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Is Life the Double

Source of Ethics?
Bergson's Ethical
Philosophy Between
Immanence and
Transcendence
Frdric Worms

Universit de Lille III

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Frdric Worms (2004) Is Life the Double Source
of Ethics? Bergson's Ethical Philosophy Between Immanence and
Transcendence, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology,
35:1, 82-88, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2004.11007424
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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 35, No. 1, January 2004

IS LIFE THE DOUBLE SOURCE OF ETHICS?

BERGSON'S ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN
IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE

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FRED:ERIC WORMS
The question I want to ask Bergson in this article is simple, and can be
stated at the outset, with respect to two remarks in his last book, The Two
Sources of Morality and Religion, although it will lead us to a more general
interrogation concerning the relationship between life and ethics in present
philosophy.
The two remarks leading to this question are the following.
It is Bergson's claim in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion that (1)
there are two different kinds of ethics, that is, of obligation, empirically
observed in human experience and history, and (2) both these ethics,
however different, are ultimately grounded in life.
The question I want to ask does not directly deal with (1), although of
course there is something striking in it. What is striking is that for Bergson
where there is obligation, there is the very fact of morality. In other words,
ethics occurs when individuals actually feel obliged and act in consequence
of it. There is no problem of 'deriving' the 'ought' from the 'is' (what we
could call the 'Hume-problem', which Kant has indeed tried to answer): the
'ought' is an 'is', that is, is a fact of human experience; we do observe
factual obligation in human experience. There would, of course, be much to
say about this point, as well as about the thesis that there are two kinds of
such obligation empirically observed in human experience and history. We
will come back at least to that second aspect in what follows.
However, the main question I want to ask deals with point (2) and could
be as simply stated as follows: in what sense can life be the source of ethics
or obligation according to Bergson?
It is most important indeed to notice that there are two main possible
answers to this question, one of which has been the more traditional answer,
and has probably been misleading the reading of Bergson's late ethics up to
the present time; while the other one is perhaps more difficult but not
altogether absent from the critical reading of this philosophy, and can even
be seen as the discrete and even secret thread leading to such readers of
Bergson as Deleuze or Merleau-Ponty, and more generally relating
Bergson's ethics to current problems at the intersection of life and morals,
life and power, which in tum are the main philosophical problems of our
present time. There is then some interest in stressing the difference between
these two readings of The Two Sources ... How then can they be formulated?
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According to the first interpretation of Bergson's ethics, the one I will call
transcendent, Bergson would have grounded ethics (the two kind of ethics)
on life, as on a substantial and metaphysical reality, given outside of our
experience, and taken as the ultimate essence of 'being' in general. And
there seem indeed at first sight to be some arguments in favour of this
interpretation. Let us stress two of them, related to each kind of morality.
First, when Bergson deals with the first kind of ethics, namely the 'closed'
one, he refers to its mode of action as instinctual or quasi-instinctual (more
precisely even as 'virtually instinctual' [instincts virtuels]), comparing
human species to the animals, and even reducing Kant's categorical
imperative to the mechanical impulses which are active among the ants! Had
he read this book (which I doubt), Bertrand Russell would have been
ironically happy to see his reading of Bergson's confirmed, he who had
compared Bergson's intuition to that of bees and ants! Thus, the first kind of
morality seems to be reduced to life as an exterior and explaining factor.
Moreover, the second kind of ethics, the 'open' one this time, seems to be
grounded for its part, if not on the biological structure of the human species
as such, at least on the ultimate essence of life, the 'elan vital' or biological
impetus that Bergson placed at the origin of the evolution of species in
Creative Evolution, and which, according to him, the great mystic or open
moralist continues. It is this sourcing in the movement of life which would in
tum explain, according to Bergson, that the great mystic obtains from us
another kind of obligation, as compelling as that of the instinct, and thus
grounds another kind of ethics. It would then be founded again in life as an
exterior and explaining force, giving a very simplistic meaning to Bergson's
famous phrase at the end of the first chapter: 'all morality, be it pressure or
aspiration, is in essence biological' .1
There would be quite a good reason, then, to judge that Bergson's ethics
is that of a pure metaphysician, not only reducing man to its biological
nature, and thus naturalizing ethics, but also grounding this very nature on a
metaphysical substance, that of life in itself, and beyond it real time or
'duree' (duration), going thus much farther at first sight than his
contemporaries Nietzsche or James whose grounding in will to power or
pragmatism seems to exclude any pretension to metaphysical essence,
presence, or reality.
There is, however, a second possible interpretation of Bergson's The Two
Sources of Morality and Religion, which (expectedly enough) I would call
the immanent one. It would stress the double fact that although obligation
marks a sort of limit in our experience, forcing us to admit it as an absolute
(or as two absolutes if there are two kinds of obligation underivable one from
another), it remains however part of our very experience, empirical and so to
speak phenomenological; not only is obligation then the experience of

