Related to Henri-Louis Bergson
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Relevant passage from Kerslake:

'Bergson himself did not apply his vitalistic theory of biological evolution and development, first developed in Creative Evolution (1907), directly to the field of human evolution and the history of civilization. It is only in his final work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1934) that he explicitly begins to develop a vitalist theory of socio-historical currents, but the detail is sketchy, and the account is more or less a priori. However, from early on in the reception of Bergson’s writings, the potential for the application of Bergsonian principles to historiography had not gone unnoticed, and found its most direct development in the English speaking world, in the lineage that leads to Toynbee’s massive universal history. Perhaps the dominant intellectual influence in Toynbee’s formation had been the work of A.D. Lindsay (1879), a Scottish philosopher who, among other things, had been partly responsible (along with Herbert Wildon Carr) for bringing Bergson’s philosophy to the British Isles. Toynbee had graduated from Oxford University in 1911 during a brief honeymoon period in the English-language reception of Bergson’s philosophy. [note: 'There was a brief Bergsonian Spring in Britain in the year of 1911, with the publication of two British books: Herbert Wildon Carr’s Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change, and Lindsay’s The Philosophy of Bergson, which was a version of his lectures on Bergson at Balliol College, Oxford. The latter work is useful today for readers of Deleuze, as Lindsay’s Kantian approach to Bergson foreshadows Deleuze’s own approach. Lindsay claims Kant and Bergson both start from the polemical claim that “many difficulties and antinomies in philosophy arise … from a failure to ask the right question” and that they hold that “the chief part of the philosopher’s task is his statement of the problem” (A.D. Lindsay, The Philosophy of Bergson. London, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1911: 1-3). Lindsay’s emphasis on the “difference of degree” between perception and physical force, and the “difference in kind” between perception and memory also points towards Deleuze’s interpretation in Bergsonism (Ibid, 159-190). In his 1957 study of Bergson, Ian Alexander remarks that despite recent publications (including Deleuze’s 1956 essay, ‘Bergson and the Concept of Difference', which he cites), “Lindsay’s book is essential for the understanding of Matter and Memory” (Ian W. Alexander, Bergson: Philosopher of Reflection. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1957, 109).'] In his introductory piece to Toynbee, Tangye Lean writes that “the year in which Toynbee graduated saw the works of Bergson, delayed by translation, sweep into Oxford in an abrupt and surprising flood. They came to Toynbee’s own intellectual world ‘with the force’, he has said, ‘of a revelation’.” [note: 'Lean, ‘A Study of Toynbee’, 13.'] Alexander Dunlop Lindsay had been the catalyst for this revelation. Although he was a classics tutor, his dominant interests lay in modern philosophy, particularly in Kant and Bergson. [note: McNeill notes that Lindsay went to Balliol in 1906, a year before Toynbee came. Lindsay was an active socialist, and in the words of Toynbee’s biographer William McNeill, was “intent on disrupting the alliance of aristocracy and talent that Jowett had painstakingly created at Balliol, believing that talent alone should prevail” (William McNeill, Arnold Toynbee: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 25). Lindsay published his The Philosophy of Bergson in 1911, while Toynbee was still an undergraduate. Between 1907 and 1916, Toynbee “became Lindsay’s close friend and protégé” (McNeill, Arnold Toynbee, 25), despite the former’s lack of capacity for philosophy. In a letter from Oxford to a friend written in 1912, the young Toynbee remarked that “Far the biggest man here is Lindsay”.'] Toynbee’s biographer, William McNeill, writes that “Lindsay’s version of Bergson’s evolutionary thinking helped to wean Toynbee away from his inherited Anglican faith.”

In his The Philosophy of Bergson (1911), Lindsay had proposed the application of Bergsonian principles to history, saying that “Bergson unfortunately has paid no attention to the nature of historical inquiry, but it admirably illustrates his account of intuition”,49 sketching out the idea of a historical method that is “more than a science”, and rooted in the “genius” of the historian, who performs “a synthesis for which there are no rules”. [note: 'Ibid, 240.'] Lindsay stressed Bergson’s idea (voiced in Creative Evolution) that intuition “must be, like art, disinterested, or rather, like art, interested only in its object”, and that “intuition implies sympathy, in the sense at least of caring enough about things to know them in their own nature.” [note: 'Ibid, 236; cf. 221.'] Lindsay’s application of Bergson’s theory of intuition to historiography is sketchy, but it creates the space for a Bergsonian historiography. Toynbee was almost certainly inspired by Lindsay’s suggestion. In one sense, his work is a realisation of the blueprint of the Bergsonian historian sketched out here by Lindsay. However, Toynbee broke with Lindsay in 1916, according to McNeill because of a disagreement over Toynbee’s future career direction; Toynbee never referred to Lindsay in the Study, even in the interminable Acknowledgements in the tenth volume.

