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Creative Mind (changes)

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The Possible and the Real

Ideas

• Don’t take for granted the novelty in life: take control of it to be the artist of your own life
• Most people think of the possible as actual phantom figures existing in the air right now
  • Instead, the possible is a retrospective creation, where the present looks into the past to explain present reality
    • Possible is a theory of history: you look back in time and “find” the evolution of the present amid a huge assortment of material circumstances
  • The present is a wide field, completely open and free, not a hidden pathway leading inexorably to the future
• Time: “continuous creation of unforseeable novelty”
  • Allows uniqueness, change, choice
  • Evolution in a classically Darwinian sense: there is no intent, only an open field
• Limitation of math and science: they are closed systems, only talking about inorganic stuff outside of time, whereas real study should concern organic life inside of time (ie, evolution itself)
• Inorganic and Organic
  • Repetition of the inorganic forms the rhythm of the organic being
  • Organic beings have duration
• Intellect versus Creation
  • Intellect wants to believe in stability and sameness, always abstracting and generalizing, thus reducing and minimizing our perceptions
  • Intellect is about repetition, manipulation, technical dexterity
    • It is mere fabrication
  • Creation is about taking chances, opening yourself up to possibility
  • Stop finding rules and laws

Interesting Notes

• Reality as “a gradually expanding rubber balloon” (77)
• Examples: uses interestingly Bloomsburian / literary examples
  • Dinner party example opens essay
  • Talks about “inventing Shakespeare”
• Life and art comparison
  • Let’s be “artisans of our life” (75)
  • The world itself is an incomparably richer work of art than any you’ve seen in a gallery (so you need to make life your art)
• Philosophical echoes
  • Nietzsche in that you want to take control of yourself and create yourself (affirmation)
  • Wittgenstein takes Bergson’s approach to defeating all of past philosophy by saying that their ideas are all a misunderstanding about language
  • Deleuze & Guattari take his critique of lack theory (there is no “nothing” except the concept invented by humans)
• An echo of my waste/excess theme, tied to Marx’s insatiability of capitalism
  • The nihilists who believe in nothingness and disorder are really just hopping from one idea to the next, not settling on one: a dissatisfied, spoiled thinker
  • Thus, a philosophical error comes because of the insatiable consumer, never happy with one idea but constantly looking for the next new thing
  • And indeed his exhortation to embrace novelty looks like consumerist propaganda

“The Philosophy of Claude Bernard”

• Extrapolates onto philosophy a physiologist’s take on proper scientific method
• Scientific method as “a dialogue between mind and nature” (171)
• Science makes us think of disinterested effort, random, not interested or prompted by a specific idea
  • You always start from a hypothesis, even if you have to change it later
  • Science as creative, not just “observing” and then a natural law hits you in the face (you invent the idea, silly
• Bernard defines the science of life, not life itself
  • He doesn’t pretend to understand life or nature
  • Nature is too complex and big for us to know (don’t simplify it)
  • Humans have human logic, whereas nature has a logic of its own
• Nature is not a collection of ready-made laws ready to “uncover” like you’re digging it up
• In philosophy, too, we can’t know everything
  • We need to try absurd hypotheses
  • We need to be flexible and change our theses as needed
• Ideas are not sacred, but only partial and temporary
• Huge philosophical or scientific systems are stupid
  • They could never possibly cover everything
  • You’ll never get the whole thing right (we’ll never totalize correctly, so don’t totalize)
• ”Let us not claim to shrink reality to the measure of our ideas (176)
  • Our ideas will always be smaller than life, so try to make them bigger!
• Instead, we should build our philosophy up brick by brick

“On the Pragmatism of William James”

Ideas

• Problem with our minds: they simplify, try to use only one principle to explain everything
• Nature of reality
  • Reality is exactly how we experience it
  • Fluctuating, fluid, a flow
    • Not dry, clear cut
  • Pluralism
  • Indefinite
  • Partakes of man’s aspirations, desires, enthusiasms
    • Unlike plain old reason
• Feelings are real forces
  • Looking at religious folks, mystics who allow feeling to blow around, led to idea of pragmatism
  • Felt truth better than conceived truth (can understand currents and connections better)
• Nature of truth: “a human invention whose effect is to utilize reality rather than to enable us to penetrate it” (185)//
  • Truth is not mimesis (ie, does this copy match reality?)
  • Truth does not pre-exist our “discovery” of it (not like a “nut in a shell” 182)
  • We INVENT truth
  • It’s practical: truth is measured according to its ability to effect reality (if it “places us under more favorable conditions for acting”)
    • Truth is made to utilize reality
  • Truth is contingent
    • It could have been something else, had the wind blow differently
    • It isn’t arbitrary, of course
  • Always changing
  • Forward-moving, talking about the future
• Upshot
  • Reason is diminished, but more room given to feeling
  • Humanist: men become very important (they create truth, don’t they?)
    • ”The things and facts which make up our experience constitute for us a _human world…sufficient for man and sufficient unto itself.”_ (180)
  • Proactive: will and intent matter
    • Though the “currents” of experience are a given, we can act for or against them as we wish, so there is a measure of agency here
    • A few humans will make huge inventions, and they’ll matter quiet a bit (their “free initiative” 184)

