vershy versh
Well-known member
Piggybacking off the Lewis piece in the LRB a few of us have been discussing, where do you stand on this axis?
I don't believe in total subjectivism, but find the Bergsonian view of things in flux convincing. I understand Lewis' view but it just doesn't feel correct to me. It feels wrong on a gut level, like looking at the special effects in a film and instinctively knowing they aren't real. I've sympathy for its deployment as a strategy, but it doesn't feel like a competing model on equal footing to the Bergsonian model. It feels like a tactic for dealing with the existence of what Bergson's describing rather than a counter narrative.
... what Lewis calls ‘the Time-mind’ or ‘the Time-view’. The adherents of this mind are very numerous and apparently diverse, among them Einstein, Darwin, Spengler, William James, as well as writers such as Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Proust, artistic schools such as naturalism and futurism... The principal villain however is Bergson... The charismatic metaphysics of Bergson, as Lewis must have remembered from his lectures, described human identity, at its most primal and non-intellectual, as the creature of a numinous time deeper than the mere succession of the clock... Lewis... understood Bergson to be advocating a rampant subjectivism, dissolving into pure consciousness objects that one might have otherwise naively assumed to exist independently of one’s experience of them. Repelled by Bergsonian flux, Lewis proposes as an alternative ‘a philosophy of the eye’, a celebration of ‘the concrete and radiant reality of the optic sense’... The appeal to ‘deadness’ is a rebuke to Bergson’s exalted concept of a universal evolutionary vitality which ‘makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave flowing over matter’. Bergson ended Creative Evolution (1907) by encouraging the philosopher of the future to see ‘the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming’. Lewis was not remotely attracted by the idea of melting into anything – ‘we should retain our objective hardness, and not be constantly melting and hotly overflowing’ – so he had a double complaint to make: not only does Bergsonian thought strip you of ‘the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you commonly apprehend’ but it also takes away ‘the clearness of outline of your own individuality which apprehends them’. Bergson often writes with heady rapture about things interpenetrating and merging, and Time and Western Man is largely a statement of Lewis’s opposite preference, ‘them standing apart – the wind blowing between them, and the air circulating freely in and out of them’.
I don't believe in total subjectivism, but find the Bergsonian view of things in flux convincing. I understand Lewis' view but it just doesn't feel correct to me. It feels wrong on a gut level, like looking at the special effects in a film and instinctively knowing they aren't real. I've sympathy for its deployment as a strategy, but it doesn't feel like a competing model on equal footing to the Bergsonian model. It feels like a tactic for dealing with the existence of what Bergson's describing rather than a counter narrative.