In his review of the last set of volumes of A Study of History, Ernest Barker suggested that Toynbee’s entire system was a product of the tradition of the teaching of classics in Oxford. Lindsay too shared this background, and wanted to extend its ethos to the study of modern society. [note: In her biography of her father, Lindsay’s daughter Drusilla Scott says that he was one of the two key architects of the plan in the inter-war years to introduce a ‘Modern Greats’: “Greats had given men some insight into the structure of a civilization as a whole, Lindsay thought. Modern Greats was an attempt to do the same for modern society” (Drusilla Scott, A.D. Lindsay: A Biography. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1971, 50). This aroused great opposition in the pre-war years; Scott says that this was partly because “some said the modern world was not a fit subject for academic study” (ibid). Unfortunately she gives no references, but the very thought that the subject of university study was the ancient past potentially sheds interesting light on the nature of Bildung in Victorian and Edwardian intellectual life, which would be almost the reverse of our own. What emerged from Lindsay’s scheme was the famous ‘Philosophy, Politics and Economics’ (PPE) degree at Oxford, the schooling ground of today’s career politicians. Lindsay was later the intellectual architect of Keele University.'] But if Toynbee’s ‘universal history’ had classical antecedents, his exhaustive application of certain Bergsonian principles to historiography was novel. It has remained largely undiscussed, and this has perhaps resulted in his work being unjustly neglected. The attacks levelled at him by traditional historians (which led to the common opinion that Toynbee’s work was ‘discredited’) were made without taking into account the role of Bergsonism in his approach to studying history. Tangye Lean’s early article on Toynbee’s work (in the literary journal Horizon in 1947) recorded that Bergson’s philosophy

gives Toynbee his first coherent picture of impermanence, and spreads out later like a kind of dye in his mind, influencing his sense of values, suggesting clues for further research, colouring even his style of exposition. If direct quotations from L’Evolution Créatrice itself are rare twenty, or thirty, or forty years later in A Study of History, it is because the book has fused into the whole structure of Toynbee’s thought. [note: 'Lean, ‘A Study of Toynbee’, 13.']

In fact, Toynbee refers to Bergson explicitly a number of times, often citing large chunks of his writings. The first volume of the Study, published in 1934, has two citations of Bergson’s Creative Evolution; in the third volume (published in the same year), there are a number of citations and references to Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion, published two years previously in 1934. ['note: See Toynbee, Study, 3: 118-119, 125, 181-85, 225-6, 231-37, 243-47, 254-56. McNeill even suggests that Toynbee’s basic version of the Bergsonian dualism between ‘life’ and ‘mechanism’ in an early essay from 1907-11 remains his elementary intellectual framework until his latest works, when the dualism finally takes centre stage (McNeill, Arnold Toynbee, 267). The opening of Toynbee’s student essay, ‘The Machine: A Problem of Dualism’, is worth quoting: “The whole universe – my consciousness, my body, my safety razor – is all a machine, and the paradox of the machine is inherent in the whole of it. It partakes of two orders of being … Life, which we know because that is what we are, and that other, which we do not know because we are not it, but which is Life’s environment and object of activity” (Toynbee Papers, Juvenilia, Bodleian Library, cited in McNeill, Arnold Toynbee, 28). Toynbee goes on that every success achieved by Life induces its opposite, ‘mechanization’. McNeill paraphrases: “In becoming conscious, ‘Life’ devitalizes itself; language becomes mechanical through grammar; morals harden into law and custom as a result of mechanical application to infinitely varying circumstance” (ibid). The young Toynbee here grasps Bergsonian vitalism ‘from within’, divining the basic Bergsonian spatiotemporal dynamism.'] As Bergson had been dismissed by British philosophers (Russell’s attack on Bergsonism was very influential), the basis for Toynbee’s approach to historiography tended to remain misunderstood by historians.

At the very outset of the Study, Toynbee polemically claims that the study of history has been put at risk in late Western civilization due to the increasing dominance of the institution of the ‘Industrial System’, the method of operation of which is “to maintain, up to the maximum of its productive capacity, an incessant output of such artiles as can be manufactured from raw materials by the mechanically coordinated work of a number of human beings.” [note: 'Toynbee, Study, 1:2.'] The “industrialization of historical thought” has proceeded to the point where “individuals or communities whose energies are concentrated on turning raw materials into light, heat, locomotion, or manufactured articles are inclined to feel that the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is a valuable activity in itself”, and are “even tempted to feel it reprehensible in other people when they neglect to develop all the natural resources at their disposal” (Study, 1:5).'] While Toynbee acknowledges that “it is possible that no violence is done to the nature of scientific thought through its being conducted on industrial lines”, the same method cannot be applied so straightforwardly to the domains of life and history. [note: 'Study, 1:3.'] In the post-Enlightenment period, he says, “we are sufficiently on our guard against the so-called ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ of imaginatively endowing inanimate objects with life.” Our epoch has the contrary problem: “we now fall victims to the inverse ‘Apathetic Fallacy’ of treating living creatures as though they were inanimate.” [note: 'Study, 1:8.'] Instead of explicitly justifying why we should be more afraid of the Apathetic than the Pathetic Fallacy (as we will see, Toynbee can easily be accused of an almost frenzied flaunting of the latter), Toynbee immediately goes on to make his first reference to Bergson, implicitly recalling Lindsay’s vision of the historian’s consciousness. The objection to the Apathetic Fallacy, it turns out, is rooted in Bergson’s critique of the limitations of intelligence (in Creative Evolution):

It is conceivable that, as Bergson suggests, the mechanism of our intellect is specifically constructed so as to isolate our apprehension of Physical Nature in a form which enables us to take action upon it. Yet even if this is the original structure of the human mind, and if other methods of thinking are in some sense unnatural, there yet exists a human faculty, as Bergson goes on to point out, which insists, not upon looking at Inanimate Nature, but upon feeling Life and feeling it as a whole. This deep impulse to envisage and comprehend the whole of Life is certainly immanent in the mind of the historian. [note: 'Study, 1:8. In the footnotes, Toynbee refers to chapter III of Creative Evolution (also important for Deleuze; cf. the 1960 ‘Cours inédit de Gilles Deleuze sur la chapitre III de L’Évolution creatricé’, in F. Worms, ed., Annales bergsoniennes II: Bergson, Deleuze, la phénoménologie. Paris, PUF, 2004).']'

(26-28)

Related to Gilles Deleuze