'Inheritance, Originality and the Will: Bergson and Heidegger on Creation', IJPS

International Journal of Philosophical Studies ISSN: 0967-2559 (Print) 1466-4542 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20 Inheritance, Originality and the Will: Bergson and Heidegger on Creation Mark Sinclair To cite this article: Mark Sinclair (2014) Inheritance, Originality and the Will: Bergson and Heidegger on Creation, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22:5, 655-675, DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2014.913302 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2014.913302 Published online: 01 Jul 2014. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 241 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=riph20 Download by: [Mark Sinclair] Date: 11 May 2017, At: 03:23 International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2014 Vol. 22, No. 5, 655–675, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2014.913302 Inheritance, Originality and the Will: Bergson and Heidegger on Creation Mark Sinclair Abstract In the work of Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger we find different responses to traditional ideas of ‘creation’. Bergson advances a philosophy of creation, wherein ‘creation’ is presented as the production of a ‘radical’ or ‘absolute’ novelty, not only in art, but in all forms of human experience and biological life. Heidegger, in contrast, comes to criticise ideas of ‘creation’ in art as the expression of an alienated ‘humanism’ and ‘subjectivism’ essential to the modern age. This paper illuminates this divergence by showing how Bergson and Heidegger, despite appearances, grapple with the question of art-production – and with the attendant issues of inheritance and originality – in similar ways. It is only in recognising this proximity, I argue, that it is possible to perceive adequately what essentially distinguishes their approaches: Bergson’s conception of creation as a function of the will. Keywords: Bergson; Heidegger; creation; genius; history; art Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger are two important twentieth-century philosophers who inherit traditional ideas of ‘creation’ in contrasting ways. From at least his Creative Evolution of 1907, an idea of creation, developed according to the guiding thread of an interpretation of art production, becomes pivotal in Bergson’s account of time as duration and in his philosophy as a whole. His is a philosophy of creation, wherein ‘creation’ is presented as the production of a ‘radical’ or ‘absolute’ novelty, not only in art, but in all forms of human experience and biological life. In contrast, Heidegger comes to criticise ideas of ‘creation’ in relation to art: such ideas, he argues, risk alienating us from the historicity and essence of art, and are an expression of the ‘humanism’ and ‘subjectivism’ essential to the modern age. Bergson and Heidegger, then, clearly differ on ‘creation’. In this paper, however, I argue that this difference shelters a close – and hitherto unnoticed – proximity. The two philosophers grapple in comparable ways with the question of ‘creation’ and with the attendant issues of inheritance and originality – and only in recognising that and how they do so, I contend, is it possible to understand what ultimately separates them.1 © 2014 Taylor & Francis INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES The first section of the article offers an initial approach to an oft-misunderstood issue in Bergson’s work: his conception of creation is not univocal. Despite his emphasis on ‘absolute’ or ‘radical’ novelty, ‘creation’, for Bergson, is by no means necessarily antithetical to an idea of inheritance from nature and history. It will become clear that Bergson and Heidegger share the project of conceiving art production as something other than either mere reproduction or production de novo – and that this leads both philosophers into a dialogue with Aristotelian ideas. In a second section of the paper, I show that this shared problematic is developed when both consider the role of history in art: the doctrine of temporal retroactivity that Bergson advances in his later work represents, I contend, the point at which he stands in the closest proximity to the conception of temporality (Zeitlichkeit) and historicity (Geschichte) with which Heidegger claimed to have surpassed his predecessor’s conception of duration. And yet, at the very moment that Bergson affirms that creativity has a retroactive effect on the past, he holds that the past has no bearing on the present – and this according to a strong sense of ‘creation’ as the production of absolute novelty. The final section of the essay will address not only the difficulties of this ‘creationist’ position but also unearth the grounds on which Bergson adopts it: an idea of the will, and thus a philosophical voluntarism, with which much of Bergson scholarship has still not come to terms. 1. Between Reproduction and Production de novo It is first necessary to recall a fact long acknowledged but all too easily forgotten given our now vague and banalised ideas concerning ‘creativity’: the idea of the human being as ‘creative’ has a theological background.2 In the Middle Ages, and still in the early Renaissance, creatio and creare were seldom used in relation to human acts and accomplishments, and the ability to produce something ex nihilo – to create, properly speaking, rather simply to make – was, in classical Augustinian terms, the prerogative of God.3 The move in the Renaissance to describe artists as creators was, in fact, a revolutionary act of an emergent humanism that, for many, would have been tantamount to blasphemy. The very idea of human creativity originally involves the idea of a divine power to produce pure novelty, to produce something from nothing; and even when human creativity is understood as merely analogous with divine creativity, since the human artist ‘creates’ the form but not the pre-given matter of the artwork, the idea of a miraculous and absolute power to produce novelty still guides and underlies conceptions of human capabilities.4 In what sense does this theological background inform Bergson’s inheritance of an idea of creation, an idea that he extends beyond art production to psychological and biological life as a whole? Bergson is certainly drawn to a conception of creation as the production of an absolute novelty, even if he cannot admit creation ex nihilo given his argument that nothingness, like disorder and 656 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL like possibility, is an ens rationis posterior to sense-experience and which thus contains not less but more than the idea of something. Bergson is certainly drawn – to make the same point with different terms – to a conception of creation as radically de novo, as deriving from nothing (apart from the pre-given work material) other than the present act of creation, and it can even be said that this absolute sense of both creation and novelty guides his thinking as an ideal from at least 1907. It is nevertheless the case that, as Newton Stallknecht put it in 1934, ‘Bergson’s philosophy really contains two accounts of creation’:5 a conception of creation as the production of absolute novelty contrasts with a more continuous conception of creation in Bergson’s work. This can be elucidated with reference to a key footnote in the first chapter of Creation Evolution, in which Bergson responds to Gabriel Séailles’ 1883 Essai sur le génie dans l’art. In this work Séailles attempts to think beyond conceptions of genius as a principle discontinuous with nature and history. The artist’s genius already resides in her selective appropriation of nature and history, he argues, and thus the difference between the product of genius and the other products of life is a difference of degree rather than in kind. It is in this sense that Séailles announces