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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Collected Works of Henri Bergson," the eminent French philosopher presents a compendium of his seminal writings, elucidating the nature of consciousness, time, and free will. Bergson's literary style is characterized by its accessibility and lyrical prose, inviting readers to grapple with complex metaphysical concepts through vivid metaphors and illustrative anecdotes. Situated in the intellectual context of early 20th-century philosophy, this collection reflects the tension between traditional rationalist thought and the burgeoning movement of phenomenology and existentialism, positioning Bergson as a pivotal figure in the philosophical discourse on life and experience. Henri Bergson, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, carved a profound niche within philosophical debates, influenced by both scientific advancements and the arts. His upbringing in a Jewish intellectual milieu and his exposure to diverse philosophical traditions, including Kant and Nietzsche, shaped his perspective on the fluidity of human experience. Bergson's critique of mechanistic interpretations of life underscores his advocacy for intuitive knowledge and the immediacy of lived experience, themes that resonate throughout his collected works. For anyone interested in the interplay of philosophy, psychology, and the human condition, "The Collected Works of Henri Bergson" offers rich insights and profound reflections. This volume is essential for both students of philosophy and general readers, as it not only deepens our understanding of Bergson's thought but also invites us to reconsider the very fabric of our own experiences. 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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The Collected Works of Henri Bergson
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together a focused selection of Henri Bergson’s most influential writings, offering a clear path into his philosophy of time, consciousness, life, and society. It gathers works originally published in French and widely read in translation, presenting them as a coherent introduction to his method and concerns. Rather than aiming at an exhaustive corpus, the volume highlights texts in which his key ideas are first formulated, refined, and applied. Readers will encounter inquiries that move from the texture of inner experience to the dynamics of biological evolution, from the social function of humor to reflections shaped by the crisis of war.
The writings assembled here are philosophical in orientation, encompassing book-length treatises, essays, and lecture-derived pieces. Time and Free Will and Creative Evolution are sustained argumentative works that develop central concepts at length. Laughter and Dreams draw on lectures and essays to explore aesthetics and psychology with philosophical depth. Meaning of the War gathers reflections written in the context of a historical emergency, meditating on moral and intellectual questions raised by conflict. The collection thus spans rigorous system-building, applied analysis, and occasional pieces, demonstrating how a single philosophical vision addresses topics that range from comedy to biology to civic life.
Across these works, Bergson’s thought is unified by an insistence on experience in its immediacy and movement. He distinguishes between abstract, spatialized measures and the qualitative flow of lived duration, and invites readers to approach reality through intuition that grasps becoming from within. Stylistically, his prose is lucid yet imagistic, unfolding arguments through concrete examples, scientific references of his era, and vivid analogies that elicit the felt texture of phenomena. The result is philosophy that resists reduction to fixed schemas, emphasizing novelty, creativity, and the open-endedness of life, while maintaining disciplined reasoning and a continuous dialogue with empirical inquiry.
Time and Free Will examines the immediate data of consciousness, bringing to the fore the contrast between measured clock time and the continuous, interpenetrating flow of lived duration. Its analyses of sensation, memory, and effort aim to clarify how freedom can be understood without reducing human action to mechanical causation. The work sets the methodological tone for the rest of the collection: it proceeds from careful introspection toward broader claims about mind and world, showing how conceptual habits can obscure the very experiences they seek to explain. Many of Bergson’s later developments trace back to the insights articulated here.
Creative Evolution extends the focus from consciousness to life as a whole, engaging debates about mechanism and finalism in natural science. Bergson emphasizes creation, continuity, and unforeseen development, presenting a vision of life as a process that continuously invents. While drawing on biological research of his time, he resists both rigid determinism and fixed teleology, seeking a third way that honors empirical findings without confining life to preestablished forms. The book’s central notions, including the vital impetus of living processes, illuminate change across levels of organization and help frame philosophical questions about novelty, continuity, and the emergence of genuinely new forms.
Laughter turns to the meaning of the comic, asking why we laugh, at what, and to what effect. Here Bergson practices philosophy as social analysis, relating comic effects to patterns of rigidity or automatism within human behavior and society. The essay attends to theatrical performance, everyday situations, and language, not to enumerate examples for their own sake but to disclose how laughter can signal a subtle form of social correction. Its approach remains strikingly accessible: it clarifies a familiar experience while showing how aesthetic and moral sensibilities intersect, and it continues to inform discussions in literary studies, performance, and cultural theory.
