Abstract
The following text is a translation of Semyon Frank’s “L’intuition fondamentale de Bergson” published in Henri Bergson: Essais et témoignages inédits, edited by Albert Béguin and Pierre Thévenaz, Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1941. In this article, Frank addresses Bergson’s notion of intuition, his anti-intellectualism, his mysticism, his closeness to Lebensphilosophie, the notion of lived experience, the distinction between intuition as pure contemplation and intuition as living knowledge, the distinction between cognition of the atemporal essence of reality and cognition of the world of becoming, pragmatism, the disinterested and open intuitive spiritual attitude vs the utilitarian attitude of social groups closed in on themselves, the transrational vs the irrational, spiritual life, psychic life, the Absolute, and the temporal flux. The article contains criticisms of Bergson on the issues of time and intuition: the durée, the intuitive time, is incomprehensible without an atemporal foundation. Therefore, according to Frank, Plato was correct—contra Bergson—to define time as the moving image of eternity. And, if there is such an atemporal foundation, then, contrary to what Bergson seems to think, intuition as living knowledge cannot be the sole mode of intuition. Moreover, unlike what Bergson appears to think, an intuition of the Absolute would be an intuition of the transrational rather than of the irrational. The translation is preceded by an introduction tracing the genesis of the article, which was commissioned by the Swiss philosopher Pierre Thévenaz.
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Notes
The book was abridged due to Aubier’s length restrictions (Obolevitch 2022, p. 43).
Unless otherwise indicated in the list of references, translations are mine.
The course in question was a course on time, the manuscript notes of which have been preserved (Thévenaz 1940a).
This draft of letter to Binswanger is preserved at the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne, Fonds Pierre Thévenaz (Thévenaz 1940b).
For a report of this meeting, see Schaerer (1940).
On the relationship between Binswanger and Häberlin, Thévenaz himself wrote the following: “The psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger (born in 1881 in Kreuzlingen, director of the Bellevue clinic in Kreuzlingen) was strongly influenced by Bleuler and Freud, of whom he was a personal friend, and also by Jung. Subsequently, close contacts with numerous philosophers (Paul Häberlin, Simon Frank, René Le Senne, E. Minkowski) and the study of phenomenology (notably Heidegger) guided his research, both psychological and philosophical, increasingly towards anthropology” (Thévenaz 1941a, p. 106).
This letter was discovered by Nikolai Frank and Gennadii Aliaiev in the S. L. Frank Family Archive in Munich (Thévenaz 1941b).
On Frank and Thévenaz, see also (Aliaiev et al. 2021, pp. 328–329).
Philip Boobbyer also gives 1938 as the year of Frank’s relocation to France (Boobbyer 1992, p. 243).
[Note from the translator: Bergson gave this lecture at the IVth International Congress of Philosophy in Bologna in April 1911. The text was published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in November 1911 (Bergson 1911). The article was then translated into Russian by P. S. Yushkevich and published in 1912 in the newly created collection Novyia idei v filosofii (New Ideas in Philosophy) edited by Nikolai Lossky and Ernst Radlov (Bergson 1912). The same year, Frank published a review of the article in the journal Russkaya mysl′ (Russian Thought) (Frank 1912).]
[Note from the translator: The word “dreadnought” appears in English in the French version. Frank borrowed it from Bergson himself, who uses it in “L’intuition philosophique” to characterize Spinoza’s Ethics: “those tremendous things called Substance, Attribute and Mode, and the formidable array of theorems with the close network of definitions, corollaries and scholia, and that complication of machinery, that power to crush which causes the beginner, in the presence of the Ethics, to be struck with admiration and terror as though he were before a battleship of the Dreadnought class” (Bergson 2002, pp. 236–237). For the French original, see (Bergson 1911, p. 814). The dreadnought was the main kind of battleship in the early twentieth century.
[Note from the translator: These words literally mean “the silent better knowledge.” In Nepostizhimoe (The Unknowable), published two years earlier, Frank also wrote: “The intuitive knowledge that guides us here is what Goethe called das stille bessere Wissen. It is mute, silent, unspeakable knowledge. But this means that it is knowledge of the unknowable, of reality in its genuine, metalogical nature” (Frank 1983, p. 29). For the Russian original, see (Frank 1939, p. 49). However, Frank provides a reference for this citation neither in 1939 nor in 1941. Irina Blauberg could not locate the source of this citation (Frank 2014, p. 521). Neither could I. As Gennadii Aliaiev and Tatyana Rezvich suggest (in Aliaiev et al. 2021, p. 471), it could be a misremembered line from Goethe’s Schlußpoetik: “Solch ein Inhalt deiner Sänge, / Der erbauet, der gefällt, / Und, im wüstesten Gedränge, / Dankt’s die stille, beßre Welt” (Goethe 1826, p. 21).]
