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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the "HENRY BERGSON Premium Collection," this anthology encapsulates the pioneering philosophies of Henri Bergson, notably his explorations of time, consciousness, and metaphysical intuition. Utilizing an eloquent and reflective literary style, Bergson presents complex ideas, inviting readers to engage with philosophical thought through a visceral, almost poetic lens. Contextually situated within the early 20th-century philosophical landscape, this collection embodies a reaction against the mechanistic views of time and reality prevalent in positivism, offering instead a vibrant perspective that emphasizes the fluidity of experience and the vitality of living phenomena. Henri Bergson, a French philosopher active during a period marked by rapid scientific advancement and sociocultural shifts, drew on diverse influences including psychology, art, and literature. His life experiences, notably his Jewish heritage and his education in the rigorous environment of the √âcole Normale Sup√©rieure, contributed to his innovative ideas that challenged the deterministic philosophies of his time. Bergson's unique insights into the nature of time and consciousness earned him significant acclaim, ultimately culminating in the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. This collection is essential for anyone interested in the evolution of modern philosophy, providing a comprehensive introduction to Bergson's groundbreaking thoughts. By engaging with this anthology, readers will not only deepen their understanding of Bergson's major works but also gain valuable insights into the connections between intuition, creativity, and the essence of human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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HENRY BERGSON Premium Collection
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers a concentrated selection of Henri Bergson’s major writings, offering a single-author panorama of his philosophical project in accessible form. Rather than a complete works, it presents a coherent pathway through pivotal texts that shaped debates about time, consciousness, creativity, culture, and social life. Readers encounter the evolution of Bergson’s thought from introspective analysis to aesthetics, biology, and public reflection. The purpose is twofold: to provide a reliable entry point for newcomers and to assemble, for seasoned readers, a compact set of touchstones that illuminate the breadth and unity of his vision across distinct yet interrelated inquiries.
The volumes assembled here are essays and book-length studies that span several modes of philosophical writing. Time and Free Will is a sustained theoretical treatise on consciousness and freedom. Laughter addresses aesthetics and social psychology through cultural criticism. Creative Evolution is a wide-ranging work in philosophy of biology and theory of knowledge. The Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict collects wartime reflections that apply philosophical concepts to public affairs. Dreams is a concise essay in philosophical psychology. Together they represent a range of non-fiction forms—systematic argument, lecture-based exposition, and topical intervention—united by a distinctive method and purpose.
Across these works, Bergson develops unifying themes that continue to animate philosophical discussion: the lived experience of time, the role of intuition alongside analysis, the creativity of life, and the dynamics of social cohesion and humor. A hallmark of his style is the use of vivid examples and carefully chosen analogies to clarify difficult ideas without losing rigor. He resists reducing time, life, or mind to fixed spatial models, urging attention to movement, growth, and qualitative change. As a whole, these texts remain significant because they open fertile perspectives on agency, perception, and culture, and demonstrate philosophy’s reach beyond academic boundaries.
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness offers Bergson’s influential account of inner duration, the felt continuity of experience that resists measurement by external clocks. He examines the difference between qualitative, lived time and the quantitative, spatialized time often used in scientific and deterministic explanations. This distinction underpins his defense of genuine freedom, understood through the flow of consciousness rather than through abstract models of causality. The work proceeds through close analysis of feeling, memory, and decision, setting the methodological tone for his later writings and establishing the centrality of temporal experience to questions of agency.
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic investigates why certain situations, gestures, and types provoke amusement, and what laughter accomplishes in social life. Bergson approaches the comic as a phenomenon that reveals something about human adaptability and community. He maps varieties of the comic and considers the conditions under which laughter arises, emphasizing its collective character. The analysis highlights patterns of rigidity that appear within living behavior, showing how incongruity, repetition, or exaggerated automatism can trigger a comic response. By interpreting laughter as both aesthetic and social, the essay connects everyday experience to broader questions about vitality and flexibility.
Creative Evolution extends Bergson’s concern with time and becoming to the biological realm. He challenges accounts of life that rely solely on mechanism or rigid teleology, proposing that creativity is fundamental to living processes. The work develops a method that complements analytic reasoning with intuition, aiming to do justice to continuity, novelty, and the emergence of forms. It examines evolutionary change not as a simple accumulation of predetermined parts, but as a dynamic unfolding. In linking knowledge to the movement of life itself, Bergson invites readers to rethink familiar oppositions—such as chance versus design—through a lens attuned to process and transformation.
Dreams presents a compact inquiry into the experience of dreaming, focusing on how memory, sensory cues, and the state of sleep combine to produce dream imagery. Rather than pursuing symbolic interpretations, Bergson investigates the mechanisms by which the mind organizes fragments of perception and remembrance when ordinary attention relaxes. The essay outlines differences between waking perception and dream construction, emphasizing continuity rather than absolute rupture. With clear examples and careful distinctions, it situates dreams within the broader study of consciousness that runs through his work, showing how nocturnal experiences illuminate the textures of time, sensation, and the fluidity of mental life.
The Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict collects public reflections written during the First World War, when philosophical issues pressed into political and moral life. Here Bergson applies his distinctions between life and inert mechanism to interpret the stakes of the conflict. The text advocates for values associated with vitality, creativity, and freedom, articulating a rationale for collective resistance to aggression. Though topical, it is continuous with his broader project: philosophical ideas are tested where events are urgent and concrete. The work exemplifies how abstract concepts can guide civic judgment without reducing complex realities to simple formulas.
Read together, these writings display a consistent method: start from the immediate phenomena of experience, attend to continuity and change, and resist premature abstraction that fixes what is essentially mobile. Bergson’s prose is notable for conceptual clarity aided by images and comparisons that illuminate rather than replace argument. He moves fluently between detailed analysis and synthetic vision, keeping philosophical rigor in dialogue with cultural observation. While each work stands alone, the shared vocabulary of duration, intuition, and creativity provides continuity. The result is a distinctive style that makes intricate ideas graspable, while preserving the depth required for sustained reflection.
The internal connections among the texts reward attentive reading. Time and Free Will develops the phenomenology of duration that underlies later treatments of life’s creativity in Creative Evolution. Laughter explores social life and habit, complementing the earlier account of freedom by showing how group dynamics shape behavior. Dreams returns to consciousness at a different register, illustrating how attention and memory function when wakeful control loosens. The Meaning of the War applies the contrast between life and inert mechanism to collective action. Seen as a whole, the collection traces a movement from inner experience to culture, nature, and public responsibilities.
The continued relevance of these works lies in their capacity to reframe enduring questions. Debates about free will and determinism benefit from the distinction between lived time and measured time. Investigations of mind and brain find resources in analyses of memory, attention, and dreaming. Aesthetics and social theory gain tools from the account of the comic and its communal function. Philosophy of biology engages with the insistence on novelty and process in living systems. In each domain, Bergson’s approach balances careful description with a readiness to rethink familiar categories, inviting renewed inquiry rather than closed doctrine.
The present collection serves as a compact itinerary through Bergson’s major concerns, enabling readers to track how a single philosophical sensibility engages multiple fields without losing coherence. By assembling these particular books—on time and agency, the comic, evolution, wartime judgment, and dreams—it highlights a unified orientation toward movement, creativity, and the lived textures of experience. The aim is not only to preserve landmark texts, but to foreground their conversation with one another. Approached in sequence or individually, they invite reflective reading and return visits, offering conceptual tools that remain fresh for thinking about mind, life, society, and responsibility.
Author Biography
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a French philosopher whose innovative analyses of time, consciousness, and creative change helped shape twentieth-century thought. Renowned for the concept of durée (duration) and for defending intuition as a philosophical method, he sought to reorient metaphysics toward the fluidity of lived experience rather than static abstractions. His major works—Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, and later The Two Sources of Morality and Religion—reached wide audiences and sparked debates across philosophy, psychology, and the sciences. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in the late 1920s, Bergson became a global intellectual figure whose ideas influenced literature, aesthetics, and social theory.
Bergson grew up and was educated in France, showing early aptitude in both mathematics and the humanities. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet and then entered the École Normale Supérieure in the late nineteenth century, where he completed advanced training in philosophy. There he encountered a broad spectrum of influences, including French spiritualist thinkers such as Félix Ravaisson and Émile Boutroux, as well as emerging psychology and evolutionary theory. Though mathematically gifted, Bergson turned decisively toward philosophy, searching for concepts adequate to the flux of inner life. This background formed the basis for his lifelong effort to reconcile scientific knowledge with the immediacy of conscious experience.
After passing the agrégation in philosophy, Bergson taught in provincial and Parisian lycées, notably in Clermont-Ferrand, where he wrote much of his early work. He earned his doctorate with a major thesis published as Time and Free Will (late 1880s) and a secondary Latin thesis on Aristotle. Time and Free Will introduced durée, distinguishing qualitative, lived time from the quantitative, spatialized time used by science. It criticized mechanistic psychology and argued for genuine freedom grounded in the flow of consciousness. The book’s originality established Bergson as an important voice in French philosophy and set the direction for his subsequent inquiries into memory, embodiment, and creativity.
Bergson deepened his project in Matter and Memory (1890s), which probed the relation between brain and consciousness, proposing that memory is not reducible to neural mechanisms and that perception selects from reality for action. Laughter (1900) analyzed the comic as a social phenomenon tied to rigidity in behavior. An Introduction to Metaphysics (early 1900s) clarified his method of intuition. His broadest philosophical synthesis, Creative Evolution (1907), argued that life manifests a creative impetus—élan vital—irreducible to purely mechanistic explanations. These works brought international acclaim, prompting translations and large public audiences. They also provoked debate with scientists and philosophers who contested his views on biology and method.
Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France drew extraordinary crowds, and he traveled to lecture abroad, including in Britain and the United States. He engaged in a fruitful exchange with William James, whose pragmatism resonated with aspects of Bergson’s thought, even as their approaches diverged. During the First World War he undertook cultural and diplomatic missions for France. Duration and Simultaneity (early 1920s) addressed relativity theory and occasioned a public exchange with Albert Einstein about the nature of time. In the later 1920s he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognizing the richness and vitality of his ideas and the clarity and beauty of their expression.
Bergson’s later writings consolidated and extended his system. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) explored the contrast between closed, rule-bound morality and the open, creative morality associated with exceptional personalities and mystical experience, examining how societies cohere and innovate. The Creative Mind (mid-1930s), a collection of essays, revisited themes of intuition, perception, and metaphysical method. While celebrated by a broad readership, Bergson faced sustained critique from neo-Kantians and early logical empiricists, who challenged his reliance on intuition and his treatment of science. Nonetheless, his careful analyses of experience and becoming continued to shape debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.
In his final years, amid political upheavals in France, Bergson maintained a principled public stance consistent with his commitments, and he died in Paris in 1941. His influence persists across philosophy, literature, and the arts. Phenomenologists and process thinkers engaged his conception of becoming; later, Gilles Deleuze offered a major reinterpretation that helped renew interest in Bergson’s work. Concepts like duration, memory, and creative evolution inform contemporary discussions in cognitive science, film theory, and studies of time. Today he is read for a powerful vision of reality as dynamic, for an account of freedom rooted in lived experience, and for a lucid, distinctive philosophical style.
Historical Context
Henri Bergson, born in Paris on 18 October 1859 to a Polish Jewish father, Michał, and an English Jewish mother, Kate Levison, matured as a thinker during France’s Third Republic. His career spanned the fin de siècle, the Dreyfus Affair, World War I, and the interwar years. The works gathered here—Time and Free Will (1889), Laughter (1900), Dreams (1901), Creative Evolution (1907), and Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict (1915)—map onto seismic changes in science, society, and letters. Based in Paris yet international in influence, Bergson’s trajectory from secondary schools to the Collège de France mirrored the Republic’s educational expansion and its ambitious cultural politics.
Educated at the Lycée Condorcet and the École Normale Supérieure, Bergson won the agrégation in philosophy in 1881 and taught in Angers and Clermont-Ferrand. His doctoral submission in 1889 combined the French thesis Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, later known in English as Time and Free Will, with a Latin study on Aristotle’s concept of place. The institutional milieu shaped his method: the Republican school system emphasized rigorous classical training while the new psychology laboratories founded by Théodule Ribot and nurtured by Pierre Janet encouraged experimental attention to consciousness, habit, and memory—concerns that reverberate through his early and middle writings.
Public life in France was transformed by the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), anticlerical legislation culminating in the 1905 separation of Church and State, and debates on citizenship and secular morality. The Third Republic fashioned the figure of the engaged intellectual, whose lessons could speak to the nation’s civic culture. Satirical journals like Le Rire (founded 1894), boulevard theatres, and the café-concert flourished, staging social types and mores that invited analysis of humor, conformity, and surprise. Within this world Bergson emerged not as a partisan pamphleteer but as a lecturer whose philosophical vocabulary—duration, intuition, creativity—circulated among artists, teachers, and administrators navigating modern urban society.
The late nineteenth century reorganized the life sciences: Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin, French experimental medicine under Claude Bernard, and microbiology after Pasteur reframed questions about variation and adaptation. In France, figures like Henri Poincaré and Émile Boutroux questioned mechanistic determinism and considered contingency in nature and science. By 1900, neo-Lamarckian currents and debates over vitalism set the stage for a proposal that evolution involved invention rather than mere selection of pre-given possibilities. Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) took shape amid these disputes, integrating empirical research while resisting both materialist reduction and teleological fixity, thereby offering a philosophical counterpoint to competing evolutionary orthodoxies.
Paris was a capital of psychological research, from Charcot’s demonstrations at the Salpêtrière to Janet’s analyses of automatisms and Ribot’s studies of memory and attention. Hypnotism, suggestion, and hysteria saturated medical and popular culture alike. Around 1900, laboratories and societies for psychology proliferated, including the Institut Général Psychologique (1901). The same years saw systematic attention to states of sleep and dreaming, intersecting with the nascent psychoanalytic movement inaugurated by Sigmund Freud’s 1900 work on dreams. Bergson’s reflections participated in this climate, balancing physiological accounts of the sleeping brain with an insistence on the continuity of psychic life and the selectivity of perception and memory.