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something transcendent, but also and above all it is the experience of

someone, in the pure immanence of his or her life, immediately
communicating with the life of all other human beings, in a plane of
immanence which is the real field of ethics.
Two major points are here at issue, dealing again respectively with each
one of Bergson's two ethics, and leading to another interpretation of this
moral duality itself, which would ground it on a more general duality in
Bergson's philosophy. This more general dyad would be that of 'the two
meanings of life'. But let us first state the two following points, concerning
the two kinds of ethics.
The first point is, of course, that, in deducing the first morality out of the
moral or social fact of obligation, 2 Bergson does not in fact go back to a
biological foundation as such, but to a biological or quasi-biological
experience of the human being, that has a specific place in human life.
Obligation is no instinct: it is the way we relate to our action, as if we were
moved by an instinct. The point is that there is a specific experience of
obligation that is neither the pure instinct of the living being, nor the pure
rationality of the moral being described for example by Kant, but a specific
kind of consciousness. This is how Bergson characterises it when concluding
his analysis of obligation in the first chapter of his book. He starts by
criticizing Kant: 'The essence of obligation is a different thing from a
requirement of reason', but then adds, implying that there is no pure 'force'
here, but a 'will' and even a 'consciousness':
Conceive obligation as a weighing on the will like a habit, each obligation dragging behind it
the accumulated mass of the others [ ... ] here you have the totality of obligation for a simple,
elementary, moral conscience [my emphasis]. That is the essential: that is what obligation
could, if necessary, be reduced to, even in those cases where it attains its highest
complexity. 3

Thus, obligation is the experience of something that necessitates us as if

corning from life, but still implies an elementary consciousness at least to be
felt, which is the beginning of reflection and discussion, if not of complete
liberty. More precisely, our life is, via obligation, present to our
consciousness, and takes the moral aspect of duty, specific to humanity.
Even if 'closed', even if incapable of leading to the open society of humanity
as such, even if always pulling the individual down to his or her quasiinstincts of war and competition (described in the portrait of the 'natural
society' in the last chapter of the book, the closest perhaps to Nietzsche's
Genealogy of Morals), this first kind of ethics is nevertheless not grounded
on a metaphysical presupposition, but on the contrary on a conscious and
quasi-phenomenological experience. More precisely again, life as it is here
revealed by obligation, and maybe life in general, is inevitably at the
crossroads between metaphysics and phenomenology: it is less than an
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exterior substance, since it is lived, but it is also more than an objective or

