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rbsp20
‘A History of
Problems’: Bergson
and the French
Epistemological
Tradition
a
Elie During
a
Paris X-Nanterre
Published online: 21 Oct 2014.
Two Traditions?
In an homage to Georges Canguilhem which was originally meant to
serve as a preface to the English translation of The Normal and the
4
Pathological, Michel Foucault observed that 'a dividing line' ran through
many philosophical and ideological oppositions in the French post-war
intellectual landscape: 'the one that separates a philosophy of experience, of
meaning, of the subject, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, and
of the concept. On one side, a filiation which is that of Jean-Paul Sartre and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty ; and then another, which is that of Jean Cavailles,
Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyre, and Canguilhem.' (Foucault 1998:
466). In the original version of this text, written in 1978, Foucault was
content with underlining 'two strains that remained profoundly
heterogeneous' (Foucault 1994-1: 430). He traced back this cleavage to an
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5
but such an activity cannot easily be identified either with the traditional
activity of judgement and its ensuing doctrine of faculties (in an
intellectualist vein still perceptible in Bachelard, a true heir of Brunschvicg
in this respect), or with the activity of a transcendental ego (in a
phenomenological way). In this respect it does not openly contradict
Cavailles' 'dialectics'. 1 Bergson's emphasis is on the particular ope rations
at play in scientific knowledge in general: scientific understanding parcels
out, arrests, quantifies and measures, whereas reality, as it is given to
immediate intuition, is an unfolding, continuous and essentially qualitative
process. This is so because, however disinterested it may have become
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today, science remains in close relation with the demands of our action. Yet
by the same token, science can be described to a certain extent without the
need of a subject of science - as an activity without a subject. Scientific
theories, with their apparatus of forms and principles, are still expressions of
life itself in its ability to use intelligence for its own purpose. In this regard,
Foucault's statement about the two traditions is perhaps most confusing in
the opposition it wishes to stress between Bergson and Poincare. The
former's view of science as rooted in practice is at times strikingly close to
the latter's so-called conventionalism, and it is no wonder that Leroy entered
the French philosophical scene by conflating Bergsonian philosophy with
Poincarean epistemology. Whereas Poincare firmly protested against what he
considered as a dubious manreuvre (see The Value of Science, published in
1905), Bergson did not mind being forced into an alliance with what some
described as a 'skeptical' trend in the philosophy of science (Boutroux,
Duhem, Milhaud, etc.; see 'La Philosophie fran9aise' in Bergson 1972:
1176-1179).
On the whole, it seems that Bergson cuts across the categories which his
name (rather than his actual philosophy) helps devising. As a consequence,
what Foucault says about Husserl could very well apply to Bergson himself:
he may be more aptly described as the point of bifurcation from which two
very different traditions emerge and start diverging. Sartre's first encounter
with philosophy, as he recalls, was the reading of Time and Free Will- it is
ironical, yet not surprising, that despite his harsh criticism of Bergson's
views about consciousness and freedom, he should find himself in his
company under the heading of 'philosophers of the subject'. Surely,
Cavailles, Bachelard (who wrote the Dialectics of Duration in 1936), and
above all Canguilhem (who published in 1943 a commentary of the third
chapter of Creative Evolution), had all read Bergson too, though more or less
carefully. Yet, as early as the 1930s, following the publication of Politzer' s
pamphlet, 'Bergsonism' had more or less become the target of almost every
innovative philosophical trend in France. The story is well known, and not
worth recounting again. It remains to be seen if the motivations underlying
6
the rejection of Bergson are homogeneous. Tracing back diverging readings
of Bergson himself (Merleau-Ponty being a much more ambiguous example
than Sartre in this regard), 2 would probably reveal cleavages as profound
(although probably less apparent) as those Foucault identified in the history
of Husserl's reception.