in the introduction that ‘[t]hought continues life, it tends to assimilate to itself, to organise everything which enters into it’. What Séailles says about thought applies to his account of genius: it is a principle continuous with life, insofar as it is a capacity to assimilate both history and nature. Yet what was evidently of great interest to Bergson is Séailles’ further claim that what unites and underlies thought and life in their unity is a ‘creative principle (puissance créatrice)’;6 thought ‘can be defined, as much as the life of the body, as “a creation”’.7 Thought, including the mode of ‘thought’ that is genius, is continuous with biological life, but life in its organisation is already a function of a ‘creative’ principle – and it clearly must be if genius as a creative principle is not to be discontinuous with life itself. In appealing thus to an idea of ‘creation’, however, Séailles is aware – the quotation marks already indicate this – of the extent to which he is deforming traditional usage, insofar as creation, on his account, involves assimilation and precisely not production from nothing. As he acknowledges much later in the book, genius, a principle continuous with life, is not, stricto sensu, creative; genius ‘does not create, in the strict sense of the word; it does not produce new forms from scratch (de toutes pièces)’.8 There is, then, a ‘creative’ principle underlying all the manifestations of life, but this creative principle cannot be taken in any strict sense as the production of an absolute novelty. Given that it clarifies one of the two ideas in the title of the book, the footnote in which Bergson responds to Séailles is perhaps the most important of Creative Evolution as a whole.9 Within it, Bergson first seems to indicate that Séailles remarks are a source of inspiration for his own attempts to locate a creative principle in nature, but here is the footnote in its entirety: 657 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES In his beautiful book on Genius in Art, M. Séailles develops the double thesis that art prolongs nature and that life is creation. We would happily accept the latter formulation: but do we have to understand by ‘creation’, as he does, a synthesis of elements? Wherever there are pre-existing elements, the synthesis that will be made of them is given virtually (virtuellement), being only one of the possible arrangements: and this arrangement, amongst all the other possibilities that surrounded it, could have been apprehended in advance by a superhuman intelligence. We hold, on the contrary, that in the domain of life, the elements do not have a real and separate existence. These are but successive views of the mind on an indivisible process. And this is why there is radical contingency in progress, an incommensurability between what proceeds and what follows – that is, duration.10 Bergson does not explicitly comment on Séailles’ position that creation in this context should not be understood in a strict or proper sense. Yet he implicitly accepts this, and criticises only Séailles’ further claim that creation is a synthesis of separate ‘elements’. That creation is not ex nihilo or de novo does not, Bergson holds, entail that it is synthetic or combinatorial in this way. Such an approach, for Bergson, would reduce creation to mere making and fail to recognise the real extent to which there is novelty in the course of life. Presenting an early expression of his arguments concerning the modal category of possibility, Bergson argues here that if the new thing is only an arrangement of already separate elements then that thing was (in principle, and here in the divine mind) foreseeable (and thus, as Bergson claims, ‘possible’ or ‘virtual’) – but life in its progress and duration cannot be foreseen because it involves radical contingency and incommensurability between past and future.11 The present, as Bergson always argues, in no way determines what the future will be. Unforeseeablility and indeterminism do not necessarily imply discontinuity, however, and for this reason Bergson can use the term ‘element’ in a positive sense: there are elements from which the new event emerges, but these do not have a ‘real and separable existence’. Bergson will develop this idea of production from ‘elements’ in Chapter II of Creative Evolution in describing biological evolution, and this shows how his account of biological life is influenced by his account of art production.12 Biological evolution, he writes, ‘never advances in the sense of an association, but rather of dissociation, never towards convergence, but towards a divergence of effort’. Consequently, if there are ‘elements’ from which processes and events emerge, these are not comparable to objects juxtaposed in space, exclusive each of the other, but rather to psychological states, of which each, though itself to begin with, participates in the others and thus contains virtually the whole of the personality to which it belongs.13 658 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL The singularity of forms of life and events emerges from an original interpenetrative unity. What is still more important for us, however, is that the footnote referring to Séailles already makes clear that we should not take at face value Bergson’s claims to a ‘radical’ and ‘absolute’ novelty. If creation did involve an idea of absolute novelty or discontinuity, the very idea of a creative evolution would risk a contradiction in terms. Moreover, in 1907 Bergson treats creation as synonymous with maturation; after having stated that ‘the more we dwell on the nature of time, the more we will understand that duration signifies invention, creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new’, he can write of time as the ‘internal work of maturation or creation’.14 To note this is not to deny that a second, discontinuous sense of creation emerges elsewhere in Bergson’s work. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, for example, Bergson will return to the idea of a creative evolution by describing ‘the unforeseeability of forms that life creates from scratch (de toutes pièces), by discontinuous leaps, all along its evolution’.15 What Séailles had denied, that creation operates ‘from scratch’, Bergson affirms in 1930; and therefore he seems to entertain the apparently contradictory idea of a discontinuous evolution. It nevertheless remains the case that in Creative Evolution Bergson advances an idea of creation as irreducible both to reproduction and production de novo, and that this idea of creation is involved in what he writes about artistic inspiration as ‘aesthetic intuition’. Borrowing from Séailles, Bergson holds that the artist attempts to capture the hidden ‘intention’ of her model, thus placing herself in the ‘interiority of the object by a sort of sympathy’.16 As much as this sympathy brings something to the object, it nevertheless draws something from its hidden interiority. It is this conception of creation that can be compared productively with Heidegger’s reflection on art production. Like Bergson, Heidegger seeks to distinguish art production from traditional ideas of prosaic craft – and this is a reason why, in the two early versions of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ delivered as lectures in 1935, there is no positive account of the former; we will not, he argues, be able to account for the specificity of art production unless we first determine what the artwork itself achieves or works in its reception. Certainly, Heidegger’s approach may seem to contrast with Bergson’s emphasis on novelty: art production is distinct from craft production, Heidegger holds, not because it inherits less from what precedes it, but rather because it inherits more. It is from this perspective that he thinks art with the verb schöpfen, which according to the dictionary originally means to ‘draw from’, as ‘one draws water from a well’.17 It