Bergson’s reach owed much to transatlantic circulation. William James championed him, citing him in A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and finding affinities between pragmatism and duration. English translations quickly followed: Time and Free Will by F. L. Pogson (1910), Creative Evolution by Arthur Mitchell (1911), and Laughter by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (1911). These editions, published in London and New York, carried his ideas into American universities and magazines, where debates on psychology, education, and liberal Protestant culture were already receptive. Through James, Josiah Royce, and later John Dewey’s circles, Bergson’s vocabulary threaded into discussions of habit, novelty, and practical intelligence.
The twentieth century recast time through physics. Einstein’s 1905 special relativity and 1915 general relativity disciplined simultaneity and measurement, challenging common-sense temporality. Mathematicians such as Poincaré had already questioned absolute time; physicists introduced new operational definitions anchored in devices and synchronization. Bergson insisted on a distinction between scientific time and lived duration and publicly met Einstein on 6 April 1922 at the Société française de philosophie in Paris, a celebrated exchange that followed his own study of relativity in Durée et simultanéité (1922). This encounter dramatized early twentieth-century tensions between experiential, biological, and instrumental conceptions of temporality across science and philosophy.
Modern mass culture reframed social life. The illustrated press, humor weeklies, and early cinema—pioneered by the Lumière brothers in 1895 and soon expanded by comic film stars like Max Linder—produced new rhythms of attention and collective amusement. Urbanization, the uniform cadence of factory time, and standardized timetables created a public susceptible to the jolts and incongruities that laughter often exploits. Within Paris’s theatres—Théâtre des Variétés, Palais-Royal—repertoires of farce courted laughter through stiffness, repetition, and social masks. Bergson’s reflections on the comic engaged a city in which costume, gesture, and type were not only aesthetic categories but also instruments of social regulation.
In 1900 Bergson was elected to the chair of modern philosophy at the Collège de France, where his Tuesday lectures became cultural events attracting students, writers, and foreign visitors. Charles Péguy, among others, helped popularize Bergsonism as a label for a sensibility attuned to liberty, invention, and intuition. The lecture hall’s diverse audience—civil servants, teachers from the lycée system, and guests from abroad—situated his work at a junction between academic speculation and civic pedagogy. T. S. Eliot attended lectures in 1910–1911 while studying in Paris, part of a broader migration of Anglo-American students who carried Bergson’s idiom back into literary modernism.
World War I shattered European assumptions about progress. After Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914, mobilization transformed daily life in France. Bergson was elected to the Académie française that year and soon contributed to Allied diplomacy, undertaking missions to Spain and the United States in 1917–1918 to advocate cooperation and, later, a League of Nations. Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict (1915) belongs to a moment when industrialized slaughter, artillery, and gas warfare sharpened questions about mechanism and life, habit and freedom. The war made moral and metaphysical stakes visible in the most concrete and devastating of ways.
The postwar settlement left institutions in flux. The League of Nations created a Commission on Intellectual Cooperation in 1922; Bergson served as its first president, promoting exchanges among scientists, scholars, and educators. In 1927 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for Creative Evolution and for the luminous clarity of his style, an acknowledgment that a philosopher could speak to wider publics beyond disciplinary confines. Honors multiplied—doctorates, foreign memberships, state decorations—yet the 1920s also intensified disputes over science, metaphysics, and language, with logical empiricists and analytic philosophers insisting on new standards of precision that challenged the rhetorical amplitude of Bergson’s prose.
French religious culture between 1890 and 1930 was marked by a Catholic revival, the Modernist crisis culminating in 1907 condemnations, and renewed Jewish civic life in a secular Republic. Bergson’s later reflections on morality and religion (not included here) and his personal ruminations on conversion circulated in a milieu sensitive to mysticism and ethics. In the 1930s, rising antisemitism and the approach of war darkened the horizon. Under Vichy statutes in 1940, Jews were excluded from many offices; Bergson, though exempted, chose to register with fellow Jews in solidarity. He died in Paris on 4 January 1941 after a winter walk to that registration office.
French letters furnished a resonant backdrop. Symbolist poetry and the novel of memory, exemplified by Marcel Proust, engaged themes of duration, recollection, and social performance. Bergson married Louise Neuberger in 1892, a relative of Proust, linking philosophical and literary salons. The comedic tradition from Molière to Third Republic vaudeville provided a corpus of types and mechanisms amenable to analysis of humor’s social function. Playwrights, novelists, and essayists mined the city’s rituals—dinners, promenades, bureaucratic routines—for the rigidities that satire exposes. The arts thus helped materialize concepts of habit and elasticity that also mattered for understanding perception, agency, and the flow of lived time.
Around 1900, public fascination with dreams intersected with occult revivals and scientific skepticism. The Society for Psychical Research in Britain (founded 1882) collected dreams and apparitions, while French clinicians charted sleep’s stages and parasomnias. Artificial lighting, commuting, and the new tempo of city nights altered sleep schedules, producing rich data and anxieties about fatigue and suggestion. Early cinema provided a technological analogy for dream images, with discontinuous sequences and superimpositions that mirrored nocturnal cognition. Against this background, careful description of how memory filters sensations and how attention loosens in sleep offered a sober alternative to both crude materialism and extravagant spiritualism.