Without going that far, it is interesting to bring the case of Foucault into
focus. His negative identification of Bergson as an inverted forerunner of the
line of thinkers to which he feels indebted, involves a retrospective scheme
which tells us a great deal about himself and the nature of his intellectual
formation in the heyday of existentialism, when phenomenology (or at least
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7
critique of spatialisation as a specific mechanism of intellectual and social
control, a critique which is supposed to bear its effects everywhere, from
Luckacs (whose concept of reification owes much to 'spatialisation') and the
Marxist tradition, up to Foucault himself (Jay 1993: 191-208, 430).
This interpretative flip-flop hints at the fact that such totalizing views of
Bergson's position in the century are most often put to work for ideological
purposes. In the most recent Deleuzian literature, Bergson is often fancied as
the denied father of French postmodem philosophy (Douglass 1992). Once
again Bergson becomes an overarching figure casting its shadow on the
whole philosophical stage, over-determining every philosophical division.
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These 'grandes manoeuvres' may well revive Bergsonian studies, but as far
as the precise understanding of Bergson is concerned, they do not provide
much philosophical insight. Whether he is believed to be heralding what is
now known as a philosophy of difference (thus providing the groundwork for
the metaphysics of postmodernism), or whether one holds his
epistemological insights as a foreshadowing of the contemporary scientific
image (in modem physics, psychology, neurosciences, biology, theories of
human information-processing, etc.), in every case Bergson functions as a
dubious reference point - an origin. Pete Gunter at least warns us against
the shortcomings of such 'retrospective' readings, of which it is quite certain
that Bergson would have disapproved: 'it is no easy matter to specify what
amount of influence on, or degree of prophetic anticipation of, the course of
scientific thought would constitute a 'verification' of his philosophical
methods.' (Gunter 1969: 36)
'Positivism'
Bergson's metaphysical stance involved maintaining as a guiding
principle the possibility of an intuitive, immediate grasp of reality,
undercutting the interplay of concepts and symbols to which common-sense
and science have accustomed us. A rather paradoxical consequence of this
central claim is that he was repeatedly charged with being a hidden
'positivist.' Politzer criticized Bergson's notion of duration as substantial,
and so did Bachelard when he indicted duration as a massive, positive
plenum. Sartre reproached him for confusing the self-transparency of
consciousness with the opaque presence of a thing. Bergson, a 'positivist'?
The accusation may well be misplaced, and yet the concern for immediacy,
combined with the praise of a 'positive metaphysics' (in the line of
Ravaisson) and a 'superior empiricism,' for all their ambiguity
('metaphysics' and 'superior' being of course essential qualifications here),
made Bergson seem like a good candidate for the label.
As a matter of fact, some of Bergson's critics have been described as the
proponents of a form of 'radical and deliberate non-positivism' (Lecourt
8
1972: 7), though in a sense that brings another twist to the very notion of
positivism. It is Canguilhem who first remarked that Bachelard, having
realized that science reformed itself through epistemological breaks,
gradually formed 'a conception of the relations between science and the
history of science that in itself constituted such a break: a non-positivist
conception.' (Canguilhem 1970: 186; see Canguilhem 1994: 31-35).
The trademark 'positivism' was recently endorsed by Pete Gunter in
relation to Bergson. This clever move was chiefly motivated by the desire to
blur the lines drawn by the dominantly positivist Anglo-American
epistemology, but it is rather unfortunate from the standpoint of the French
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9
as it may seem, in the specific sense of 'positivism' that is now under
scrutiny, Auguste Comte would actually count as an anti-positivist. For as
Pierre Macherey reminds us, 'he creates the concept of a philosophical
history of sciences: a history of problems and concepts, rather than a history
of solutions and 'theories,' in other words a rational and reasoned history,
rather than an empirical, descriptive history ... ' (Macherey 1989: 95). And he
adds in a footnote: 'this view has greatly inspired the historical epistemology
of G. Bachelard and G. Canguilhem.' As a matter of fact, Bachelard has
never kept secret his admiration for Comte: 'there is no scientific culture', he
says, 'that does not fulfil the obligations of positivism' (Bachelard 1949:
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104). This rather unexpected filiation wouldn't make sense if we forgot that
Comte was precisely not a 'positivist' regarding concepts, even if his
definition of the scientific method as a mixture of observation and induction
leaves us with a rather weak concept of science.