nonetheless remains the case that when Heidegger advances his interpretation of schöpfen in the final version of the essay, he comes up against the question of the novelty of the original artwork in a way such that his apparently different orientation by no means precludes sharing common ground with Bergson. This occurs within Heidegger’s attempt to overcome traditional conceptions of matter according to his conception of Earth (Erde). The artist he argues, 659 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES does not simply impose from the outside a plan or blueprint on more or less pliable, more or less recalcitrant materials, and, by working them up into a definite form, she does not simply act on them, forcing them to become what they are not. Instead, the artist ‘draws from’ what we call her ‘materials’, and lets a particular form come into presence. In art production there is an essential passivity, a ‘receiving and extracting (Entnehmen) within the relation to unconcealment (Unverborgenheit)’.18 In this context Heidegger retrieves Albrecht Dürer’s dictum, according to which ‘in truth, art lies hidden within nature; he who can wrest it from her, has it’.19 The dictum expresses what Erwin Panofsky has described as a commonplace of Renaissance thinking, namely the idea that the artwork is hidden in the work ‘material’ before it is unearthed or extracted in the process of production – a process that is much more ‘revelatory’ than ‘creative’.20 And yet although Heidegger appropriates this Renaissance commonplace by means of Dürer’s dictrum, he immediately qualifies it. It is true that ‘hidden in nature’ is a ‘capacity for bringing forth (Hervorbringenkönnen)’, and thus that art is hidden in nature, but ‘it is equally certain that this art hidden in nature becomes manifest first through the work, because it lies originally in the work’.21 Heidegger takes up the dictum, then, because it offers a conception of art production as revelation rather than creation, but he immediately qualifies the dictum, and thus its sense of revelation, in order to emphasise the originality and novelty of the artwork. What is at stake here can be illuminated by returning to the ancient Greek origin of this Renaissance conception of art-production: Aristotle’s notion of dunamis, of power or potentiality. In Metaphysics Z we read: ‘energeia means the presence – to huparchein – of the thing but not in the sense which we mean by potentiality. We say that a thing is present potentially as Hermes is present in the wood’.22 Since the wood is the statue potentially, the latter, as Aristotle will note, needs only to be wrought out from the former by a process of abstraction. This is to say that when Heidegger qualifies Dürer’s dictum, he is engaging with an Aristotelian problematic concerning potentiality. More to the point, he is responding to Aristotle’s question concerning the respective priority of actuality and potentiality. In Metaphysics Θ, Aristotle holds that actuality is ontologically prior to potentiality in that the finished product is more in being, and thus higher than as yet unformed matter. He also acknowledges, however, that actuality is prior to possibility epistemologically or conceptually (to logo), since we cannot know what exactly the wood is capable of until we experience whatever is produced from it.23 Heidegger, too, makes this epistemological point when he writes that the art hidden in nature becomes manifest only by means of the work, and yet he seems to go further than this in claiming that the capacity is originally rooted ‘in the work’. I will return to this problem in the following section, but Heidegger seems to say that these capacities are what they are only through the work, and in this case it is hard to see how they can be pre-existing capacities at all. 660 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL Here, however, it is important to note that Aristotle’s conception of potentiality illuminates Bergson’s thinking also. It can, in fact, help us to think production in the sense intermediate between reproduction and production de novo that Bergson intends. Certainly, it might be thought that Aristotle’s position is antithetical to Bergson’s concern for novelty, for if the statue is already present in the wood, then production would be tantamount to reduplication, and thus nothing genuinely new would happen in the event. Yet Bergson’s critique of a conception of possibility as conceivability and foreseeability has no bearing on Aristotle’s notion of potentiality,24 for, as we have seen, Aristotle recognises that our conceptions of what something can possibly or potentially be occur in the event, after the fact. In addition, Aristotle says not that the statue is actually present before it is produced, but rather that it is potentially present, and we can approach what he means by dunamis as a way of being, by recognising that the passive power of the wood is what it is only in relation to the active power of the carpenter to transform the wood. The finished product requires the unification and fusion of different active and passive potentialities, potentialities that exist only in relation to each other. Hence the statue is clearly not already, i.e., actually there in the wood; it is not actually, for that matter, anywhere at all. This is to say that Aristotle’s conception of potentiality no more excludes a conception of novelty than Bergson’s own concern for the ‘elements’ from which a product derives. Of course, we might worry that Aristotle’s dunamis is not sufficiently ‘dynamic’ or that his teleological essentialism excludes radical novelty – but these are, quite simply, different issues. 2. Retroactivity in History and Ecstatic Temporality Both Bergson and Heidegger, then, attempt to think art production as something intermediate between reproduction and production de novo, and this involves the recognition that originality is tied to inheritance – at least, as we have seen, to inheritance from nature. Yet in his later work, and with his doctrine of retroactivity in history, Bergson develops this thought in ways that are perhaps surprising. He argues not just that originality is tied to or bound by inheritance, but that inheritance is a function of originality, and even ‘created’ by the latter; and this according to an absolute and genuinely radical conception of creation that was not the primary sense of the term in Creative Evolution. Bergson articulates his doctrine of retroactivity in a 1920 lecture at The University of Oxford that was reworked and published in French as ‘Le possible et le réel’ in the 1934 La pensée et le mouvant. It is, however, in the introduction to this volume that the doctrine receives its most deliberate formulation, with an example that borrows from Emile Deschanel’s 1882 Le romantisme des Classiques. We may well talk now of the romanticism of Racine or Boileau, but: 661 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES the romantic aspect of classicism became manifest (ne s’est dégagé) only by the retroactive effect of romanticism […]. If there had been no Rousseau, no Chateaubriand, no Vigny or Hugo, not only would we never have noticed, but there would never really have been any romanticism in the Classics of old, for this romanticism of the Classics is realised only by the lifting-out (découpage), in their work, of a certain aspect (aspect), and this aspect (la découpure), with its particular form, existed no more in classical literature before the apparition of romanticism, than exists, in a passing cloud, the amusing sketch that an artist perceives in it by organising the amorphous mass according to his imagination. Romanticism operated retroactively on classicism, like the artist’s sketch on this cloud. Retroactively it created its own prefiguration in the past, and an explanation of itself by its antecedents.25 The idea that the romantic aspect of classicism was actually there all along, but