Bergson’s method—analysis guided by intuition—stirred admirers and critics. Bertrand Russell’s 1912 study challenged his logic and clarity; later, logical positivists prioritized verification that seemed to sideline metaphysical speculation. In France, however, phenomenology and existentialism found affinities with themes of embodiment and temporality. Maurice Merleau-Ponty praised the recovery of lived experience from abstractions, while Gaston Bachelard disputed images of continuity, preferring epistemological breaks. The crossfire mattered for the reception of ideas about laughter’s corrective function, evolution’s creativity, dream cognition, and freedom’s immediacy, because it framed how philosophical language could justifiably range across biology, social life, and inner experience without losing rigor.
Translation and lecture circuits anchored Bergson’s global presence. By the early 1910s, English-language editions were standard library holdings in Britain and North America. Newspapers reported his 1913 visit to New York, where he lectured at Columbia University to overflow audiences, and discussed philosophy with journalists who relayed his ideas to general readers. He received honorary degrees from universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Princeton, and delivered talks in London that linked academic and public spheres. These networks ensured that reflections on time, comedy, dreams, and evolution traveled together, shaping debates in psychology, education, theology, and the arts from Boston to Buenos Aires.
Seen together, these works register a civilization negotiating science’s ascendancy, urban modernity, and the trauma of mechanized warfare. They embed philosophical claims in the textures of theatres and laboratories, timetables and trenches, lecture rooms and diplomatic salons. Dates and places—Paris 1889, 1900, 1907; New York 1913; Paris 1915; Geneva in the League years; Paris again in 1922—trace a map on which concepts like duration, élan vital, social laughter, and dream selection gained traction. The collection’s historical horizon clarifies its unity: a sustained effort to think life as creative, consciousness as active, and society as a field where freedom must continually be renewed.
Synopsis (Selection)
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Explores what makes things comic, arguing that laughter functions as a social corrective triggered by mechanical rigidity imposed on life. Surveys forms of comic effect such as repetition, inversion, and caricature, highlighting laughter’s role in promoting social flexibility.
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Distinguishes lived duration—qualitative, continuous inner time—from the quantitative, spatialized time of science. On this basis, contends that genuine free will expresses the indivisible flow of consciousness rather than calculable chains of cause.
Creative Evolution
Presents evolution as a creative, unpredictable process propelled by an élan vital, rejecting both strict mechanistic explanations and fixed teleology. Integrates biological observation with philosophy to argue that life invents new forms over real duration while the intellect, built for action, tends to miss this fluid creativity.
Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict
Interprets World War I as a clash between vital moral forces and a mechanized materialism, defending democratic spirit and responsibility against rigid organization. Calls for a renewal of values that place life, freedom, and creativity above mere technical efficiency.
Dreams
Offers a psychological account of dreaming as the interplay of faint sensory inputs and spontaneous memory-images when attention relaxes in sleep. Explains common dream features without mysticism, emphasizing continuity between waking perception and dream construction.
HENRY BERGSON Premium Collection
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
TRANSLATORS: CLOUDESLEY BRERETON FRED ROTHWELL
TRANSLATORS' PREFACE
This work, by Professor Bergson, has been revised in detail by the author himself, and the present translation is the only authorised one. For this ungrudging labour of revision, for the thoroughness with which it has been carried out, and for personal sympathy in many a difficulty of word and phrase, we desire to offer our grateful acknowledgment to Professor Bergson. It may be pointed out that the essay on Laughter originally appeared in a series of three articles in one of the leading magazines in France, the Revue de Paris. This will account for the relatively simple form of the work and the comparative absence of technical terms. It will also explain why the author has confined himself to exposing and illustrating his novel theory of the comic without entering into a detailed discussion of other explanations already in the field. He none the less indicates, when discussing sundry examples, why the principal theories, to which they have given rise, appear to him inadequate. To quote only a few, one may mention those based on contrast, exaggeration, and degradation.
The book has been highly successful in France, where it is in its seventh edition. It has been translated into Russian, Polish, and Swedish. German and Hungarian translations are under preparation. Its success is due partly to the novelty of the explanation offered of the comic, and partly also to the fact that the author incidentally discusses questions of still greater interest and importance. Thus, one of the best known and most frequently quoted passages of the book is that portion of the last chapter in which the author outlines a general theory of art.
C. B. F. R.
CHAPTER I
THE COMIC IN GENERAL — THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS AND MOVEMENTS — EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC.
What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible gradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we may gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something more flexible than an abstract definition, — a practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. And maybe we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made an acquaintance that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?
