To pierce the mystery of the deep,
it is sometimes necessary to regard the heights.
It is earth’s hidden fire which appears
at the summit of the volcano.
Bergson 1975, 32.
- 1 In this article, therefore, I simply suggest the possibility of a comparison, which, as far as I kn (...)
- 2 I quote from the English translation without including references to the original edition (Bergson (...)
- 3 I quote from the English translation without including the references of the original edition (Nish (...)
- 4 Nishida was the first author to introduce Bergson in Japan in his October 1910 article: “Essay on t (...)
- 5 The term ri (Chinese pronunciation li) is generally translated as “principle.” In neo-Confucianism, (...)
- 6 A key-expression in the Chinese Buddhist school Huayan (in Japanese Kegon), with which Nishida was (...)
1In this article, I argue for the affinity between Bergson’s “complete mysticism” and Nishida’s “energetism.”1 Complete mysticism is a key-concept of Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson 1974);2 energetism is a key-concept of Nishida’s Inquiry into the Good,3 a book in which the central chapters (Nishida 1990, 85-146) investigate the various sources of moral obligation, just as Bergson did in The Two Sources (Bergson 1974, 1-91). Regarding these two key-concepts, I think it is possible to speak of a community of intuition, though The Two Sources is from 1932 and the Inquiry is from 1911. In the latter, indeed, there are no direct references to Bergson’s philosophy. Yet, there are a lot of minor Bergsonian ideas. By minor, I mean that none of Bergson’s major concepts such as the élan vital or durée, are mentioned there. Nishida analysed them in other works (see e.g., Nishida 1987),4 agreeing with Bergson that the universe is the sensible manifestation of a single creative force (Nishida 1990, 158ff) which acts from behind (Bergson 1944, 319). Already in the Inquiry, Nishida describes this force as a living root, or principle [ri],5 that unifies everything without stopping (Nishida 1990, 60-64). According to Bergson and Nishida, there is nothing in the world that does not derive from the spontaneous activity of self-creation and self-development of this single force (Nishida 1990, 55ff). Ri, in fact, is a principle not in the sense of the arché, but in the sense of the immanent structure of all phenomena.6 Etymologically, the term “ri” refers to the veining of the jade stone and evokes the semi-visible texture that organises every element of reality. Just like Bergson’s élan vital, Nishida’s ri is another name for a God which is common to all beings and whose vision, when possible, would mean “the immediate abolition of the war” (Bergson 1974, 204).
2The minor Bergsonian themes we find in Nishida’s Inquiry are the qualitative character of inner experience (Nishida 1990, 42ff), the consequent impossibility of analysing it with reflection and discursive thought (Nishida 1990, 11-19), and the acknowledgement of a difference in degree, but not in kind, between intuition, i.e., the direct access to inner life, and the other acts of consciousness (Nishida 1990, 30-34). Nishida describes it as “an extremely ordinary phenomenon” that can be found “in all of our disciplined behaviour” (Nishida 1960, 34). Bergson, likewise, points out that “intuition exists in each of us, though it is covered by other functions more useful to life” (Bergson 2009, 47, my translation).
- 7 For his concept of “pure experience” [junsui keiken], Nishida is inspired by the concepts of “reine (...)
3Intuition, for Bergson, is the additional attention (Bergson 2009, 85) we can always pay to ourselves: it expands our ordinary perception to the level of pure and immediate experience7 in which it is impossible to distinguish an object from a subject (Nishida 1990, 3-10; Bergson 1912, 2ff.). For Nishida too, our deep, true, and enduring self is found on this level, being the expression of an “unlimited unity” (Nishida 1990, 31). Consciousness experiences intuition, i.e., the act by which the self tests its unifying power, as a tension of the will, as an effort. But, to the extent that intuition is also the way in which life lives and reality realises itself, Bergson and Nishida agree that intuition is both our effort and the world’s.
- 8 Nishida takes up the Aristotelian term in the chapter of the Inquiry dedicated to energetism (Nishi (...)
- 9 In concluding for this definition, Bergson is influenced by the work of Delacroix (1899; 1908).
4Our thesis is that Bergson’s complete mysticism is an energetism, from the Greek enérgheia, activity,8 insofar as complete mysticism is a practical, and in this sense a dynamic, religion (“complete mysticism is action” — Bergson 1974, 215),9 while energetism is, at the same time, a religious ethic and a religious practice. Complete mysticism and energetism are two models of self-emancipation because they are both centred on a peculiar experience of freedom, even if freedom is not the main theme of The Two Sources.