unnoticed, is, Bergson argues, merely a retrospective illusion – an illusion ignorant of the way that the present can shape retroactively the past. The illusion is tenacious, and it is the fate of creative artists to be subjected to it, in one way or another, by critics who discover, once the shock caused by the novel work has receded, that the work was prefigured in the past. ‘Creative’ work is, to borrow the title of a recent book by Pierre Bayard, Le plagiat par anticipation, and that is to say, anticipatory rather than actual plagiarism.26 It involves repetition of the past – not the boring repetition of the same that Bergson routinely opposes to creation, but rather repetition with a difference. Yet if the new aspect of the past was not actually there all along, does that mean that it was not there in any sense at all? There are two responses to this question in Bergson’s later work, and these two responses are reducible to his two senses of creation. Bergson entertains an affirmative answer to the question in that he proposes that the novelty of the present ‘could’ consist of ‘additions of new qualities, created from scratch (de toutes pièces) and absolutely unforeseeable’.27 This is no mere hypothesis given what he had claimed about creation ‘from scratch’ in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. At the very moment, then, that Bergson claims that the present has a retroactive effect on the past, he asserts that the past has or, at least in particular instances, can have no bearing on the present; the present can arise wholly de novo and the aspects that it ‘discovers’ would simply be imposed on the past by the present. Although Séailles had resisted the idea of genius, the principle of ‘creation’, as arising de toutes pièces, Bergson now affirms precisely that idea; and he does this in ‘The Possible and the Real’ and The Two Sources according to a rather more traditionally modern interpretation of ‘genius’ as a capacity for making absolute beginnings. Moreover, he seems immediately to extend this conception of genial discontinuity in the history of art and literature into a conception of social 662 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL history more broadly understood. We may claim, he writes, to discover ‘premonitory signs’ of the modern advent of democracy in the periods preceding it, but these are in our eyes, signs only because we know the course, because the course has been completed. Neither the course, nor its direction, nor in consequence, its end were given when these facts came into being: hence they were not yet signs.28 Bergson sketches here a picture of history without tendencies, movements or forces, and historical change seems to have become a matter of permanent revolution – and this not just as a desideratum.29 Certainly, Bergson admits in a parenthesis that ‘not just any (non quelconque)’ novel reality is able to emerge from a specific historical conjuncture, but what it is that prevents anything being possible he does not say. There is, however, another, negative answer to the question, and not just because of the way Bergson obliquely qualifies his conception of social history. For the terms he uses to articulate the idea of retroactivity seem to presuppose that the new aspect was not imposed on, but drawn from the past. He writes of ‘isolating (isoler)’ an aspect of the past, and uses a reflexive verb in a passive sense, se dégager, and a noun, découpure, with privative prefixes to describe what the present does to the past: the découpure or ‘cutting’ s’est dégagé, was revealed in, or ‘lifted out of’ the past. Of course, if the aspect was lifted out of the extant work of the past, it must in some sense have already been there; perhaps not actually there, but at least, and as Aristotle put it, potentially there. Moreover, if Bergson’s example of the artist’s imagination amounts to a claim that the ‘amusing sketch’ is wholly other to the cloud that occasioned it, then we would have to reject the idea that the cloud occasioned the sketch at all – but Bergson obviously does not. It would also be difficult to relate this to what he had said previously about artistic ‘inspiration’ as ‘aesthetic intuition’. Bergson certainly acknowledged late in his life that he never presented a developed or complete aesthetic theory that he could call his own,30 but if his example of the artist in the passage above is supposed to support a theory of art production ‘from scratch’, it would contrast sharply with his previous position. With this second response to the question, then, Bergson would affirm that an aspect découpé in the tradition was somehow already there in that it was drawn from or out of the past, and that this aspect did not previously exist. Such a contradictory position may not seem to be the most auspicious basis for philosophical thought. Yet precisely this contradiction is what Heidegger also affirms in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ when describing aesthetic intuition as a ‘poetic projection’: 663 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES Poetic projection [dichtende Entwurf] comes from nothing in this respect, that it never takes its gift from the ordinary and the traditional. Yet it never comes from nothing in that what is projected by it is only the withheld determination [Bestimmung] of historical [geschichtlichen] Dasein itself.31 The original artwork comes from nothing that is already extant – and yet it does not come from nothing, it does not emerge ex nihilo, in that it draws from the past in order to be original. How, then, to make sense of such a contradiction? Everything rests here on the sense of ‘history’ or Geschichte in Heidegger’s hands. His claim that the work does in some sense arise ex historia is not to say that the possibility of the original work in the present simply pre-existed the present in the work of the past. Nor does it imply, conversely, that the possibilities of future work were ‘created’ in it by the retroactive effect of the original work of art in the present. The point, for Heidegger, is that we do not have to choose one of these options. Instead, we have to think both at the same time: the original work reveals what the past made possible – but this possibility is nothing without the original work in the present. It is therefore pointless to wonder whether the possibility of the work chronologically precedes its actuality or vice versa: both appear at once and co-constitute the ‘shock of the new’. We may claim that such an account of history was already implied in Kant’s intriguing and elliptical remarks on canonical succession in §47 of the Critique of Judgment.32 We may even argue that the ‘simultaneity’ of actuality and possibility in the sense described above is acknowledged by Aristotle, who in Metaphysics Θ writes that ‘according to time, actuality is in one sense prior” to potentiality “and in another sense not’.33 Yet Heidegger grounds his thinking of potentiality and canonical succession in art on an idea of time or temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as such.34 According to §68 of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), the past – and that is to say, the ‘having-been’ or ‘beenness (Gewesenheit)’ of Dasein – can be taken up by means of ‘repetition (Wiederhölung)’ expressly as a source of possibility for the future. Whether it be one’s own past or that of world-history, ‘beenness’ is always a task. The past is not a realm of dead necessity, and yet the possibilities it bequeaths are what they are only in their repetition by means of the openness of the future. Accordingly, Heidegger argues that what he terms ‘ecstatic temporality’ ‘does not mean a “succession” (“Nacheinander”) of the ecstases. The future is not later than having-been, and this is not earlier than the present’.35 Beenness is not a series of ‘nows’ that are no longer, and the future is not a series of ‘nows’ that are