At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we look upon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic than on the field within which it must be sought.
I
The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it, — the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to.
Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.
This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should be drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d'hote, to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do so. A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied: "I don't belong to the parish!" What that man thought of tears would be still more true of laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity. Hence those definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstract relation between ideas: "an intellectual contrast," "a palpable absurdity," etc., — definitions which, even were they really suitable to every form of the comic, would not in the least explain why the comic makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected? It is not from this point of view that we shall approach the problem. To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.
Let us clearly mark the point towards which our three preliminary observations are converging. The comic will come into being, it appears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one of their number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into play nothing but their intelligence. What, now, is the particular point on which their attention will have to be concentrated, and what will here be the function of intelligence? To reply to these questions will be at once to come to closer grips with the problem. But here a few examples have become indispensable.
II
A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-by burst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could they suppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on the ground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary.
Consequently, it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises a laugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change, — his clumsiness, in fact. Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy, AS A RESULT, IN FACT, OF RIGIDITY OR OF MOMENTUM, the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the reason of the man's fall, and also of the people's laughter.
Now, take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations of his everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the result being that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it out all covered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid chair he finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his actions are all topsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every case the effect is invariably one of momentum. Habit has given the impulse: what was wanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He did nothing of the sort, but continued like a machine in the same straight line. The victim, then, of a practical joke is in a position similar to that of a runner who falls, — he is comic for the same reason. The laughable element in both cases consists of a certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being. The only difference in the two cases is that the former happened of itself, whilst the latter was obtained artificially. In the first instance, the passer-by does nothing but look on, but in the second the mischievous wag intervenes.
All the same, in both cases the result has been brought about by an external circumstance. The comic is therefore accidental: it remains, so to speak, in superficial contact with the person. How is it to penetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled when mechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation a stumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or human knavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from its own store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for externally revealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind always thinking of what it has just done and never of what it is doing, like a song which lags behind its accompaniment. Let us try to picture to ourselves a certain inborn lack of elasticity of both senses and intelligence, which brings it to pass that we continue to see what is no longer visible, to hear what is no longer audible, to say what is no longer to the point: in short, to adapt ourselves to a past and therefore imaginary situation, when we ought to be shaping our conduct in accordance with the reality which is present. This time the comic will take up its abode in the person himself; it is the person who will supply it with everything — matter and form, cause and opportunity. Is it then surprising that the absent-minded individual — for this is the character we have just been describing — has usually fired the imagination of comic authors? When La Bruyere came across this particular type, he realised, on analysing it, that he had got hold of a recipe for the wholesale manufacture of comic effects. As a matter of fact he overdid it, and gave us far too lengthy and detailed a description of Menalque, coming back to his subject, dwelling and expatiating on it beyond all bounds. The very facility of the subject fascinated him. Absentmindedness, indeed, is not perhaps the actual fountain-head of the comic, but surely it is contiguous to a certain stream of facts and fancies which flows straight from the fountain-head. It is situated, so to say, on one of the great natural watersheds of laughter.
Now, the effect of absentmindedness may gather strength in its turn. There is a general law, the first example of which we have just encountered, and which we will formulate in the following terms: when a certain comic effect has its origin in a certain cause, the more natural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find the effect. Even now we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to us as a simple fact. Still more laughable will be the absentmindedness we have seen springing up and growing before our very eyes, with whose origin we are acquainted and whose life-history we can reconstruct. To choose a definite example: suppose a man has taken to reading nothing but romances of love and chivalry. Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find him walking among us like a somnambulist. His actions are distractions. But then his distractions can be traced back to a definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE of mind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE of the individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings. Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble into a well because you were looking anywhere but in front of you, it is quite another thing to fall into it because you were intent upon a star. It was certainly a star at which Don Quixote was gazing. How profound is the comic element in the over-romantic, Utopian bent of mind! And yet, if you reintroduce the idea of absentmindedness, which acts as a go-between, you will see this profound comic element uniting with the most superficial type. Yes, indeed, these whimsical wild enthusiasts, these madmen who are yet so strangely reasonable, excite us to laughter by playing on the same chords within ourselves, by setting in motion the same inner mechanism, as does the victim of a practical joke or the passer-by who slips down in the street. They, too, are runners who fall and simple souls who are being hoaxed — runners after the ideal who stumble over realities, child-like dreamers for whom life delights to lie in wait. But, above all, they are past-masters in absentmindedness, with this superiority over their fellows that their absentmindedness is systematic and organised around one central idea, and that their mishaps are also quite coherent, thanks to the inexorable logic which reality applies to the correction of dreams, so that they kindle in those around them, by a series of cumulative effects, a hilarity capable of unlimited expansion.