5For both Bergson and Nishida, freedom is a development of our “deep” or “true” self, namely a “development of consciousness” (Nishida 1990, 25) that is a “creation of self by self” (Bergson 1975, 30-31). Yet, this development is not an increase in abstract knowledge. The true self is pure experience, but pure experience “has no meaning whatsoever; it is simply a present consciousness of facts just as they are” (Nishida 1990, 4), without the addition of the least discursive reflection. The sword of logic cannot penetrate the deep self because the deep self, like the God of the mystics and the élan of the universe, is not a nóema (Nishida 1990, 61). The deep self is an activity of unceasing creation (Nishida 1990, 56ff; Bergson 1944, 27; 114; 220; 252; 369) that we become aware of through intuition: “the discernment of this single reality” (Nishida 1990, 32) indiscernible from this single reality. Intuition is the contact with the inside within the inside that attains the absolute (Bergson 1912, 1). For that reason, if freedom is a certain relation between the “inner” self and its “external” acts (Bergson 2001, 219), intuition is the condition of possibility of freedom.
6According to Bergson a free act emanates from the deep self (Bergson 2001, 129 ff.) as its sensible sign, though it is not mechanically caused by it (Bergson 2001, 162-172). Rather, a free act expresses our personality like a painting, or a piece of music — examples also given by Nishida in the Inquiry (Nishida 1990, 82; 130; 133-4; 169) — express the self of the artist who made them (Bergson 2001, 172). The paradigm of the free act in both Bergson and Nishida is the action of a self-moving hand (Nishida 1990, 32-33; 133-134; Bergson 2001, 11 ff..; 165 ff.) and so, as strange as it may seem, is a kind of automatism. Freedom, in fact, is not about free choice. Bergson and Nishida agree that to be free does not mean to choose between two or more alternatives (Bergson, in Time and Free Will, criticises the so-called “fork-model” — Bergson 2001, 175 ff.). Freedom is not the libertas arbitri. For Nishida “only when we function according to a certain deep, imparted motive we feel we are active and free. Conversely, when we function in opposition to such a motive, we feel compulsion” (Nishida 1990, 25). Consciousness, in reality, “is free not because it functions fortuitously beyond the laws of nature, but because it follows its own nature. It is free not because it functions for no reason, but because it knows well the reason behind its functioning” (Nishida 1900, 99; see also Spinoza 1910, 155, quoted in Nishida 1990, 125).
7Both for Bergson and Nishida, to be free means, simply, to be active from one’s own deep and blind nature (“true reality is the free development that emerges from the internal necessity of a single unifying factor” — Nishida 1990, 58; Bergson 2001 165-172), and so, in a way, to be passive, receptive with respect to it. The kind of will described by those who argue for:
[T]he freedom of the will, a will that is totally without cause or reason, does not exist. Such a contingent will would not be felt to be free; rather, it would be felt to be oppressive. When we function for a certain reason, that is, from the internal character of the self, we feel ourselves to be free. And we feel most free when the cause of a motive emerges from the most profound internal character of the self. The reason behind the will, however, is not a mechanical cause as described by determinist. Our spirit contains a law governing its activity, and when spirit functions in accordance with its own law, it is truly free (Nishida 1990, 98).
8Thus conceived, freedom is a possession, not in the sense that when we are free, we possess something, but, rather, in the sense that when we are possessed by this “something,” we are free (Bergson 1944, 219). Intuition is the condition of this unbearable libertas necessitatis because intuition is a “sympathy” (Nishida 1990, 98-99; Bergson 1912, 7; 9; 69; 91; Bergson 1975, 32) with “our” deep nature that intelligence cannot master. Intelligence can only grasp, know, and check the action of the self-moving hand in its effects, retrospectively. As Bergson’s famous image suggests (Bergson 1994, 105; Bergson 1974, 46), intelligence can only recognise the inner and deep movement of the hand sunk into a container full of iron filings starting from the external and superficial configuration taken up by the fragments. Intuition, instead, can feel the self-moving hand while moving because it is not a knowledge but an inward migration toward the true self, and “the true self is this unifying intuition” (Nishida 1990, 33).