not yet. Instead, the past, the present and the future all ‘occur’, as it were, ‘at the same time’. Hence as Heidegger writes in §6 of Being and Time, in advancing an idea that is not foreign to Bergson’s thinking: ‘Dasein’s own past – and this always means the past of its generation – is not something which follows along after it, but something which already goes ahead of it’.36 664 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL Bergson does not deliberately advance any such conception of temporality, and he does not transform or restate his account of duration to accommodate his own idea of the retroactivity of the present on the past in history. Bergson, in other words, does not show explicitly how the idea of retroactivity developed at the level of art history and ‘collective’ history impacts on his previous accounts of duration and memory as experienced by each of us individually. That he does not is one reason why his claims concerning retroactivity remain merely promissory. Nevertheless, if there are ‘only a few indicators’ in Bergson’s work concerning history and ‘historical duration’,37 as Jean Hyppolite noted in 1949, then these indicators point towards, I contend, a hermeneutic conception of history, and towards an ‘ecstatic’ idea of temporality that would ground it. This is an important reason why it is not entirely fair that, as Hyppolite also notes, ‘modern philosophies of temporalisation have criticised Bergson for making nothing more of duration than “cohesion”, for not having recognised the separations and the reunifications of the ecstasies of the past, present and future’.38 According to such a critique, the account of duration that Bergson establishes by criticising a linear and thus spatialised conception of time is, in effect, a ‘negative chronology’ in that it says much more about what duration or original time is not than about what ‘it is’.39 One might respond to such a critique, following Hyppolite, by claiming that Bergson’s Matter and Memory is already an attempt ‘to raise the problem’ of the separations and reunifications of past, present and future and to ‘resolve’ it.40 Yet this response passes over a fundamental point: even though he develops it only in relation to social rather than personal history, Bergson’s conception of retroactivity clearly goes beyond the idea of the past in-itself advanced in the text of 1896.41 3. Creation and the Will According to the ‘ecstatic’ conception of time and history outlined above, it is not simply the case that inheritance and originality are inextricably bound together. Each is rather a function of the other; the artist can inherit from the past to the degree that she is original, and she can be original to the degree that she inherits. In one sense, Bergson expresses such a conception of inheritance and originality, and thus his thinking points towards a hermeneutic conception of time and history. Yet if the idea of inheritance and originality each being a function of the other is not Bergson’s ‘official doctrine’ in his later work – if, instead, he holds that the present retroacts on the past whilst drawing nothing from it – then it is necessary to determine both what is particular to this doctrine, and what motivates him to adopt it. One motivation seems to be that Bergson holds that novelty is, in itself, a good thing. This becomes clear when, in the final paragraph of ‘The Possible and the Real’, he illuminates the ethical import of his thinking. A doctrine of creation and novelty can guide a way of life that is more joyful: 665 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES More joyful, because the reality that invents itself before our eyes will give to each of us, continually, some of the satisfactions that art offers at rare intervals for the privileged: it will reveal to us, beyond the fixity and the monotony, which our senses, hypnotised by the constancy of our needs, first see in it, the continual, endlessly repeating novelty, the original mobility (mouvante) of things.42 Now, if novelty is intrinsically a good thing, we can see why Bergson would hold that we have access to an unadulterated form of it in our experience. Almost two centuries before Bergson, however, Edmund Burke had insightfully rejected the idea that novelty is intrinsically good in the first section of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. ‘Some degree of novelty’43 is certainly an ingredient of any experience of the beautiful and the sublime, but novelty is not, as Joseph Addison had held, an aesthetic category in its own right, for it is not necessarily good; all kinds of novel things are, need it be said, bad. Moreover, continual novelty would be, far from joyful, perfectly disconcerting. ‘The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind’, Burke argues, is ‘curiosity’, but ‘as those things which engage us purely by their novelty, cannot attach us for any length of time, curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections … and it always has an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety’.44 There is, then, something infantile and tiresome in what Bergson claims to be a matter purely of joy. A century after Burke, Søren Kierkegaard puts the same point in an interrogative form: ‘Who could want to be susceptible to every fleeting thing, the novel, which always enervatingly diverts the soul anew?’45 Who, if not those who, strangely enough, see no virtue in constancy?46 After Burke and Kierkegaard there is nothing novel left for Heidegger to say about novelty in an epoch – die Neuzeit, modernity or the time of the new – that defines itself by it. Yet after analysing curiosity as a state of distraction in Being and Time, he does make sure to state the obvious: the problem with the new is that it ‘is already fast becoming passé’.47 There is another, more compelling motivation for Bergson’s positing of creation as the production of absolute novelty: his concern to elaborate and safeguard an idea of human freedom. Discontinuity between the past and present, one might claim, allows for radical freedom, freedom to act wholly independently of the past. On this question of freedom, however, in the final paragraph of ‘The Possible and the Real’, Bergson continues thus: … we will, above all, be stronger, for we will feel ourselves participating, creators of ourselves, in the great work of creation, which is there form the beginning and which continues before our eyes. Our capacity to act, in grasping itself, will be intensified. Humiliated heretofore in at attitude of obedience, slaves of all kinds of natural necessities, we will lift ourselves up, masters associated to a greater Master.48 666 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL A doctrine of radical novelty constitutes a ‘preparation for living well’49 because it will give us both joy and freedom, liberating us not only from boredom, but also from humiliation. Far from noble savages, we are originally humiliated slaves; and consequently Bergson conceives freedom in terms of intensification, strength and mastery, of self-mastery and mastery over nature. The goal of modern philosophy, following Descartes, is mastery and possession of nature, and Bergson qualifies this only by adding that self-mastery in the form of self-creation is also required. Certainly, the mastery of the subject over nature can never be absolute, but we will nevertheless be able to associate ourselves with the great work of creation that exceeds us, and which Bergson seems – without further clarification – to describe as the ‘great Master’. What is it, however, that enables us to create and thus create ourselves? What allows us to lift ourselves up, to elevate ourselves above natural necessity? To lift oneself up requires effort, and where there is effort, there is will. Creation, then, is a function of the will, and, if Bergson does not state this explicitly in ‘The Possible and the Real’, he nevertheless affirms