Interesting Notes

• Luxury/economy
  • 178: Our intelligence economizes, but nature is extravagant (IMPORTANT!)
  • Intelligence works for “exactly what is necessary,” but nature gives us “more than is necessary”
  • Reality is “superabundant”
• Work
  • Truth is practical, moves towards concrete ends
    • Thus, truth is all about use-value
  • “The structure of the mind is to a great extent our work.” (184)
    • Thus, truth is a kind of human labor
  • Truth is a product of experience
    • Thus, Bergson’s truth is a materialist conception

Introduction to Metaphysics

Ideas

• Two kinds of knowledge: relative and absolute
  • Relative: analysis
    • Outside of the object (POV, data)
    • Uses symbols (a translation)
    • Limited, only can extend knowledge use-value around an intuition
  • Absolute: intuition
    • Inside the object (imaginative sympathy)
    • Uses the inexpressible (not symbols)
    • Perfect, though can be supplemented by analysis
• What’s wrong with the relative?
  • Always allows the real to escape
  • Uses ready-made concepts which distorts the object
  • All concepts (color, light, texture or even yellow, soft, pebbly) don’t actually describe the object itself but instead compare it with others
  • Thus, it investigates objects in terms of what it is NOT, not what it IS
  • “Properties” never fit the objects (they are elements, or partial notions—never actually the parts!)
    • Kant too is like this: a priori knowledge is dead wrong, his frameworks are too rigid and too neat (real work is dirty and insoluble)
  • Creates a philosophy that’s just a fighting among schools
    • Depending on which property is “most important” for knowledge
• Metaphysics
  • “The science which claims to dispense with symbols” (136)
  • Must begin with intuition (you can use an intuition to understand analysis, but without that intuition, despite all the analysis in the world, you’ll never get it)
  • Must break with symbols (164)
• Intuition
  • “The metaphysical investigation of the object in what essentially belongs to it” (140)
  • Thus intuition is a kind of essentialism
  • Transcends concepts
• Reality
  • Pure mobility
  • Variability
  • Indivisibility
  • Continuity of flow, succession of states indivisible
  • Spectrum: not just a thesis and an antithesis, but a whole shimmering array
  • Complex: it is never simple, never immobile
  • “Nascent change of direction” (159)
• Duration
  • Only understood through intuition
  • “The state of completing itself”
  • Not just a unity, not just a multiplicity
    • Includes both “successive states” and “a unity” that binds (155)
    • “Between these two extreme limits moves intuition, and this movement is metaphysics itself” (158)
  • “Perpetual becoming” (151)
  • Endless numbers of durations
• Inner Life
  • “Continuity of progress,” not images
• Science and metaphysics should both share intuition!
• His philosophical position
  • Beyond realism and idealism
  • Beyond empiricism and rationalism
  • Does ontology
    • “What really matters to philosophy is to know what unity, what multiplicity_, _what// reality….is the multiple unity of the person” (148)
• Recommendation We need to create concepts for each object under investigation, not just have one grand idea for a whole host of things.
  • Reverse Anti-Comte the normal pattern of thought: go from intuition to concepts, rather than use concepts to find truth
  • “Philosophy should be an effort to go beyond the human state” (163) Nietzschean
• Recommendation
  • Reverse the normal pattern of thought: go from intuition to concepts, rather than use concepts to find truth
  • “Philosophy should be an effort to go beyond the human state” (163) Nietzschean
• Most methods of philosophy and science “allows what is the very essence of the real to escape”
• Metaphysics: going back and forth between materiality (a repetition of the thing: simple sensation) and duree (change): ultimately a “still moving eternity”
• Reality is Mobility
• Says that the work of the philosopher is like that of the writer: once you have all your notes done and are ready to work, all of the sudden you have to place yourself into the very heart of your subject

What’s interesting for modernists

• ”There is no feeling, no matter how simple, which does not virtually contain the past and present of the being which experiences it” (142)
• Ideas about “inexpressible shading” seem to encourage precious “I’m special” whining and wallowing about
• Method: “spiritual auscultation” (148) or diving to the bottom of the ocean and “sounding” the depths and then coming up to the surface (168)
• Literature simile
  • Metaphysics needs to work like writers creating a novel
  • You can’t just create a book by adding data together
  • You have to have an inspiration apart from all of them

Interesting Notes

• Performativity
  • Bergson walks us through the argument, even arguing against himself for demonstration purposes
  • He deliberately sets traps for us to catch us accepting shoddy thinking
• Gold metaphor
  • In reference to trying to understand the absolute from a relative viewpoint
  • “the piece of gold for which one can neber make up the change” (135)
• Mass production anxiety
  • Doesn’t like the “ready-made” but wants something specifically tailored for the concept (149)
  • Doesn’t like mass consumer objects in THOUGHT
  • Afraid that thought is becoming like capitalism
  • It’s too instrumentalizing (“what it can do for us”) worries too much about use, whereas Bergson is all about the useless (not to “gain a profit” 149, “turned to the profit to be gained from them” 150)
    • 154: the ready-made is a question of “practical” use
    • 159: philosophical problems happen when “we apply to the disinterested knowledge of the real the procedures we use currently with practical utility as the aim” (can’t confuse the useless with the useful)
  • “By manipulating symbols, how are you going to manufacture reality? (153)—- Cynicism about modern industry
    • You can produce and produce and produce, but it won’t do anything without intuition