intentional phenomenon (and for the same reason!). Life compels us to go to
the limits. So will it also in Deleuze and Foucault, these readers of Nietzsche
and Canguilhem, as well as of Bergson.
But the next question comes naturally: is it the same now for the second
kind of ethics? If the primitive human is not, according to Bergson, the mere
prisoner of a 'life' exterior to his life, is it the same for the mystic on the
other hand, or even the superhuman being already described as a 'surhomme' in the Evolution creatrice? In other words, is not the mystic, for his
or her part, defined by a diving into and merging in the substance of the elan
vital and a superior presence, as Bergson phrases it in the third chapter on
'dynamic religion'? Is there not, on that side of Bergson's thought, a
remaining metaphysics of substance?
The point is of importance and has recently been very strongly stressed,
from another point of view, by Jean-Christophe Goddard in a very important
essay confronting Bergson and Deleuze on the question of mysticism and
schizophrenia. 4 According to him, Bergson's mysticism anticipates
Deleuze's schizophrenia in the sense that they are both described in terms of
a fusion in an anonymous and all-encompassing 'champ transcendantal'
where personal consciousness totally disappears. The figure of the madman,
in the second part of the French philosophy of the twentieth century, would
thus have replaced that of the mystic, which had dominated the first part of
it. But philosophically mysticism and madness would be intimately
connected through a common disappearance of the conscious subject in a
transcendant reality or a transcendantal field.
But even in the case of the mystic, and even if illuminated by such a
comparison with Deleuze's schizophrenia, we could not accept everything in
such an interpretation of Bergson's second kind of ethics and religion. 5 In
the case of Bergson at least (and maybe even of Deleuze), there is an effort
to describe an experience of the limit which remains within the limits of our
experience, not a merging in life in general but an experience in one life (to
quote the title of Deleuze's last published article) and in one's life.
Indeed, as is well known but essential to recall, Bergson initially refuses to
reduce mysticism to the experience of ecstasy. Of course, at first sight, this
seems only to reinforce an experience of such unity, 'action' being but one more
step towards the fusion and confusion of the individual soul in that of God:
It [the soul of the mystic] had even been united to Him in its ecstasy; but none of this rapture
was lasting, because it was mere contemplation. [ ... ] Now it is God who is acting through
the soul, in the soul; the union is total, therefore final. 6

But even then there cannot be complete fusion, precisely because the mystic
has to act on the level and for the sake of humanity, of the very humanity he
or she has somehow overcome. If he or she is 'une arne ala fois agissante et
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'agie', dont la liberte coincide avec l'activite divine', and if J.C. Goddard is
right in his other comparison, with Spinoza this time, it is only because: 'lui
seul se rend compte d'un changement qui l'eleve au rang des adjutores Dei
[ministers of God], patients par rapport a Dieu, agents par rapport aux
hommes' (my emphasis).
Indeed, Bergson's whole purpose is to show in what way mysticism is
firstly experienced by individual human souls whose testimonies are unique
phenomenological descriptions of something that pure philosophical
deduction cannot attain - but also immediately communicated as an
obligation to act to all other human beings. Yet mysticism is a compelling
phenomenon that pulls us towards the limit of our conscious and moral
experience without at any time leaving the field of human history for that of
a transcendent metaphysics. The mystical experience is still an experience
communicating itself to other men even if it does so in a specific way: not
through the global phenomenon of society (as described by Durkheim), but
through the pluralist and multiple way of imitation and interaction which has
been described by that other great French sociologist of the end of the
century, of whom Bergson was a colleague, and who has been a source of
inspiration to Deleuze, namely Gabriel Tarde.
Even though that thesis would need a careful verification in the text itself,
we could already conclude that, though both represent a contact with
something primitive we can call life, both remain in Bergson on the strict
level of human experience and immanence. We would then, of course,
advocate here what we have called the second reading of Bergson's Two
Sources, the immanent versus the transcendent, if only for the sake of mere
comprehension of Bergson's work itself.
But I will also conclude by stressing two more general consequences of
such an approach of Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion: the
first relates it to the understanding of Bergson's philosophy as a whole,
understood as a theory on the 'double meaning of life', the second relates
this philosophy to the problem of the relationship between life and ethics and
politics which is at the centre of present philosophy. Both these final remarks
will also lead us to stress anew the importance of the duality of ethics, or of
relationships between ethics and life, that we find in Bergson.
First, of course, if the two sources of ethics refer to life as the double limit
of our experience, it is because it was already the case in Bergson's earlier
philosophy, not only in his specific theory of life, (as set out in Creative
Evolution of 1907), but even as early as in his first book, Time and Free
Will, published in 1889. Indeed, in his very first book, Bergson did not only
make the famous distinction between real time or duree, on the one hand,
and space on the other, as a distinction between two general forms of
sensibility or knowledge. That very distinction between duration and space