9Consequently, intuition is both the cause and the effect of the desertion of the false self. Intuition either precedes or follows the compression of the false self to the advantage of an immersion within our enduring, true personality. The condition of possibility of intuition is the immanence of the authentic self to the inauthentic one. For Bergson, as for Nishida, our true nature is ever present as a background melody, and we can always intuit our personality by converting our attention. We can always reverse our mental habits (Bergson 1912, 70) and, in the ensuing awakening, “we realize with our whole being the profound unity at the base of knowledge and the will […] This awakening is the basis of all truth and contentment” (Nishida 1990, 34).
10Nevertheless, some critics might object that to say that mysticism is an energetism is to say that mystical experience is an experience of freedom and, in The Two Sources, Bergson does not speak of freedom, at least not directly as he did, for example, in Time and Free Will. Yet, the opposition between “closed” and “open” society, “static” and “dynamic” religion of 1932 reminds us of his 1889’s opposition between the “superficial,” or “spatial,” self and the “deep,” or “temporal,” one. Besides, in Time and free Will, Bergson uses the same adjectives, i.e., “static” and “dynamic,” to describe the two ways of assimilating the antecedents of an act (Bergson 2001, 189): the static way is mechanical, and therefore cannot support freedom; the dynamic way is creative, and therefore can support freedom (Bergson 2001, 189-221). Moreover, for Bergson mysticism itself is an appeal to inner and deep life (Bergson 1972, 495; 1201). Every mystical act is a free act that frees in turn (the “fires of generosity” lit by mystics, to take up the beautiful image from Life and Consciousness — Bergson 1975, 32 — are fires of freedom) because every mystical act arises from a “superabundance of life” (Bergson 1974, 221). Bergson claims that mystics are “rare” and “exceptional” (Bergson 1974, 202) but, in Time and Free Will, freedom is also said to be “rare” and “exceptional” (Bergson 2001, 20; 167; see also Bergson 1944, 219). These adjectives do not mean “exclusive” or “private” because for Bergson we can all meet God, just as we can all perform a free act. Doing so is nothing but a daily, though outstanding, mystical act.
11In Life and Consciousness, furthermore, Bergson compares the free act with the moral one (Bergson 1975, 31-33). Like the moral act, the free act originates from the élan and “can intensify the action of other human beings” (Bergson 1975, 32) to the extent that “there is a mystic dormant, merely waiting for an occasion to awake” (Bergson 1974, 90) within each of us. Nishida, similarly, acknowledges that “an infinite power is hidden even in our small chests that are restricted by time and space; the infinite unifying power of reality is latent in us” (Nishida 1990, 81), and for those souls who are predisposed, “a mere hint, the slightest token, is enough” (Bergson 1974, 215) to wake up. A mystic, for Bergson, is this human-hint, this human-sign or affordance: by seizing the chance that he or she embodies, we can feel our own deep life and find the strength to express it outside shaping the “exterior” with the energy of the “interior”. The essence of complete mysticism lies in diffusion in the sense that every mystic is a “one” that is immediately a “many,” an “original” human being which, merely existing, calls for an infinite and spontaneous reduplication.
12In the Two Sources, mystics are the “supplement of soul” (Bergson 1974, 299) that stimulates intuition as supplementary attention: an increase that generates further increases (Bergson 1974, 216). Intuition is the “effort to transcend the human condition” (Bergson 1912, 77), and the mystical experience is an experience of human limits within the limits of human experience; thus, it is also an experience within everyone’s reach (Bergson 1972, 1201). Mystical experience is an experience of human limits because we perceive our deep self, just like God, only at the limit of our consciousness, in the so-called “mystical dark night of the soul.” Here, as Nishida points out, “we are of necessity blind” (Nishida 1990, 29), because the pure experience is “the alpha and omega of our spirit and the true face of reality” (Nishida 1990, 164). Yet, if the limits of the mystical experience are nonetheless the limits of human experience, it is because mystics are human beings, albeit extraordinary ones. Thanks to their impulse, we can all experience our limits within the limits of our experience because Bergson’s complete mysticism is a generalized mysticism very similar to Nishida’s energetism.
- 10 For Nishida the Good is the realization of our ideals and “energetism” is “the ethical theory that (...)