here that we are artistic and creative when ‘we want to be (quand nous le voulons)’.50 Such a voluntarist position may appear strange, particularly in the light of ordinary intuitions about ‘creativity’ containing an essential element of inspiration irreducible to perspiration. One wonders how such a voluntarist position could make sense of, say, ‘writer’s block’ or the ‘difficult second album’. The position is all the more strange in that within Kant’s third Critique, the locus classicus of the modern concept of genius, the principle of fine art production is independent of the will.51 Yet Bergson’s remark is not inadvertent, since in Creative Evolution, he had already claimed that ‘the principle of all life’, and thus all duration, is ‘a pure willing (un pur vouloir)’.52 Certainly, if as Bergson writes in ‘Dreams’, ‘waking and willing (veiller et vouloir) are one and the same’,53 he might have considered creation, like dreaming, to be a form of relaxation or even negation of the will. Yet he does not, and the reason why not is, in the end, patent: if life is creation, and if life is will, then creation itself cannot be anything but voluntary. Bergson evidently wants to hold on to the thought that life is creation, and to develop the idea that life is a function of the will; but given that his idea of creation in developed according to the guiding thread of reflection on art production, this leads to a voluntarist conception of the latter, and of what, for him, is its principle, namely genius. In fact, in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion Bergson explicitly speaks of genius as a function of the will. There exist ‘volontés géniales’, genial acts of will, volitions that are at once acts of genius; ‘the will has its genius’, Bergson holds, ‘as does thought, and genius defies all prevision’.54 What exactly Bergson could mean here with the idea that the will is in possession of genius is open to question, but genius would not be a force or faculty external to the will, but rather one internal to it. Within an important recent study, Arnaud François remarks that Bergson’s theory of the will has ‘little drawn the attention of commentators’, principally 667 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES because it is most explicitly developed in lectures, rather than in the works published in his lifetime.55 François shows how Bergson’s reflection on the will begins with an idea of the unity of memory and future-oriented, voluntary action as a function of a variable ‘vital tone’ or ‘tension’, which is independent of, though related to, the will; and how this position later develops into the more radical claim that the essence of all consciousness, and thus all life and duration, is will.56 It is this emergent voluntarism, I contend, that forms the background to, and provides a motivation for, Bergson’s positing of discontinuity. For, given the apparently brute and unmovable fact of the past, the purest expression of the will – at least if one does not follow Nietzsche’s thought of the Eternal Return of the Same – would be an entirely self-grounding, purely voluntary principle of creativity entirely independent of the past. That such a conception of discontinuity returns us to the cinematic conception of movement and time that Bergson so effectively criticised in 1907 would be merely an inconvenience for a philosopher able to sacrifice, as we have seen, a rich and viable account of artistic production and aesthetic intuition for, in the end, the sake of the will. In any event, the consequences of such radical voluntarism can easily be drawn: if all creation is a pure willing, and if all creation is necessarily a self-creation, then all creation is ultimately a ‘will to will’ – a willing that intends, through its ‘creative expressions’, to augment its own power and mastery. ‘Modern subjectivism’, as Heidegger remarks in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, ‘immediately misinterprets creation as the sovereign subject’s performance of genius (mißdeutet freilich das Schöpferische sogleich im Sinne der genialen Leistung des selbstherrlichen Subjektes)’.57 The remark points to a simple fact, namely that the idea of genius as the principle of fine art production arises in the eighteenth century, and belongs to the epoch of modern philosophy that Heidegger terms the ‘modern metaphysics of subjectivity’. To be sure, the remark is vague and risks interpretative violence if it were supposed to apply, for example, to the Critique of Judgment. Not only can genius not be reduced to the will and sovereignty in Kant’s analysis, but the latter contains echoes of an inspiration theory of art production as distinct from a creation theory; genius can act as a conduit for nature, as Kant suggests in §46, whilst §47, as noted above, presents genius as intrinsically bound to history and inheritance, albeit in a way that Kant admits he is not quite able to comprehend.58 In a lecture course of 1944, however, it becomes clear that the most immediate target of this remark was not Kant, but Nietzsche, in whose conception of the will to power, as Heidegger argues, the ‘modern thought of the human as “genius” expresses itself with its final consequence’. Heidegger continues as follows: The thought of the creative human, or, stated more clearly, the thought that the human achieves its highest fulfilment in creativity and as genius … is founded on the modern determination of the essence of the human 668 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL as subject setting-itself-upon itself [als des sich-auf-sich-selbst stellenden Subjektes], by which all ‘objects’ are first determined as such in their objectivity. By setting its essence upon itself, the human rises into the willing of its self. With this up-rising [Aufstand] of the human into the will as the willing of itself, all things simultaneously become an object for the first time.59 Here Heidegger uses schöpfen to speak of creation in a sense he aims to delimit, rather than trying to draw on the original sense of the German word to advance an inspiration or revelation theory that would contrast, strico sensu, with a creation theory. In any case, his first point is that the idea of the human being as possessing a creative power, a power to produce absolute novelty, is an expression of the basic metaphysical position of an a-historical, supra-natural and thus self-grounding subject – a basic position that was prepared for, as Heidegger goes on to note, in the Renaissance. Yet this fundamental metaphysical position already contains, as Heidegger seems to assert, the idea of the primacy of the will that will clearly emerge, in various ways, later in the course of modern philosophy: the primacy of the will is what the idea of sovereignty and self-grounding already contains. Hence it should come as no real surprise that creation and genius appear later in Nietzsche’s work explicitly as a function of will, for this is simply what the idea of self-grounding, which underlies the idea of human creativity, presupposes. Heidegger offers these remarks about creation and genius towards the end of a long trajectory of thinking on the question of the will – which, at the beginning of the 1930s, had included an explicit philosophical voluntarism that, as recent scholarship has underlined, partially motivated his disastrous political interventions in the Third Reich.60 It is not possible to trace this trajectory here, and our concern lies simply with the fact that the ‘thought of the human as creative and as genius’ expresses itself with this ‘final consequence’ in Bergson, as well as in Nietzsche. Certainly, in one sense – the improper sense – Bergson’s doctrine of creation does not attain this final consequence, in that it does not exclude, as we have seen, revelation of history and nature in the production of ‘novelty’. The concept of aesthetic intuition in relation to nature that Bergson inherits