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has something ultimate and irreducible about it, because it is indeed a

distinction between two forms or two meanings of life. Both duration and
space ultimately refer to life, in two different and incompatible ways that the
whole philosophy of Bergson will try to articulate, perhaps succeeding only
in its final form, through the problem of ethics, precisely in The Two
Sources. Duration refers indeed to life understood as immanent life (of an
always individual consciousness) through the flowing or the flux of time
which it has to retain and synthesize: it thus has a metaphysical priority, the
original fact of the flux of time requiring an act of immanent synthesis
through consciousness and memory. Whereas space for its part refers to life
through the biological constraints of the body and of action in general,
which entails representing distinctly and mastering practically the things that
are mixed in the original flux: it thus has a pragmatic priority this time
(Primum vivere), as primitive as the metaphysical one, although
incompatible with it, and both relating to life as the name of that primitivity
itself. It is then Bergson's philosophy as a whole which is pulled to a limit,
the limit between metaphysics and experience (or phenomenology).
But it is essential that this limit is double, that there is for us a double
meaning of life, illustrating itself finally in a double experience of obligation.
That duality means that we cannot reach a primitive and absolute unity by
taking 'life' as a general and infinite substance, and annihilating our own life
as such within it. If life is given to us in a double way, it is because life is
always the finite and intensive life of someone, be it of God Himself,
encountering its limitation and reversing itself from creative impetus to
biological constraint. Duality can thus be seen as a sign of the finitude or
rather of the various intensities of the absolute itself. Conversely, however,
duality is nothing relative or artificial: at each limit of our life, and at every
degree of life, we do reach something absolute, the ultimate meaning of our
experience. But this meaning appears according to Bergson only in specific
experiences: that of obligation, but also that of change and movement as
such. We now understand why we have a double experience of obligation, as
a human species condemned to act, and as living individuals able to create
and imitate open morality and mysticism: we can even understand why this
duality is the ultimate of all Bergsonian dualities, the ethical duality being
the one where all the metaphysical dualities at work in reality become aware
of themselves in human experience and history, as well as the one that gives
its meaning not only to human life but, through human life, to all the degrees
of life, from the lower ones, which prepare our action, to the higher ones,
which condescend (as Bergson puts it, quoting Ravaisson) to our action, and
even require it, the universe itself being, according to the famous last
sentence of The Two Sources, that we can now understand: 'une machine a
faire des dieux'.

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But there is one last word to add, to indicate how Bergson thus relates to
the most present problem of life-ethics or even bio-power. Through The Two
Sources, one could trace the effects of biological power in society, on the
one hand, as well as, on the other hand, of the creative ethical potentialities
of individual life: more generally, it would confirm in a way the Nietzschean
and post-Nietzschean diagnosis that there is something immediately ethical
and even political in the experience of life, and reversely that there is
something ultimately biological in the experience of ethics and politics,
obligation and power. Moreover, Bergson (as we have tried to show) would
help us formulate a most important principle in that perspective, one that is
too often neglected in some parts of 'post-modem' philosophy: namely, that
one should never go beyond our life and our human experience, in other
words beyond the limits of immanence. What Bergson himself did not do, his
successors, being such accurate critics of 'metaphysics' should not do a
fortiori! They should not be speaking of life as an exterior force or a
mysterious substance. It is always our life that has the two ultimate meanings
we have studied here, through the two kinds of ethical obligation. We should
then be aware of but not fascinated by bio-power and creative living. They
are but the two limits between which our ethical and political life has to
endure.
Universite de Lille III
Acknowledgement
Preliminary versions of this paper were read at the symposium on Bergson and social science
organised in Newcastle by John Mullarkey, and at the Bergson session organised during the
SPEP Conference in Chicago in October 2002 by Len Lawlor. I would like to thank them both
for their invitations, comments and support.
References
I. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre
Dame Press, 1977), p.lOI.
2. Taking this social fact as primitive, by the way, under the influence of the greatest French
sociologist of the time, Emile Durkheim.
3. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, pp.24-5.
4. Jean-Christophe Goddard, De Ia simplicite, mysticisme et folie, Desclee de Brouwer, 2002.
5. It is striking that most interpreters focus on the mystic, leaving aside the open morality of
the first chapter, although they are but two descriptions of the same phenomenon.
6. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, p.232.

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