Despite the ambivalent character of their Comtian origin, the uses of
'positivism' seem to converge in the definition provided by Canguilhem as a
preliminary to the understanding of the true task of the historian of sciences:
'positivism, a philosophy of history based on a generalization of the notion
that theory ineluctably succeeds theory as the true supplants the false.'
(Canguilhem 1994: 42). What is remarkable in Canguilhem's definition is
first of all that the dividing line cuts through different conceptions of history,
and not primarily different metaphysics or even epistemological stances.
'Positivism' does not imply an a-historical vision of things (the one that
would take the universal or natural character of the given for granted) ; it is
itself a particular view of history, a 'philosophy of history.' The distinctive
mark of this philosophy is that it presents concepts as the more or less
adequate replica of verified facts, supplying truths according to which
theories must be judged and eventually vindicated or overthrown.
10
concerns an axiological activity, the search for truth. This axiological
activity appears only at the level of questions, methods and concepts, and
nowhere else.' (Canguilhem 1994: 30). How this bears on the question of
historicity itself, and how 'the history of the relation of intelligence to truth
generates its own sense of time' (Canguilhem 1994: 31), is another question,
but it is a Bergsonian question as well.
It seems that we are now in a position to formulate the general principle of
anti-positivism: it consists in the belief that epistemology is not about facts
(neither scientific facts, nor historical facts uncovered by the history of
science), but about concepts. This means that its objects are always projects,
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and in the case of the history of sciences, 'the object of historical discourse
is, in effect, the historicity of scientific discourse.' (Canguilhem 1994: 26).
Yet again, the real problem with positivism is not so much that it strives at
some kind of immediate contact with the real: it is rather that this attitude
implies a very naive idea of what a concept is, in general. Hence the problem
is not so much to replace facts by concepts as the proper objects of inquiry,
but to reach an adequate understanding of the formation and functioning of
concepts in the first place. Whether the substitute for positivism is found in
dialectics or intuition, what is being criticized is always an abstract view of
concepts which considers them apart from their theoretical setting, the
network or system of notions to which they belong, their vital connections in
the web of thought (Canguilhem 1994: 50-51). In his study on the formation
of the concept of reflex movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
Canguilhem emphasizes the necessity of studying conceptual filiations rather
than the succession of theories (Canguilhem 1994:181). Bachelard develops
a similar line of argument concerning Fizeau's experiment: we do not know
what we are talking about before 'the object of knowledge is replaced in a
problematic, situated in a discursive process of instruction.' (Bache lard
1949: 55). On this construal, the object becomes 'more than a historical fact,
more than a fact resulting from observation: it solves a problem.' (Bachelard
1949: 53)
Briefly stated, the kind of 'positivism' that is being discarded by the
French epistemological tradition under consideration is essentially one which
considers concepts in isolation from their variation in a problematic
configuration, one which proves incapable of engaging in what Canguilhem
calls the 'working of a concept' ('Dialectique et philosophie du Non chez
Gaston Bachelard,' in Canguilhem 1970: 206). Anti-positivism thus reverts
the ordinary direction of thought: instead of going from theories (and facts)
to concepts, it goes from concepts to theories (and problems), because to
define a concept is to formulate a problem. Through the succession of
theories, one must realize that a problem endures, even within the solutions
devised for solving it. Problems must be tracked, identified, properly recast
11
and posed, even where scientists and thinkers themselves were not in a
position to do so, or believed they could do without it by simply stating the
solutions. To quote Bachelard once more
Above all one must know how to state problems. Whatever one may say, in scientific life,
problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this sense of problems which is the
distinctive mark of a genuine scientific mind. For a scientific mind, every piece of
knowledge is an answer to a question. If there is no question, there cannot be any scientific
knowledge. Nothing is granted. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed' (Bachelard
1938: 14).