Dreams offers a concise inquiry into the nature of dreaming, its relation to perception and memory, and the continuity between sleeping and waking consciousness. Without venturing into speculative metaphysics detached from experience, Bergson examines how images arise, how attention shifts, and how the mind organizes materials drawn from life. The essay uses introspection alongside illustrative cases to outline a psychology of dreaming consistent with his broader method. By showing how the mind’s activity persists in altered conditions, it sharpens the distinction between measurable stimuli and lived images, and it invites readers to reconsider where the boundaries of attention and awareness lie.
Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict situates Bergson’s philosophy in the historical pressure of the First World War. These reflections consider the stakes of the conflict in terms that link moral responsibility, scientific power, and the values of a living culture. Rather than technical argument, the work presents measured interventions aimed at clarity and resolve, articulating a view of civilization in which intelligence and creativity are inseparable from ethical commitment. It demonstrates how a philosophy of life can address urgent public questions without sacrificing rigor, and it records the encounter between ideas of open-ended becoming and the realities of collective crisis.
Taken together, these texts display a distinctive style: analytic care joined to evocative imagery, a sustained appeal to intuition alongside critical engagement with scientific discourse. Bergson’s writing invites readers to test arguments against experience, to sense the movement of phenomena before freezing them into concepts. He often stages his ideas through comparisons that illuminate without caricature, avoiding both rigid system-building and formless reflection. This blend of clarity and nuance has ensured the readability of his works beyond their immediate academic context, making them resources for disciplines that value both precise reasoning and a feel for the qualitative textures of life.
The unifying themes across the volume include duration, creativity, and the relationship between individual consciousness and social forms. Whether addressing free will, evolution, comedy, or dreaming, Bergson focuses on processes rather than static states, on becoming rather than bare being. He challenges explanations that treat change as mere rearrangement of inert elements, and he resists moral and aesthetic theories that ignore the living context from which acts and works arise. This orientation yields a philosophy attentive to emergence, contingency, and invention, while remaining committed to patient analysis. The result is a body of work at once systematic and open-ended.
Readers may approach the collection in various orders. Time and Free Will establishes core distinctions that illuminate the later texts. Creative Evolution carries those concerns into the life sciences. Laughter and Dreams apply his method to aesthetic and psychological domains, while Meaning of the War shows it operating in the sphere of public reflection. Each work stands alone, but their resonance becomes clearer in combination: insights about duration inform creativity, analyses of attention shape accounts of dreaming, and social reflection refracts through a philosophy of life. The volume is therefore both an introduction and a conversation among complementary inquiries.
The continuing significance of these works lies in their invitation to reexamine habits of thought that flatten experience. Bergson offers neither dogma nor mere skepticism; he proposes a way of seeing that honors movement, emergence, and qualitative difference. In a time when scientific, technological, and social transformations remain rapid and contested, his insistence on creativity and responsibility retains force. By gathering these writings together, the collection presents a sustained encounter with a philosophy that is rigorous without being reductive, and imaginative without losing discipline. It opens a space in which analysis and intuition, reason and life, meet and enrich one another.
Author Biography
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a French philosopher whose work reshaped debates about time, consciousness, and creativity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Championing the concepts of durée (lived duration) and intuition as a philosophical method, he challenged mechanistic accounts of mind and nature. His lucid prose and public lectures made him an international figure, bridging philosophy, psychology, and the life sciences. Bergson’s ideas radiated beyond academia into literature and the arts, inspiring modernist experiments with memory and narrative. Recognized for the vigor and clarity of his thought, he became one of the era’s most widely discussed thinkers and later received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Educated in Paris, Bergson attended the Lycée Condorcet and then the École Normale Supérieure, where he earned the agrégation in philosophy and absorbed the French spiritualist tradition. Early influences included Félix Ravaisson and Émile Boutroux, as well as developments in psychology and evolutionary theory. After graduation he taught in provincial lycées, notably in Clermont-Ferrand, while refining ideas about free will and inner experience. Returning to Paris toward the end of the 1890s, he combined rigorous scholarship with a distinctive style accessible to wider audiences. This blend of technical argument and literary clarity would become a signature, setting the stage for the books that established his reputation.
Bergson’s first major work, Time and Free Will, advanced the notion that consciousness unfolds as qualitative duration rather than discrete, measurable units. It criticized attempts to reduce inner life to spatialized, quantitative models. Matter and Memory continued the project by analyzing perception and memory in relation to the body, proposing a dynamic interplay between habit and recollection. Alongside these metaphysical studies, he published Laughter, a widely read essay on the comic and social life, and Introduction to Metaphysics, which elaborated his method of intuition. Pragmatist readers, including William James, found in Bergson a powerful ally against reductive intellectualism and a defender of contingency.