Now, let us go a little further. Might not certain vices have the same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea has to intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul. Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with all its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with it into a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices. But the vice capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that which is brought from without, like a ready-made frame into which we are to step. It lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from us our flexibility. We do not render it more complicated; on the contrary, it simplifies us. Here, as we shall see later on in the concluding section of this study, lies the essential difference between comedy and drama. A drama, even when portraying passions or vices that bear a name, so completely incorporates them in the person that their names are forgotten, their general characteristics effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title of a drama can seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other hand, many comedies have a common noun as their title: l'Avare, le Joueur, etc. Were you asked to think of a play capable of being called le Jaloux, for instance, you would find that Sganarelle or George Dandin would occur to your mind, but not Othello: le Jaloux could only be the title of a comedy. The reason is that, however intimately vice, when comic, is associated with persons, it none the less retains its simple, independent existence, it remains the central character, present though invisible, to which the characters in flesh and blood on the stage are attached. At times it delights in dragging them down with its own weight and making them share in its tumbles. More frequently, however, it plays on them as on an instrument or pulls the strings as though they were puppets. Look closely: you will find that the art of the comic poet consists in making us so well acquainted with the particular vice, in introducing us, the spectators, to such a degree of intimacy with it, that in the end we get hold of some of the strings of the marionette with which he is playing, and actually work them ourselves; this it is that explains part of the pleasure we feel. Here, too, it is really a kind of automatism that makes us laugh — an automatism, as we have already remarked, closely akin to mere absentmindedness. To realise this more fully, it need only be noted that a comic character is generally comic in proportion to his ignorance of himself. The comic person is unconscious. As though wearing the ring of Gyges with reverse effect, he becomes invisible to himself while remaining visible to all the world. A character in a tragedy will make no change in his conduct because he will know how it is judged by us; he may continue therein, even though fully conscious of what he is and feeling keenly the horror he inspires in us. But a defect that is ridiculous, as soon as it feels itself to be so, endeavours to modify itself, or at least to appear as though it did. Were Harpagon to see us laugh at his miserliness, I do not say that he would get rid of it, but he would either show it less or show it differently. Indeed, it is in this sense only that laughter "corrects men's manners." It makes us at once endeavour to appear what we ought to be, what some day we shall perhaps end in being.
It is unnecessary to carry this analysis any further. From the runner who falls to the simpleton who is hoaxed, from a state of being hoaxed to one of absentmindedness, from absentmindedness to wild enthusiasm, from wild enthusiasm to various distortions of character and will, we have followed the line of progress along which the comic becomes more and more deeply imbedded in the person, yet without ceasing, in its subtler manifestations, to recall to us some trace of what we noticed in its grosser forms, an effect of automatism and of inelasticity. Now we can obtain a first glimpse — a distant one, it is true, and still hazy and confused — of the laughable side of human nature and of the ordinary function of laughter.
What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in consequence. TENSION and ELASTICITY are two forces, mutually complementary, which life brings into play. If these two forces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent, we have sickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they are lacking in the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency, every variety of insanity. Finally, if they are lacking in the character, we have cases of the gravest inadaptability to social life, which are the sources of misery and at times the causes of crime. Once these elements of inferiority that affect the serious side of existence are removed — and they tend to eliminate themselves in what has been called the struggle for life — the person can live, and that in common with other persons. But society asks for something more; it is not satisfied with simply living, it insists on living well. What it now has to dread is that each one of us, content with paying attention to what affects the essentials of life, will, so far as the rest is concerned, give way to the easy automatism of acquired habits. Another thing it must fear is that the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after an increasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and more perfectly into one another, will confine themselves to respecting simply the fundamental conditions of this adjustment: a cut-and-dried agreement among the persons will not satisfy it, it insists on a constant striving after reciprocal adaptation. Society will therefore be suspicious of all INELASTICITY of character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion. It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom — scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE. By the fear which it inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity. Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of esthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in many particular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of general improvement. And yet there is something esthetic about it, since the comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art. In a word, if a circle be drawn round those actions and dispositions — implied in individual or social life — to which their natural consequences bring their own penalties, there remains outside this sphere of emotion and struggle — and within a neutral zone in which man simply exposes himself to man's curiosity — a certain rigidity of body, mind and character, that society would still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability. This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.
Still, we must not accept this formula as a definition of the comic. It is suitable only for cases that are elementary, theoretical and perfect, in which the comic is free from all adulteration. Nor do we offer it, either, as an explanation. We prefer to make it, if you will, the leitmotiv which is to accompany all our explanations. We must ever keep it in mind, though without dwelling on it too much, somewhat as a skilful fencer must think of the discontinuous movements of the lesson whilst his body is given up to the continuity of the fencing-match. We will now endeavour to reconstruct the sequence of comic forms, taking up again the thread that leads from the horseplay of a clown up to the most refined effects of comedy, following this thread in its often unforeseen windings, halting at intervals to look around, and finally getting back, if possible, to the point at which the thread is dangling and where we shall perhaps find — since the comic oscillates between life and art — the general relation that art bears to life.