from Ravaisson and Séailles is close to Heidegger’s at once Aristotelian and post-modern conception of art production, as is the less ‘official’ aspect of Bergson’s doctrine of retroactivity in history. Yet, in another, proper and absolute sense, one that Bergson expresses in his later work, creation becomes solely a function of the self-grounding voluntary subject, master of itself and the objects arrayed before it. To be sure, we might wonder whether the will is much more of a cosmic than an individual principle in Bergson’s work – but it is Bergson who says we are artistic when we want to be, and even if it were an impersonal principle, genius, as a function of the will and as a principle of discontinuous radical novelty, would still amount to 669 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES alienation from history and nature. Of course, one might also claim that the virtue of Bergson’s evolutionary theory is precisely to challenge modern humanism and ‘subjectivism’, and this, in particular, by extending a sense of creativity to the non-human, to biological life as a whole. Yet as Bergson’s final remarks in ‘The Possible and the Real’ make plain, extending a fundamentally modern metaphysical position concerning genius, creativity and the will beyond human life does not amount to a transformation of that position. To read Bergson, I conclude, is to be confronted with the necessity of a decision. This is not, to be sure, the decision: Bergson or Heidegger. Yet nor is it simply the oft-discussed decision between Bergson as a thinker of either continuity or discontinuity. Certainly, Bergson does posit creative discontinuity – at least as an ideal – but now we can recognise what this discontinuity involves: mastery, domination, will, and ultimately the will to will. In this light, it is plain to see that the problem of Bergson’s conception of discontinuous, radical novelty is not that it reintroduces an idea of transcendence into duration, precisely where we might least want it; the problem is rather that it is all too immanent, for it cannot see any other activity in art-production than that of a self-grounding, self-sufficient subject. In opposition to discontinuity in this sense, however, Bergson does more than simply propose an idea of continuity, particularly in that the doctrine of retroactivity leads him to the idea that our freedom and futurity is produced by, and not just limited or conditioned by, the past – and vice versa. The decision, then, is this: between, on the one hand, a fulfilment of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity, and, on the other hand, a recognition that originality and inheritance are a function of each other, and that both are irreducible to the will. It is in the light of this decision that we will be able to judge adequately more recent philosophies of creation, and even of creation ex nihilo, in contemporary French thinking. Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Notes 1 Attempts to relate Bergson and Heidegger’s thinking have begun to emerge in recent scholarship: see, in particular, Heath Massey, ‘On the Verge of Being and Time: Before Heidegger’s Dismissal of Bergson’, Philosophy Today 54(2) (2010), pp. 138–56. 2 For a longer treatment of this issue see Nahm, ‘The Theological Background to the Theory of the Artist as Creator’, Journal of the History of Ideas 8(3) (1947), pp. 362–72. 3 On this particular point, see Edgar Zilsel, Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffs – Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus (Hildesheim/New York: Olm, 1972), p. 225. 4 See Nahm, ‘The Theological Background’, p. 366. 5 Newton Stallknecht Studies in the Philosophy of Creation with Especial Reference to Bergson and Whitehead (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1934), p. 53. 670 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL 6 Gabriel Séailles, Essai sur le génie dans l’art (Paris: Librairie Germer Baillière, 1883), p. ix. All translations from this text are my own. 7 Ibid., p. viii. 8 Ibid., p. 154. 9 The importance of Séailles’ book for Bergson’s project in 1907 is seldom acknowledged, but for an exception see Ansell-Pearson, ‘Bergson’s Encounter with Biology’, Angelaki 10(2) (2005), pp. 59–72. 10 Bergson, Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), pp. 518–19; Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York, H. Holt, 1913), p. 30. 11 Like the idea of creation, ‘virtuel’ is another term that Bergson uses in two senses that are difficult to dissociate merely by reference to the chronology of his writings. In the passage cited it is a synonym of an intellectualist conception of the possible as conceivability – and Bergson treats the terms as synonymous whenever he criticises the modal category of possibility. Yet, he also uses the term in a more positive sense that develops traditional ideas of potentiality. In this sense John Mullarkey is right to remark that ‘no clear water exists in Bergson’s texts between the virtual and the possible as it does in Deleuze’s reading’: Mullarkey, ‘Forget the Virtual: Bergson, Actualism and the Refraction of Reality’, Continental Philosophy Review 37(2) (2004), pp. 469–93, p. 492. 12 That Bergson interprets natural process and production through the lens of artistic production is still more obvious in the French neologism génialité that Bergson coins to describe the movement of biological life: Œuvres, p. 624. When Arthur Mitchell translated this term as ‘fervour’ he obscured its derivation from an idea of genius as the principle of art production; Creative Evolution, p. 173. Certainly, that natural process is interpreted through the lens of art does not preclude the possibility that there are significant differences in the sense of creation across these ‘domains’ – but Bergson seems more concerned to underline the similarities rather than the differences between them. 13 Bergson, Œuvres, p. 595; Creative Evolution, pp. 125–126. 14 Bergson, Œuvres, p. 503; Creative Evolution, pp. 11–12. This is a particularly acute example of the two different senses of ‘creation’ in Bergson’s work, and of his tendency to elide them. 15 Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1072; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Audra Ashley and C. Brereton (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 95. 16 Bergson, Œuvres, p. 645; Creative Evolution, p. 187. 17 Martin Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, Gesamtausgabe Vol. 5: Holswege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995), p. 63; ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Off the Beaten Track, trans. K. Haynes and J. Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 48. 18 Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, p. 50; ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, p. 37. 19 Cited in Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, p. 58; ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, p. 43. 20 See Panofsky, Idea, trans. J. Peake (New York: Harper Collins, 1975). Robert Bernasconi (‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam: Erasmus and Dürer at the hands of Panofsky and Heidegger’, in Heidegger and the Art of Existing [New York: Humanities Press, 1993], pp. 118–34) has suggested that Heidegger takes Dürer’s dictum out of context, and that it is concerned only with the question of fidelity to nature in the artistic imitation of its forms. Yet this claim loses much of its force when we consider that Heidegger is retrieving a Renaissance commonplace of which Dürer was undoubtedly aware. 671 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 21 Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, p. 58; ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, p. 43. 22 Aristotle, Metaphysics Z, 1048a 32-3. 23 See Aristotle, Metaphysics Θ 1049b13. 24 On this point, see Jean-Louis Chedin, ‘Deux Conceptions du Possible: Aristote et Bergson’, La revue de l’enseignement philosophique 37(2) (1986), pp. 36–50. 