And elsewhere: 'Scientific research does not need the bravado of universal
doubt, but the constitution of a problematic. It takes its departure in a
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12
Bergson was finally elected to the College de France at the turn of the
century. The titles of his courses confirm Ribot's remark: Sketches for a
history of the notion of time in its relation to systems (1902-1903), The
evolution of the theories of memory (1903-1904), Study of the evolution of
the problem offreedom (1904-1905) ....
Two claims remain to be examined: first, that Bergson's practice of the
history of ideas and problems actually conformed to the anti-positivist
principles; second and more interestingly, that Bergson provided the
philosophical underpinning of an anti-positivist view, not only of concepts or
knowledge in general, but of problems themselves.
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13
derivation between heterogeneous terms' (Bergson 1995: 251). This
summary (or anticipation) of Matter and Memory is interesting in that it
provides a very striking instance of what it means, in practice, to replace a
history of theories with a history of problems. Theories of the soul are
indeed considered as so many systems of variation of a deeper, more relevant
problem, which needs to be extracted and stated in each specific case: the
problem of causal relations between substances or realities. What really
matters is exposing the problem that corresponds to a given concept or set of
concepts. In an interesting text on the question of how philosophers should
write, Bergson explains that if the same philosophical term ('reason,' for
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14
'L'Effort intellectuel' (ibid., 31): Bergson, according to Gueroult, is at his
best when he tries to unpack the meaning of a problematic situation by
adjusting the focus, moving back and forth from a given system of concepts
to the dynamic scheme that engendered it, recapturing a problem and stating
it in a way that suggests the different threads one may follow in an attempt to
solve it. Such a process probably meets Bergson's purpose in studying the
history of philosophy: to get a clearer view of 'the unity of the problem
underlying the multiplicity of the solutions.' (Bergson 1997: 7).
History of Science
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15
take time as an independent variable. But with what time has it to do?' (Bergson 1944: 364-
365).
Thus Bergson displaces a rather conventional philosophical problem
(concepts versus laws), substituting for it a new one (time as an independent
variable), which he considers more apt to characterize a new range of
scientific problems (Kepler's). The same kind of operation is systematically
carried out in relation to different issues. It is, obviously, an essentially
problematic method.
Bachelard reproached Bergson for his outdated image of science. This
criticism was first formulated, by the mathematician Emile Borel in 1908
(Castelli 1998: 278). Whether it is justified or not, it seems to miss the
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point, for Bergson was not so much interested in the history of sciences for
its own sake (the 'evolution' of scientific theories, with their positive
contents and methods), as in the historicity of their problems. It is of course
typical of Bergson's method that he should bring out the historicity of
scientific problems by showing their relevance to certain philosophical
problems. Problems nevertheless imply by necessity a particular kind of
historical method. Bergson believes it is essential 'to confer some
importance on the (often contingent) order in which problems were stated.
In this respect, science would be contingent, in part at least, and the history
of science would be part and parcel of science itself.' ('Discussion a la
Societe Fran~aise de Philosophie, 18 decembre 1902,' in Bergson 1972:
568). Thus Bergson repeatedly criticized any teaching of science that would
not simultaneously deal with the history of science, and he strongly
supported the reinstallation of a program in the history of science at the
College de France in 1919 (Castelli 1998: 279). His view of the history of
science is remarkable in at least two respects: he approaches it as a history
of scientific problems (for example, the problems of classical mechanics, or
the problems raised and solved by mechanistic conceptions of the living),
and in relation to certain philosophical questions (the problem of change,
the problem of creation).