With Creative Evolution, Bergson reached a broad public. Interpreting biological novelty through the idea of an élan vital, he argued against both rigid mechanism and teleology, emphasizing creativity and unforeseeable emergence in nature. Beginning in 1900 he lectured at the Collège de France, where his courses drew large audiences and helped make him a cultural phenomenon. He engaged critics across philosophy and the sciences, debating neo-Kantian and positivist perspectives. His election to the Académie française during the First World War signaled official recognition of his stature. Even admirers, however, contested aspects of his vitalism, igniting lively controversy that kept his work in the spotlight.
In the early 1920s Bergson published Duration and Simultaneity, distinguishing lived time from the time of physics and entering into public debate about relativity. His position provoked responses from scientists and philosophers, including exchanges with Albert Einstein, and underscored his conviction that science and philosophy address different orders of temporality. Around the same time, he helped inaugurate the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, serving as its first chair. International acclaim culminated in the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, awarded for the richness and influence of his ideas and the elegance with which he conveyed them.
Bergson’s later philosophy turned to ethics and religion in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. He contrasted closed, obligation-based moralities with open, creative ones animated by exemplary personalities, and distinguished static from dynamic forms of religion, granting a central role to mysticism. The work, written after years of ill health and public service, reconnected his earlier themes of freedom and creativity with social life and political questions. It was both praised for ambition and criticized for speculative elements, yet it offered a powerful culmination of his lifelong attempt to describe processes—of consciousness, life, and community—that elude rigid conceptual capture.
Bergson spent his final years in Paris, publishing little as his health declined, and died there in 1941. By mid-century his reputation waned amid the rise of existentialism, logical empiricism, and the consolidation of relativity in physics. Yet his influence persisted, resurfacing in phenomenology and in later French philosophy, notably through renewed readings by figures such as Gilles Deleuze. Writers and artists continued to draw on his analyses of memory, duration, and creative invention. Today Bergson is read for the subtlety of his descriptions of experience, his dialogue with science, and his defense of novelty at the heart of mind and nature.
Historical Context
Henri Bergson’s oeuvre emerged from the ferment of the French Third Republic, particularly the Belle Époque (circa 1871–1914), when Paris stood as a global hub of science, arts, and mass politics. The Exposition Universelle of 1889, with the Eiffel Tower as emblem, and that of 1900 showcased technical modernity and democratized spectacle. Universal schooling, secularization, and the expansion of the lycées created a new public for philosophy. Newspapers, satirical weeklies, theater, and early cinema intensified urban rhythms and social scrutiny. These developments formed the cultural horizon in which questions of time, consciousness, laughter, creativity, and moral purpose took on urgent and widely intelligible significance.
Born in Paris on 18 October 1859 to a Polish Jewish father, Michał Bergson, and an English mother, Kate Levison, Bergson was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and entered the École normale supérieure in 1878. There he encountered the French spiritualist tradition of Jules Lachelier and Émile Boutroux, which tempered positivism with a philosophy of freedom. After his agrégation (1881), he taught in Angers and at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, where he matured the theses of his doctorate, defended at the University of Paris in 1889. This institutional path linked pedagogy, research, and a civic audience—crucial for the reception of his later public-facing works.
Bergson’s career unfolded amid profound shifts in the sciences. Thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, and non-Euclidean geometries unsettled inherited mechanistic certainties, while Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism questioned foundations of measurement. Zeno’s paradoxes reappeared in new mathematical guise; the intuition-versus-analysis divide sharpened. In this landscape, conceptions of duration, novelty, and causality mattered not only to metaphysics but to social self-understanding. The intellectual battle lines—between deterministic physics and open-ended creativity, quantitative time and lived time—cut across journals, academies, and lecture halls in Paris, London, and Berlin. Bergson’s sustained dialogue with these currents provided a common matrix for his reflections on comedy, dreams, free will, evolution, and civic morale.
Around 1900, psychology professionalized. Charcot’s demonstrations at the Salpêtrière on hysteria and hypnosis (1870s–1890s), Théodule Ribot’s psychopathology, Pierre Janet’s analyses of dissociation, and Alfred Binet’s experimental program (L’Année Psychologique, 1894) drew attention to memory, attention, and suggestion. The Institut Général Psychologique was founded in 1900 in Paris as a forum for interdisciplinary inquiry. Earlier studies of dreams by Alfred Maury and the sinologist d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, together with Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899/1900), formed a contested field. Bergson’s engagement with dreaming, habit, and imagination developed within this context, aligning philosophical questions of consciousness with laboratory findings and clinical observations while resisting reductive psychologism.