13Keeping in mind that for Nishida we can all develop our deep self, allows us to anticipate and rebuke the objection to our thesis according to which energetism is not a mysticism because, if anything, it is a kind of ethics, namely a practice whose aim is the happiness of the individual. Indeed, for Nishida, the Good of energetism is “the realization of our internal demands, of our ideals, the development or completion of the will” (Nishida 1990, 123; 129-140).10 Accordingly, one might say that we should not mistake energetism for a religious phenomenon. However, energetism is a religious ethics too. Its aim is the development of the individual self, but the latter is a part of the divine one (for Nishida religion concerns the relationship between human beings and God — Nishida 1990, 153). Our deep self, in fact, is not the Ego, but a degree of God: “the expression of the unifying power of reality; an unchanging eternal power” (Nishida 1990, 76-77). As a result, being the demand that regards the self, the demand that concerns its life, the religious demand is “the demand in which the self, while perceiving its relativity and finitude, yearns to attain eternal, true life by uniting with an absolutely infinite power” (Nishida 1990, 149).
- 11 In the third chapter of the Two Sources, Bergson retraces the evolution of mysticism from its incom (...)
14The religious demand is the demand for a great life, and, for Nishida, we cannot remove this demand from our soul even if we want to: our demands are rational and their source, which is God, is infinite. Like complete mysticism, Nishida’s energetism instead invites us to part with our shallow demands, and to reform our life by making room for God. In the Inquiry, Nishida sums up the essence of this “reformation of life” (Nishida 1990, 149) with the words of St. Paul, the Christian par excellence: “I do not live, Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2: 20, quoted in Nishida 1990, 135). This Christian reference is not surprising. The reformation which is at stake in Nishida’s energetism is the same as the one achieved by the Christian mystics according to Bergson.11 Nevertheless, for Bergson Christian mystics did not only achieve this reform. They also inspired it in other people by example (the imitatio Christi is not the duplication of Christ’s image but the imitation of Christ’s acts).
- 12 This experience has both an anthropological and a metaphysical value because the metaphysics of The (...)
15In The Perception of Change Bergson invokes Paulist words while acknowledging that, in the absolute, i.e., duration as eternity of life, “vivimus et movemur et sumus” (Bergson 2009, 176; Bergson 1994, 218). It follows that, if mystics are moral heroes (Bergson 1974, 42; 45), moral heroes are religious souls. In 1932, Bergson is as interested in this heroism, as he is in mystical actions. Before considering mysticism as a religious phenomenon, in the Two Sources he focuses on mysticism’s transformative power. Every mystic, in his opinion, is an accelerator of humanity’s progress and, in 1932, “progress” means “divinization.” Mystics overcome the limits assigned by nature to humanity sub specie closed societies and static religions. The experience they live is a contact with the élan12 (Bergson 1974, 209) and, to the extent that the élan “is of God, if it is not God himself” (Bergson 1974, 209; see also Nishida 1990, 79ff), the trans-secular agreement of mystics is the best proof of God’s existence (Bergson 1974, 236). Mysticism offers this proof to philosophy and, as Bergson points out, philosophy must take it into account. Nishida agrees: only immediate and internal experience proves the existence of God (Nishida 1990, 80 ff.) because God is “not a mere philosophical argument but an actual fact of spiritual experience” (Nishida 1990, 166).
- 13 Kokoro is the Japanese term for “mind”, although it can also mean “heart.”
16For both Nishida and Bergson, contact with God is an intuition, and intuition is an affective act. Bergson describes it as a coincidence with “the intuited” (Bergson 2009, 27; Bergson 2009, 137) generating a pervasive emotion; Nishida as the full union of heart and mind [kokoro].13 Yet, if both kinds of intuition prove the existence of God — “the infinitely free activity of the human heart proves God directly” (Nishida 1990, 81) and “mysticism means absolutely nothing to the human beings who have no experience of it, however slight” (Bergson 1974, 226) — it is because intuition does not come from the subject. Intuition, instead, is the way in which the activity of the “object” affirms itself in the activity of the “subject.” “Affection” could be the name of this affirmation, i.e., the name of the encounter with God, because mystics feel God (Bergson 1972, 731), are affected by him. They are one with God, “identified with God” (Bergson 1972, 789) because they don’t know this overflowing absolute, nor can properly say anything about it. Mystics “have felt truth flowing into their soul from them fountainhead like an active force. They can no more help spreading it abroad than the sun can help diffusing its light. Only, it is not by mere words that they will spread it” (Bergson 1974, 22).