16
transform the very notion of problem. And yet it is a mark of the
philosophical limitations of the anti-positivist tradition that it has not devoted
much effort to the conceptual clarification of the problem as such. As we
shall try to argue, Bergson does precisely this, and in even clearer terms than
Bachelard or Canguilhem. 3
Anti-positivism, for its own part, always threatens to degenerate into a
positivist view of problems as 'historically given,' or merely deduced from
the examination of possible 'moves' in a given situation, i.e. what it is
possible to say within the limits of a certain system of propositions and
concepts. Structuralism had to struggle with a positivist conception of
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17
words, according to the probable truth of a simple doxa' (Deleuze 1994:
157). 4
The positivist view of problems eventually comes down to the illusion
that pictures the problem as a phantomatic double of its solutions. This
illusion itself can be explained by reference to our tendency to give too much
importance to the activity of problem-solving, at the expense of problem-
stating. As Bergson says in the Creative Mind: 'The truth is that in
philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and
hence of posing it even more than of solving it. For a speculative problem is
solved as soon as it is well posed' (Bergson 1934: 51).
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Disagreement
Bergson, whether we like it or not, shares a common concern with
Bachelard, Koyre, Canguilhem, Foucault, Althusser (and Deleuze, which
goes without saying): a concern for what has been called a history of
problems. Not only does Bergson's actual conceptual practice confirm this,
but his method (or theory of philosophical practice) provides all the
underpinnings for a non-positivist view of problems. He can be considered
as the true purveyor of the theory of problems implicit in the anti-positivists'
epistemological practice.
This fact was not always acknowledged by those who reproached
Bergson for his rigid conception of science, or who classified him as a
'philosopher of experience'. But common problematics paradoxically
manifest themselves most clearly through this kind of disagreement
(Ranciere 1999: xii), or differential of interpretations. A common
problematic need not be stated as such, it does not require that any common
problem be stated. In a truly anti-positivist manner, we may say that it does
not need to be stated by both parties in the same way, or even stated at all.
The real discrepancy is of course not between anti-intellectualism and
intellectualism, irrationality and rationality, not even experience and
knowledge, subject and concept. It runs deeper, which means that it cannot
be grasped anywhere else than within philosophical practices themselves
- not in the types of 'philosophies' that these rather 'ideological'
designations try to capture, but in the working of certain operations and
procedures, and in the interpretations that allow them to function,
sometimes on condition that they become invisible.
Now where do we stand? There is no superior viewpoint. We must install
ourselves within the interpretative differential, where contrasting
interpretations and procedures play off each other. After opening a pair of
pliers to their widest possible angle (Foucault's scenography), we squeeze
them back to their pressure point (a common anti-positivist stance).
Somewhere along the way, we find that interpretations start diverging: it is
18
the point where differences are at once minimal and maximal, the point of
contradiction where contradictories oscillate around a centre, the smallest
angle. It is there that we have a chance to find what separates Bergson from
the French epistemological tradition, in their greatest proximity.
An easy way out, as we have seen, could be found in emphasizing that
Bergson is not a historian of science, nor an epistemologist, nor even a
philosopher of science. He is a metaphysician, and a metaphysician of a
specific kind: a metaphysician of intuition. He thinks that a direct
apprehension of reality is possible when one thinks sub specie durationis, in
duration, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us. This, indeed, is distinctive of
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False Problems
If we retrace our steps, the trajectory appears clearly:
1. the first point consisted in showing that the anti-positivist stance gives
priority to concepts over facts;
2. a deeper move was then identified: that of giving priority to problems
over concepts and theories;
3. this reversal of priority was grounded in a renewed conception of
problems themselves;
4. the last step consists in showing that it is essential to any consistent anti-
positivist view of problems that one should be able to account for the
possibility of pseudo-problems. And this is where Bergson's
philosophical strategy parts with the anti-positivist epistemological
tradition (to reverse the chronological order of things).
Bergson does not simply insist on the necessity of assessing problems
before the solutions that theories and systems provide. He develops, as Gilles
Deleuze rightly emphasized, a genuine method of intuition whose first rule
can be stated as follows: 'Apply the test of true and false to problems
themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the
level of problems.' (Deleuze 1991: 15).