25 Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1264; The Creative Mind, trans. M. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 23–24. 26 See Pierre Bayard, Le plagiat par anticipation (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2009). 27 Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1264; The Creative Mind, p. 23. 28 Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1264; The Creative Mind, p. 24. 29 Henri Davenson (‘Bergson et l’histoire’, in Henri Bergson : Essais et témoignages recueillis, ed. A. Béguin and P. Thévenaz [Neuchatel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1943], p. 207) counters claims that Bergson is an anti-historical thinker by pointing out that his accounts of duration and retroactivity allow ‘the historian to flourish and liberate himself’ (p. 207, translation mine) from the idea that history is a matter of recording chronological facts settled once and for all. This response, however, does not address the issue of the meaning and possibility of historical action and the movement of history itself – of Geschichte, to use the terms that Davenson borrows from Heidegger, rather than Historie, as the study of history. 30 See Isaac Benrubi, ‘Un entretien avec Bergson’, in Henri Bergson: Essais et témoignages recueillis, ed. A. Béguin and P. Thévenaz (Neuchatel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1943), p. 368. 31 Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, pp. 63–64; ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, p. 49. 32 For the claim that Kant’s remarks on exemplarity and canonical succession in The Critique of Judgment imply a ‘hermeneutic’ understanding of history see Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art (London: Polity, 1992), pp. 99–101. The further claim that Heidegger’s thinking of history is ‘modelled’ on Kant’s brief and elliptical remarks, risks succumbing to the retrospective illusion that Bergson diagnoses. 33 Metaphysics IX, viii, 1049b12. On the basis of this text, and in concluding an extended argument that it is not possible to rehearse here, Pierre Aubenque (Le problème de l’être chez Aristote [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966], pp. 442–3; my translation) argues that: ‘the debate concerning the respective priority of possibility and actuality is a false debate. Actuality and possibility are co-originary; they are only the ecstasies of movement; only the clash of possibility and actuality at the heart of movement is real; only the violence of human discourse […] can maintain dissociated […] the originary tension which constitutes, in its unity that is ever divided, the being of the being in movement.’ 34 It is not possible here to engage with the problem of Heidegger’s move – if it is one – from individual temporality to ‘collective’ history in Being and Time. 35 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984), p. 350. 36 Ibid., p. 20. 37 Jean Hyppolite, ‘Various Aspects of Memory in Bergson’, trans. A. V. Coleman, in Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism (London: Continuum 2003), pp. 112–28, p. 114. 38 Ibid., p. 113. 39 For the germs of such critique, see Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 432. 40 Hyppolite, ‘Various Aspects of Memory in Bergson’, p. 114. 41 This is one reason why we should not be surprised that there is no mention of Matter and Memory (MM) in any of Bergson’s discussions of retroactivity. There is, however, at least one more reason: Bergson develops the thought of retroactivity 672 INHERITANCE, ORIGINALITY AND THE WILL 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 in relation to the history of art and then social history, which is very different from the paradigm of personal memory in MM, according to which we have to have experienced a past event in person for it to be able to reappear in the horizon of the present (in perception, explicit recollection, dreams, etc.). The present-day genius has not experienced, say, ancient Greece in person, and yet through her that epoch can present itself in a new way. Craig Lundy (‘Bergson, History and Ontology’ in Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film, eds. J. Mullarkey and C. de Mille [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013], pp. 17–31) has recently attempted to defend Bergson against the claim that there is no philosophy of history to be found in his work, but for the reason I have just adduced it is from the account of retroactivity rather than from Matter and Memory that we might be able to draw one. Bergson, Œuvres, pp. 1344–5; The Creative Mind, p. 105. On a political or social level Bergson wonders to what extent change can be recommended (Œuvres, p. 1328; The Creative Mind, p. 88), but here on a personal level he seems to see no problem in recommending that we apprehend it. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. A. Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 29. Ibid. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. E. Hong and H. Hong (New Jersey: Princeton, 1983), p. 133. Bergson can see some virtue in constancy, but only insofar as it provides a basis for novelty, which is irreducible to, less boring and thus better than it: ‘there will be novelty in our acts only thanks to what we have found to be of a repetitive nature in things’: Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1334; The Creative Mind, p. 94. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie: (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), p. 55; Contributions to Philosophy (On the Event), trans. R. Rocjewicz and D. Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 45. Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1345; The Creative Mind, pp. 105–6. Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1345; The Creative Mind, p. 106. Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1334; The Creative Mind, pp. 93–4. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. N. Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 137: ‘where an author owes a product to his genius, he does not himself know how the ideas for it have entered into his head, nor has he it in his power to invent the like at pleasure.’ Bergson, Œuvres, p. 697; Creative Evolution, p. 251. In the recent critical edition of La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009; p. 385) Arnaud Bouaniche notes that this remark is not inadvertent, but without drawing out its philosophical consequences. Bergson, Œuvres, p. 893; Mind-energy: Lectures and Essays, trans. H. Wildon Carr (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), p. 127. Bergson, Œuvres, p. 1023; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Audra Ashley and C. Brereton (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 44. Arnaud François, Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche: volonté et réalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), p. 48. See Ibid., pp. 48–71. Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’, p. 64; ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, p. 52. See Bernstein, The Fate of Art, pp. 99–100, for a reading of Kant’s analysis of genius that takes up these points against Heidegger’s remark. 673 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 59 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe Bd. 50: Einleitung in die Philosophie: Denken und Dichten (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), pp. 110–11; Introduction to Philosophy: Thinking and Poetizing, trans. P. Braunstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 20. 60 See Bret Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), and, for an opposing view, Vincent Blok, ‘“Massive Voluntarism” or Heidegger’s Confrontation with the Will’, Studia Phenomenologica 13 (2013), 449–65. 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