On this subject, we can see an almost literal anticipation of Bergson’s fundamental ideas in some considerations of Plotinus (e.g., Enneads IV, 4, 6–8) and in some of Goethe’s Sprüche in Prosa concerning the theory of knowledge.
[Note from the translator: “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” John 14:6, King James Bible.]
[Note from the translator: “In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight.” Luke 10:21, King James Bible.]
“Is not the core of nature in the heart of man?” [Note from the translator: The German is not accurate here. What Goethe wrote is: “Ist nicht der Kern der Natur | Menschen im Herzen?” (Goethe 1867, p. 81). For some reason, in the French version ist has been substituted for liegt. But the substitution does not affect the meaning of the sentence. About these two lines, Karl Grün commented that what Goethe meant was as follows: “Der Kern der Natur ist Menschen im Herzen. Im Menschenherzen ist der Kern der Natur. Die Natur hat ihren Kern im Herzen des Menschen” (“The core of nature is in the heart of man. The core of nature is in the human heart. Nature has its core in the human heart”) (Grün 1846, p. 250).]
[Note from the translator: Sub specie aeternitatis is Latin for “under an aspect of eternity” or, more literally, “under a species of eternity.” The expression was used by Spinoza (a philosopher with whom both Bergson and Frank felt close affinity) to describe what is universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon merely temporal reality. See Ethica II, 44 Cor. 2, Ethica V, 22, 23, 29 Schol., 30, Dem. 31 Schol., and 36 (Spinoza 1830).]
[Note from the translator: ϰτῆμα ἐς ἀεί (ktêma eis aeı) means “a good forever,” “a possession for eternity,” or again “an everlasting possession.” The expression is from Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War (1.22.4): “My history is an everlasting possession [ϰτῆμα ἐς ἀεί]” (Thucydides 1881, p. 15).]
[Note from the translator: The word “soul” here translates âme and “spirit” translates esprit. Âme and esprit are most probably, in turn, translations of, respectively, Seele and Geist. The German vitalist philosopher Ludwig Klages opposed the life-affirming Seele to the life-denying Geist. See Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (The Spirit as the Adversary of the Soul), Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1933.]
[Note from the translator: The French word that I have translated as “com-prehended” is com-prise. Comprise means “understood, grasped by the understanding,” but in its etymological sense (com- = with, together; prise = taken, grasped) it means “grasped together.” The French com-prise could be a translation of be-greifen (to grasp). Pris is the past tense of prendre, which derives from the Latin prehendere (to grasp, to seize, to catch), and com-prehendere has given rise to the English verb to comprehend.]
[Note from the translator: The French libre-penseurs (freethinkers) were, around the 1860s, proponents of the libre-pensée (freethought), which consisted in a search for truth based solely on the use of the scientific method, thus based only on reason and experiment, and not on theological dogma. Amongst the most well-known libre-penseurs was Victor Hugo.]
[Note from the translator: In his correspondence with Ludwig Binswanger, Frank mentions that Thévenaz made a mistake in the translation; the latter translated Erneuerung as modernisme, whereas it should have been translated as “renaissance” (Antonov et al. 2021, p. 480). In light of this, I have translated modernisme as “renaissance.” “Catholic renaissance” refers to Charles Péguy’s renaissance catholique.]
[Note from the translator: Georges Sorel was a French social and political thinker. Thévenaz translated the book title as Essai sur la violence, but the title in French is in fact Réflexions sur la violence (Sorel 1908). The book was subsequently translated into English as Reflections on Violence by Thomas E. Hulme (Sorel 1912). I thus rendered it here as Reflections on Violence instead of as Essay on Violence.]
[Note from the translator: I have left the text as I found it, but here either Frank or Thévenaz made a mistake. Thévenaz’s translation reads as follows: “Les idées, disait Schiller, demeurent tout près l’une de l’autre, et pourtant les choses se heurtent durement dans l’espace (“Dicht beieinander wohnen die Gedanken, doch hart im Raume stoßen sich die Dinge”).” However, these lines, from Schiller’s play “Wallenstein,” are: “Leicht beieinander wohnen die Gedanken; Doch hart im Raume stoßen sich die Sachen” (Schiller 1830, p. 376). Somehow, the word Leicht has been substituted for Dicht, and Sachen for Dinge. The change from Sachen to Dinge does not affect the meaning of the sentence, for both mean “things,” but the modification from Leicht to Dicht changes the meaning from “easily” to “closely,” and the former makes more sense: “Thoughts dwell together easily, but things collide hard in space.”]
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Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Gennadii Aliaiev and Jean-Pierre Thévenaz for supplying me with research material as well as for helpful comments.
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Frank, S.L., Tremblay, F. Bergson’s Fundamental Intuition. Stud East Eur Thought (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-024-09641-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-024-09641-6