The fin-de-siècle theater, café-concert culture, and satirical press cultivated a civic sensibility attuned to the social uses of humor. Parisian venues like the Théâtre des Variétés and illustrated periodicals such as Le Rire (founded 1894) mapped the city’s mores and masked anxieties through laughter. Urban crowds, bureaucratic routines, and standardized gestures encouraged reflections on the comic as a collective corrective to rigidity. Simultaneously, Symbolist poetics and Impressionist explorations of perception widened aesthetic horizons. This cultural mosaic—where habit clashed with spontaneity and convention with invention—provided the living laboratory for Bergson’s broader interrogation of the mechanization of life, the pliancy of attention, and the forms of social sanction.
Industrial modernity reconfigured time. Railways, telegraphy, and factory discipline imposed timetables that culminated in the International Meridian Conference at Washington, D.C. (1884), which adopted Greenwich as a prime meridian. Scientific and commercial standardization put clocks at the center of global coordination, while Paris negotiated its own alignment with Greenwich in the early twentieth century. The new chronometry promised mastery but raised questions about experience, memory, and spontaneity. Philosophers and psychologists disputed whether time was homogeneous and divisible or qualitative and indivisible. Bergson’s sustained insistence on lived duration played out against this quantifying backdrop, resonating with artists, jurists, and educators who sensed the costs of temporal abstraction.
In 1900 Bergson was elected to the Collège de France, where his lectures, often delivered to overflowing amphitheaters, became a Parisian institution. The publication of Creative Evolution in 1907 consolidated his public stature. He traveled to Britain in 1911 for lectures that attracted intellectuals and general readers alike, a sign of his growing international reputation. In 1914 he was elected to the Académie française, and in 1927 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, honoring the literary vigor with which he intervened in philosophical issues. This trajectory—scholar, public lecturer, academicien, laureate—situated his reflections on comedy, time, life, war, and dreams at the crossroads of elite and popular discourse.
Transnational exchanges amplified Bergsonism. William James, who met Bergson in Paris and discussed him in A Pluralistic Universe (1909), found in durée an ally against intellectualist reduction, even as he recast it in pragmatic terms. In Britain and the United States, translations—such as F. L. Pogson’s of Time and Free Will (1910) and Arthur Mitchell’s of Creative Evolution (1911)—catalyzed debate among philosophers, psychologists, and theologians. Italian idealists Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile polemicized with vitalism, while in Germany, phenomenologists like Max Scheler and literary modernists parsed Bergson’s implications for value and intuition. This cosmopolitan reception reinforced the cross-cutting reach of his inquiries across science, art, ethics, and politics.
Biology’s turn-of-the-century controversies supplied a crucial backdrop. Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) had unsettled teleology, yet debates persisted over mechanism and chance. August Weismann’s germ-plasm theory challenged inheritance of acquired traits; Hugo de Vries’s 1901 mutation theory complicated gradualism; Jacques Loeb pursued a mechanistic physiology, while Hans Driesch’s sea urchin experiments (1891–1893) revived vitalist interpretations. Embryology, paleontology, and comparative anatomy filled laboratories and museums in Paris and beyond. These disputes framed the stakes of articulating creativity within nature without collapsing into either rigid determinism or nebulous mysticism, a dilemma that reverberated through reflections on novelty, habit, and the relation between matter, mind, and society.
The Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906) fractured French public life, exposing deep currents of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and republican civic ideals. It also transformed the role of the intellectual through petitions, salons, and newspapers. Parallel legislative reforms culminated in the 1905 law of Separation of Churches and State, recasting the moral vocabulary of citizenship. This contentious milieu shaped expectations for philosophy: to address public reason, adjudicate between collective pressures and individual conscience, and scrutinize the social mechanisms that discipline behavior. In such a climate, inquiries into the social function of laughter, the dynamics of attention, and the ethical grammar of voluntary action resonated beyond academic circles.
Interest in dreams intersected with broader fin-de-siècle curiosity about the unconscious and the paranormal. The London-based Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882) enlisted eminent scientists; Bergson served as its president in 1913, signaling his cautious openness to phenomena at the edge of science. In France, debates over suggestion and automatism at the Salpêtrière met with literary explorations of reverie and memory. Early cinematography and photography further complicated questions of image, movement, and the persistence of impressions. Within these intersecting discourses, philosophical analysis of dreaming could serve as a vantage point for assessing the limits of explanation, the role of memory, and the texture of inner duration.