III
Let us begin at the simplest point. What is a comic physiognomy? Where does a ridiculous expression of the face come from? And what is, in this case, the distinction between the comic and the ugly? Thus stated, the question could scarcely be answered in any other than an arbitrary fashion. Simple though it may appear, it is, even now, too subtle to allow of a direct attack. We should have to begin with a definition of ugliness, and then discover what addition the comic makes to it; now, ugliness is not much easier to analyse than is beauty. However, we will employ an artifice which will often stand us in good stead. We will exaggerate the problem, so to speak, by magnifying the effect to the point of making the cause visible. Suppose, then, we intensify ugliness to the point of deformity, and study the transition from the deformed to the ridiculous.
Now, certain deformities undoubtedly possess over others the sorry privilege of causing some persons to laugh; some hunchbacks, for instance, will excite laughter. Without at this point entering into useless details, we will simply ask the reader to think of a number of deformities, and then to divide them into two groups: on the one hand, those which nature has directed towards the ridiculous; and on the other, those which absolutely diverge from it. No doubt he will hit upon the following law: A deformity that may become comic is a deformity that a normally built person, could successfully imitate.
Is it not, then, the case that the hunchback suggests the appearance of a person who holds himself badly? His back seems to have contracted an ugly stoop. By a kind of physical obstinacy, by rigidity, in a word, it persists in the habit it has contracted. Try to see with your eyes alone. Avoid reflection, and above all, do not reason. Abandon all your prepossessions; seek to recapture a fresh, direct and primitive impression. The vision you will reacquire will be one of this kind. You will have before you a man bent on cultivating a certain rigid attitude — whose body, if one may use the expression, is one vast grin.
Now, let us go back to the point we wished to clear up. By toning down a deformity that is laughable, we ought to obtain an ugliness that is comic. A laughable expression of the face, then, is one that will make us think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wonted mobility of the face. What we shall see will be an ingrained twitching or a fixed grimace. It may be objected that every habitual expression of the face, even when graceful and beautiful, gives us this same impression of something stereotyped? Here an important distinction must be drawn. When we speak of expressive beauty or even expressive ugliness, when we say that a face possesses expression, we mean expression that may be stable, but which we conjecture to be mobile. It maintains, in the midst of its fixity, a certain indecision in which are obscurely portrayed all possible shades of the state of mind it expresses, just as the sunny promise of a warm day manifests itself in the haze of a spring morning. But a comic expression of the face is one that promises nothing more than it gives. It is a unique and permanent grimace. One would say that the person's whole moral life has crystallised into this particular cast of features. This is the reason why a face is all the more comic, the more nearly it suggests to us the idea of some simple mechanical action in which its personality would for ever be absorbed. Some faces seem to be always engaged in weeping, others in laughing or whistling, others, again, in eternally blowing an imaginary trumpet, and these are the most comic faces of all. Here again is exemplified the law according to which the more natural the explanation of the cause, the more comic is the effect. Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, are clearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. But this effect gains in intensity when we are able to connect these characteristics with some deep-seated cause, a certain fundamental absentmindedness, as though the soul had allowed itself to be fascinated and hypnotised by the materiality of a simple action.
We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. However regular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect: there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it. He makes his models grimace, as they would do themselves if they went to the end of their tether. Beneath the skin-deep harmony of form, he divines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter. He realises disproportions and deformations which must have existed in nature as mere inclinations, but which have not succeeded in coming to a head, being held in check by a higher force. His art, which has a touch of the diabolical, raises up the demon who had been overthrown by the angel. Certainly, it is an art that exaggerates, and yet the definition would be very far from complete were exaggeration alone alleged to be its aim and object, for there exist caricatures that are more lifelike than portraits, caricatures in which the exaggeration is scarcely noticeable, whilst, inversely, it is quite possible to exaggerate to excess without obtaining a real caricature. For exaggeration to be comic, it must not appear as an aim, but rather as a means that the artist is using in order to make manifest to our eyes the distortions which he sees in embryo. It is this process of distortion that is of moment and interest. And that is precisely why we shall look for it even in those elements of the face that are incapable of movement, in the curve of a nose or the shape of an ear. For, in our eyes, form is always the outline of a movement. The caricaturist who alters the size of a nose, but respects its ground plan, lengthening it, for instance, in the very direction in which it was being lengthened by nature, is really making the nose indulge in a grin. Henceforth we shall always look upon the original as having determined to lengthen itself and start grinning. In this sense, one might say that Nature herself often meets with the successes of a caricaturist. In the movement through which she has slit that mouth, curtailed that chin and bulged out that cheek, she would appear to have succeeded in completing the intended grimace, thus outwitting the restraining supervision of a more reasonable force. In that case, the face we laugh at is, so to speak, its own caricature.