19
There is an art of inventing problem positions that is assumed, yet never
taken up, in the works of the 'philosophers of the concept'. There is a
question they cannot really ask, because they lack a transcendental, truly
genetic conception of problem conditions, and this question is: 'how can this
constitutive power which resides in the problem be reconciled with a norm
of the true?' As Deleuze goes on: 'While it is relatively easy to define the
true and the false in relation to solutions whose problems have already been
stated, it seems much more difficult to say in what the true and the false
consist when applied to the process of stating problems.' (ibid., 16).
It will not do 'to define the truth or falsity of a problem by the possibility
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20
something inexplicable. The only authorized moves consist in demystifying,
unveiling and laying bare a problem that was never posed. But such a
problem, by definition, can never be false, it is at best unstatable (or at least
was so). And it can never be properly said to be invented either:
philosophy's role is merely to acknowledge its presence or absence.
Bergson, by contrast, is not satisfied with uncovering the problem:
[... ] I mean that its solution exists [as soon as it is well posed], although it may remain
hidden and, so to speak, covered up: the only thing left to do is to uncover it. But stating the
problem is not simply uncovering, it is inventing. Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with
what already exists, actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later.
Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened (Bergson 1934:
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53).
The critical stance can only uncover, it is bound to remain uncreative. If false
problems are ever debunked, they cannot be explained - why this false
problem rather than that one? how is it that we have begged the question by
projecting the answer in the question? why precisely this question, and this
answer? why now? Curiously enough, it is often the alleged partisans of the
concept which display the most naive and psychologising view of problems.
Bachelard's 'dialectics,' for example, often sounds like an elaboration of the
Brunschvicgian 'activity' of reason, conceived on the model of judgement.
The criticism of problems amounts to drawing boundaries, refusing,
overthrowing. 'It is fruitless, says Bachelard, to put a false problem at the
origin of a real one, it is even absurd to compare alchemy with nuclear
physics. [... ] Science has nothing to gain from false continuities, where what
is at stake is frank dialectics.' (Bache lard 1953: 104 ). At best then, false
problems boil down to problems that could not be solved when they were
formulated, problems that needed to be dropped and replaced by the right
ones by means of an 'epistemological break'.
Spelling out all the implications of the Bergsonian critique of false
problems would require a systematic investigation of the interplay of
intuition and intelligence in the operations of problem-making: dismantling
and debunking, stating and posing, answering and solving. Bergson's own
philosophical practice provides glimpses of what an inventive art of problem
positions, as opposed to the mechanical techniques of problem-solving,
would look like. In the case of metaphysical false problems (nothingness,
disorder), it is as if intelligence, triggered by intuition, was folded back unto
itself and forced to undo its own constructions, thus providing the
'intellectual counterpart of the intellectualist illusion,' to quote from La
Pensee et le Mouvant (Bergson 1934: 69; During 2000). But only intuition
can expose the wrong gesture or false movement that caused the problem to
be badly posed in the first place.
21
Conclusion
Carved out, so to speak, according to its natural articulations, the
disagreement between Bergson and the 'philosophers of the concept' has
taken a new shape. Only Bergson has managed to extend the anti-positivist
view of the positivity or priority of problems to a conception of their
intrinsic determination. This move, which Deleuze singled out as the main
characteristic of the method of intuition, necessarily involves probing
problems according to a norm of the true and the false, for this is really all
that is intrinsic about them. It also explains why Bergson cannot be captured
in Foucault's net: he is neither a philosopher of experience, nor a philosopher
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References
1. Cavailles' opposition runs between 'dialectics' and 'activity,' the latter being modelled
after a mainstream neo-Kantian philosophy.
2. See 'Bergson se faisant' ('Bergson in the making'), his tribute to Bergson, pronounced in
1959, with its dialectic of 'Bergson' and 'Bergsonism'.
3. A careful study of Canguilhem's 'Concept and Life' (Canguilhem, 1970: 335-364) would
qualify this statement. This text gives a very useful clue to the understanding of Bergson's
own theory of problems. Problems are described as an expression of life itself: it is in fact
life which poses problems about life, even if man alone is able to raise truly false
problems.
4. Also compare Deleuze 1994: 158 and Bergson 1934: 51. See During 2001: 67-69.
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