The First World War (1914–1918) placed intellectuals before unprecedented mobilization and loss. Bergson’s wartime pamphlets, published in French and swiftly translated into English as The Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict (1915), aimed to articulate the moral orientation of the conflict. He undertook diplomatic missions for France, notably to the United States in 1917, contributing to the alignment of Allied perspectives and meeting President Woodrow Wilson. The language of energy, morale, and creativity—long present in his philosophy—gained civic inflection. The war’s demands thus integrated metaphysical motifs with appeals to public spirit, discipline, and the defense of cultural values under threat.
Relativity theory unsettled older intuitions of simultaneity. Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers and Hermann Minkowski’s 1908 spacetime formalism provoked philosophical scrutiny across Europe. Bergson’s sustained engagement culminated in a celebrated encounter with Einstein in Paris in 1922 at the Société française de philosophie, followed by his Durée et simultanéité (1922). The debate turned on the distinction between operational clock-time and lived duration, with implications for psychology, aesthetics, and social coordination. Whether addressing the timing of a joke, the interval of a dream, or the unfolding of biological novelty, the early twentieth-century reconfiguration of time ensured that philosophical analysis remained entangled with experimental physics and instrumentation.
Bergson’s Parisian milieu fostered cross-pollination with sociology and anthropology. Émile Durkheim, who taught at the Sorbonne from 1902, theorized social facts and sanctions; his nephew Marcel Mauss examined rites and collective representations. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl investigated so-called “primitive mentality,” challenging Eurocentric rationalism. These inquiries provided complementary lenses for examining how communities enforce norms, share beliefs, and ritualize laughter and mourning. Philosophical treatments of habit, memory, and attention thus entered into dialogue with empirical studies of institutions and ceremonies. The metropolitan university system, anchored by the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, coordinated such debates through seminars, reviews, and learned societies.
Publishing networks shaped the diffusion of Bergson’s thought. The Revue de métaphysique et de morale (founded by Xavier Léon in 1893) and the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger provided venues for discussion and critique, while the Paris house Félix Alcan issued major works, including the 1889 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience and the 1907 L’Évolution créatrice. English translations by F. L. Pogson, Arthur Mitchell, and others carried his ideas to transatlantic audiences. Salons, learned societies, and public lectures enabled encounters among politicians, artists, and scientists, ensuring that reflections on comedy, freedom, creativity, war, and dreams circulated far beyond university classrooms.
Between wars, Bergson’s public service continued. In 1922 he became the first president of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, working alongside figures such as Marie Curie and Albert Einstein to facilitate scholarly exchange. The initiative sought to stabilize a fragile peace by linking laboratories, universities, and cultural institutions. This diplomatic intellectualism echoed Bergson’s wartime efforts yet looked forward, insisting that moral and scientific energies could be coordinated without sacrificing spontaneity and invention. The Commission’s work situated philosophical concerns with time, creativity, and social cohesion within the apparatus of international governance, education policy, and cultural diplomacy.
Bergson’s later years unfolded amid crisis. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion appeared in 1932, while the 1930s saw mounting authoritarianism and anti-Semitism across Europe. After the fall of France in 1940, he refused exemptions available to him and affirmed solidarity with persecuted Jews, a stance anticipated in a 1937 testament. He died in Paris on 4 January 1941. Across his career—from 1889 to the interwar period—his work threaded together debates in physics, biology, psychology, literature, and public ethics. This historical arc frames the collected essays on laughter, time, dreams, evolution, and war as responses to modernity’s promises and perils, addressed to a broad civic audience.
Synopsis (Selection)
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
Bergson examines what makes things comic, arguing that laughter arises when the living appears mechanical and serves as a social corrective. He analyzes devices such as rigidity, repetition, inversion, and caricature to show how automatism in behavior provokes laughter.
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Bergson distinguishes qualitative inner time (duration) from the quantitative, spatialized time of science. From this, he defends free will as the expression of the whole self in duration and critiques psychophysical reductionism.
Creative Evolution
Bergson presents evolution as a creative, ongoing process driven by an élan vital that eludes both mechanistic and teleological accounts. He develops intuition as a method for grasping duration and reinterprets life, memory, and consciousness as continuous creation.
Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict
Written during World War I, this work frames the conflict as a struggle between the values of life and spirit and the mechanization of matter and force. It defends the Allied cause and articulates the war’s moral and philosophical stakes.
Dreams
Bergson proposes that dreams arise when the mind’s attention to practical life relaxes, allowing memory-images to combine freely. Bodily sensations and residual perceptions are transformed into coherent yet fluid narratives by the dreaming imagination.
The Collected Works of Henri Bergson
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.
