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.At the end of the essay, Hulme reflects on the controversy over thepolitical implications of Bergson’s theories about the reality of time – the controversy that had by this time convinced him that Bergson’s theories constituted‘nothing but the last disguise of romanticism’ ( CW, p.xix).In Hulme’s account, romantic revolutionaries and other radical leftist progressives had taken Bergson’s theory as a reason to see history as a process of perpetual revolution: if it was‘real’, then time brought new change at every moment and thus cut the present off from historical precedent.Bergson had therefore become license for a dangerousirrationalism.Such was the view Hulme took from Bergson’s right-wing critics,principally Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre, for whom Bergson was not onlythe leading example of French romanticism in general, but a very direct inspiration to those aspects of left-wing irrationalism that made any alliance against theRepublic impossible.Certain elements of the Right would ultimately find a way to incorporate Bergsonism – indeed, as Mark Antliff has argued, the ‘romanticfascism’ of interwar Germany even linked Bergson to Nazi ideology – but at thisstage Bergsonian vitalism seemed mainly to endorse a leftist romanticism forwhich no necessary laws govern society and it is ‘useless.to search in the past for general truths which shall be applicable to the present’ ( CW, p.165).5Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism 117Wanting to oppose this extreme romanticism, and this extreme application ofBergson to progressive politics, Hulme at least temporarily considered a way tolimit the reality of time to the subjective realm.At the end of the essay, he writes,‘I can find a compromise for myself, however, which I roughly indicate by sayingthat I think time is real for the individual, but not for the race’ ( CW, p.165).Time could be a matter of perpetual innovation at the level of individual subjectivity and yet be unreal – abstracted, regularized, constant – at the level of public life.But what would this compromise entail? Hulme wrote that he would ‘try in a laterarticle to work out the consequences of this’ ( CW, p.165) but when he does, his compromise falls well short of what his own understanding of Bergson could haveproduced.What might it have been? And why, finally, does Hulme revert to acompromise that is no compromise at all – the dualism that he himself insistedentailed a misunderstanding of Bergsonian temporality?Hulme’s compromise began as an effort to bring into line the Bergson he likedwith the Bergson he did not.At first, of course, Bergson seemed all good to him: he had found in the theory of the heterogeneous durée a means of escape from the nightmare of determinism, from what he called the ‘chessboard’ mentality thatreduced human life and even the human soul to mechanism.Bergson had proventhat determinism wrongly projected the form of ‘external manifolds’ into the‘intensive’ manifold, wrongly subjecting time to space (roughly speaking) andfalsifying the freedom with which time actually unfolds or becomes.Intuition into intensive manifolds became Hulme’s method of choice; it freed him fromdeterminism, and, because it seemed the special talent of the artist, bolstered his sense of vocation and his sense of self.But even from the beginning, theimplications of Bergson’s theory of time could not square with Hulme’s ethical,social, and political tendency to think in terms of ‘fixity and sameness’ ( CW, p.135): as much as he liked to imagine subjectivity made up of flux, he did not like to think of the ethical or social subject capable of the radical change that the flux would have to entail.His absolutism and conservatism in the social realm, hisadherence to absolute values, put him in need of a way to distinguish betweentime’s personal reality and its unreality for the social or public self.Ultimately this need would result in a simpler all-out rejection of Bergson; Hulme would famously renounce Bergson, even as he maintained a commitment to much of whatBergson’s theories had taught him.But initially the need led Hulme to try for a compromise.The immediate context for the compromise, in and around ‘Bergson, Balfour,and Politics’, was focused proof that left-wing groups had indeed found in Bergson support for their revolutionary zeal.As Robert Ferguson puts it in his recentbiography of Hulme, the Bergsonian notion that ‘the present was always a uniquepresent, having no parallels with what had come before’, coupled with the sensethat because ‘time is real.there can be no repetition’, resulted in aninterpretation of time that ‘provided the Left in France with an argument forrejecting the belief that the past can or should provide a model for the present; and a further argument for the consequent need to structure the development of society along idealistic lines through the application of theory’ (2002, p.88).Leftist118T.E.Hulme and the Question of ModernismBergsonians took time’s reality as their opportunity to disregard precedent, toignore history, and to conceive of the present as a perpetual crisis, and therefore a time open to any and all possibilities.Moreover, it disproved the view that ‘there are such things as laws governing societies’ and made the present moment subjectto applications of social theories based in faith in man’s perfectibility, a faith in turn licensed by a Bergsonian faith that time was essentially innovation ( CW, p.165).Hulme felt that this ‘brand-new good time’ mentality clashed utterly with the truth about man’s incorrigibility, the permanent structure of ‘original sin’, and amounted more or less to neurosis – to a ‘certain irritation of the mind’, a need for a ‘certain kind of mental excitement’ indicative not of any legitimate metaphysical outlook but rather a common weakness ‘raised to a hysterical pitch’ ( CW, pp.129-30).It consequently helped to sour him on Bergson, to enhance his own tendencyto ‘take tremendous consolation in the idea of fixity’ ( CW, p.135), and to confront him (at least temporarily) with a need to explain how fixity and flux could coexist– and, moreover, how they could collude in a ‘Tory’ social scheme [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.At the end of the essay, Hulme reflects on the controversy over thepolitical implications of Bergson’s theories about the reality of time – the controversy that had by this time convinced him that Bergson’s theories constituted‘nothing but the last disguise of romanticism’ ( CW, p.xix).In Hulme’s account, romantic revolutionaries and other radical leftist progressives had taken Bergson’s theory as a reason to see history as a process of perpetual revolution: if it was‘real’, then time brought new change at every moment and thus cut the present off from historical precedent.Bergson had therefore become license for a dangerousirrationalism.Such was the view Hulme took from Bergson’s right-wing critics,principally Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre, for whom Bergson was not onlythe leading example of French romanticism in general, but a very direct inspiration to those aspects of left-wing irrationalism that made any alliance against theRepublic impossible.Certain elements of the Right would ultimately find a way to incorporate Bergsonism – indeed, as Mark Antliff has argued, the ‘romanticfascism’ of interwar Germany even linked Bergson to Nazi ideology – but at thisstage Bergsonian vitalism seemed mainly to endorse a leftist romanticism forwhich no necessary laws govern society and it is ‘useless.to search in the past for general truths which shall be applicable to the present’ ( CW, p.165).5Hulme’s Compromise and the New Psychologism 117Wanting to oppose this extreme romanticism, and this extreme application ofBergson to progressive politics, Hulme at least temporarily considered a way tolimit the reality of time to the subjective realm.At the end of the essay, he writes,‘I can find a compromise for myself, however, which I roughly indicate by sayingthat I think time is real for the individual, but not for the race’ ( CW, p.165).Time could be a matter of perpetual innovation at the level of individual subjectivity and yet be unreal – abstracted, regularized, constant – at the level of public life.But what would this compromise entail? Hulme wrote that he would ‘try in a laterarticle to work out the consequences of this’ ( CW, p.165) but when he does, his compromise falls well short of what his own understanding of Bergson could haveproduced.What might it have been? And why, finally, does Hulme revert to acompromise that is no compromise at all – the dualism that he himself insistedentailed a misunderstanding of Bergsonian temporality?Hulme’s compromise began as an effort to bring into line the Bergson he likedwith the Bergson he did not.At first, of course, Bergson seemed all good to him: he had found in the theory of the heterogeneous durée a means of escape from the nightmare of determinism, from what he called the ‘chessboard’ mentality thatreduced human life and even the human soul to mechanism.Bergson had proventhat determinism wrongly projected the form of ‘external manifolds’ into the‘intensive’ manifold, wrongly subjecting time to space (roughly speaking) andfalsifying the freedom with which time actually unfolds or becomes.Intuition into intensive manifolds became Hulme’s method of choice; it freed him fromdeterminism, and, because it seemed the special talent of the artist, bolstered his sense of vocation and his sense of self.But even from the beginning, theimplications of Bergson’s theory of time could not square with Hulme’s ethical,social, and political tendency to think in terms of ‘fixity and sameness’ ( CW, p.135): as much as he liked to imagine subjectivity made up of flux, he did not like to think of the ethical or social subject capable of the radical change that the flux would have to entail.His absolutism and conservatism in the social realm, hisadherence to absolute values, put him in need of a way to distinguish betweentime’s personal reality and its unreality for the social or public self.Ultimately this need would result in a simpler all-out rejection of Bergson; Hulme would famously renounce Bergson, even as he maintained a commitment to much of whatBergson’s theories had taught him.But initially the need led Hulme to try for a compromise.The immediate context for the compromise, in and around ‘Bergson, Balfour,and Politics’, was focused proof that left-wing groups had indeed found in Bergson support for their revolutionary zeal.As Robert Ferguson puts it in his recentbiography of Hulme, the Bergsonian notion that ‘the present was always a uniquepresent, having no parallels with what had come before’, coupled with the sensethat because ‘time is real.there can be no repetition’, resulted in aninterpretation of time that ‘provided the Left in France with an argument forrejecting the belief that the past can or should provide a model for the present; and a further argument for the consequent need to structure the development of society along idealistic lines through the application of theory’ (2002, p.88).Leftist118T.E.Hulme and the Question of ModernismBergsonians took time’s reality as their opportunity to disregard precedent, toignore history, and to conceive of the present as a perpetual crisis, and therefore a time open to any and all possibilities.Moreover, it disproved the view that ‘there are such things as laws governing societies’ and made the present moment subjectto applications of social theories based in faith in man’s perfectibility, a faith in turn licensed by a Bergsonian faith that time was essentially innovation ( CW, p.165).Hulme felt that this ‘brand-new good time’ mentality clashed utterly with the truth about man’s incorrigibility, the permanent structure of ‘original sin’, and amounted more or less to neurosis – to a ‘certain irritation of the mind’, a need for a ‘certain kind of mental excitement’ indicative not of any legitimate metaphysical outlook but rather a common weakness ‘raised to a hysterical pitch’ ( CW, pp.129-30).It consequently helped to sour him on Bergson, to enhance his own tendencyto ‘take tremendous consolation in the idea of fixity’ ( CW, p.135), and to confront him (at least temporarily) with a need to explain how fixity and flux could coexist– and, moreover, how they could collude in a ‘Tory’ social scheme [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]