logical order. In fact, Bergson transforms the nature of the Riemannian
distinction, thereby challenging Russells thinking of time as well (pp. 7f).
We will come back to this point below, as I argue that it is the core of the divergence between
Bergson and Kant.
See Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulards Bergson entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia
of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson).
See also, The Introduction to Metaphysics. There, Bergson writes, [Metaphysics] is
strictly itself only when it goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself of the
inflexible and ready-made concepts and creates others very different from those we usually
handle, I mean flexible, mobile, almost fluid representations, always ready to mould
themselves on the fleeting forms of intuition (The Creative Mind, 213/168).
As both James Williams and Frdric Worms astutely pointed out in response to this paper,
it would seem that my criticism of Kant fails to take into account the exceptional case of
genius. Kant defines it as follows: Genius is the mental predisposition (ingenium) through
which nature gives the rule to art (CJ Part I, Book II, 46). Thus, Kant continues, genius
is the talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given hence
the foremost property of genius must be originality (ibid). Here, it does seem as if Kant
were allowing for a case in which determination does not come from an already posited
form, rule, or schema. Still, I contend, this does not lead to a reconciliation between
transcendental idealism and virtual materialism. Some essential differences remain between
Kants account of genius and Bergsons account of the intellectual effort. Firstly, genius for
Kant can neither be taught, nor can it be copied: it must be innate (CJ Part I, Book II, par.
47). This suggests that for Kant, no effort, however intent, can ever yield a situation in which
a new rule is created. Not so for Bergson. Although in his view, it is certainly not the case
that anyone can be called a genius, he does show that through effort, we can all, to some
extent, create new forms and new rules. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I firmly
believe that, even if Kant does allow for the increased creativity of the imagination in the
case of genius, he does not go as far as allowing for the elasticity of the schema which, for

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Bergson, necessarily entails the mutual determination of form and matter. Rather, Kant
writes, Genius can only provide rich material for products of fine art; processing this
material and giving it form requires a talent that is academically trained, so that it may be
used in a way that can stand the test of the power of judgment (ibid, my emphasis). In other
words, the creativity involved in genius must still, in the end, be submitted to the
understanding. And the understanding, we have shown, is itself always already determined
and negatively limited by the transcendental forms. Ultimately, then, I want to maintain that
Bergsons insistence on the mutual determination of form and matter displayed in the
intellectual effort and captured in his elaboration of the Virtual constitutes an innovation in
relation to and indeed, a progress over the Kantian transcendental.
15. Letter from Bergson to William James dated 27th June 1907. Mlanges, 726-7. Trans.
Melissa McMahon, BKW, 362.
16. See Bergsons powerful critique of the Kantian categorical imperative in the first chapter of
his 1932 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley
Brereton, Garden City: Doubleday & Company 1935. For example, In a word, an absolutely
categorical imperative is somnambulistic, enacted as such in a normal state, represented as
such if reflection is roused long enough to take form, not long enough to seek for reasons.
But then, is it not evident that, in a reasonable being, an imperative will tend to become
categorical in proportion as the activity brought into play, although intelligent, will tend to
become instinctive? But an activity which, starting as intelligent, progresses towards an
imitation of instinct is exactly what we call, in a man, a habit (20/26)?

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