- 14 For Nishida we are determined by the world, and yet we can determine it. We can move from the creat (...)
17In other words, the mystical state is theopathic: the “object” imposes itself in the “subject” with an intimate impression that cannot be grasped by intelligence but only through the senses. God’s impression is ungraspable by intelligence because it nullifies every intellectual operation. In the pure state of experience discursive reflection is not active: intelligence stops the élan (Nishida 1990, 13; Bergson 1912, 65 ff.), whereas intuition prolongs it (Bergson 1972, 789). Nonetheless, God’s impression can be attained through all senses because it abolishes the subject-object distinction and this abolition, i.e., the death of the ego as something separate, private, self-subsisting, generates an emotion that “absorbs and kindles the whole soul” (Bergson 1974, 46). Bergson and Nishida agree on the identity of God’s emotion: it is joy the affect that accompanies life’s growth, ratifying its successes (Bergson 1975, 29 ff.). Through joy the greatness of divine creation affirms itself into our limited human mind because the “creation of self by self” (Jouhaud 1992; Sarafidis 2013), to which Bergson so often refers as an ideal of a full and free life, is a communication guided directly by the creative impulse,14 and, if every emotion is creative communication (“creation signifies, above all, emotion” — Bergson 1974, 37), joy is creative communication to the highest degree.
- 15 On the relationship between Bergson and Spinoza see e.g., Astesiano (2016).
18Intuition is an encounter between two energies rather than between two entities and joy is as “boundless” as the impulse of which it is the feeling (Bergson 1974, 219). As Spinoza shows in his Ethics,15 a book which inspired both Bergson and Nishida, joy is the emotion of an intensified existence, the affect that marks our freedom either certifying the increase of our acting power or of a higher state of unification [tôitsu in Japanese]. Therefore, joy immediately proves that God is, lives and act in us so far as joy is not the mere feeling of a state. Joy is the feeling of a passage or motion (Spinoza, Ethics, III, XI, sch. in Spinoza 1910, 93) from a “closed” to an “open” condition, i.e., “the emotion peculiar to a soul opening out, breaking with nature, which enclosed it both within itself and within the city” (Bergson 1974, 44). Indeed, although “the human mind cannot arrive at absolute pleasure, it can maintain infinite happiness when, by effort, it becomes objective and unites with nature” (Nishida 1990, 78).
- 16 “The soul of the great mystic does not stop at ecstasy, as at the end of a journey. The ecstasy is (...)
19As an experience of freedom, the mystical experience is an “integral experience” (Bergson 1912, 92) that encompasses the whole soul allowing us to overcome the human condition (Bergson 1912, 77). For Bergson, mystics are more than human, more than people so far as they act. Action, at least of a certain kind, is not properly human according to Bergson. The Ego cannot master it because it is simply subverted by it. Mystical action transforms the Ego, and the hero too, by renewing them. Yet, for this action to take place, contemplation is not enough. Ecstasy alone is dull.16 Bergson points out that:
[Even when the soul] becomes, in thought and feeling, absorbed in God, something of it remains outside; that something is the will, whence the soul's action, if it acted, would quite naturally proceed. Its life, then, is not yet divine. The soul is aware of this, hence its vague disquietude, hence the agitation in repose which is the striking feature of what we call complete mysticism: it means that the impetus has acquired the momentum to go further, that ecstasy affects indeed the ability to see and to feel, but that there is, besides, the will, which itself has to find its way back to God. When this agitation has grown to the extent of displacing everything else, the ecstasy has died out, the soul finds itself alone again, and sometimes desolate. Accustomed for a time to a dazzling light, it is now left blindly groping in the gloom. It does not realize the profound metamorphosis which is going on obscurely within it (Bergson 1974, 219-220).
- 17 For Nishida the perfect action (entelecheia) is “the development and completion — the self-realizat (...)
20For Bergson, ecstasy is mere contemplation, and the human will merges with the divine one only in action. Action gives time, efficacy, and concreteness to the abstract instant of ecstasy by making ecstasy last. Without time, contemplation is sterile. Its egoistic and verbal account can generate doubts or, even worse, remain unbelievable. Intuition, in contrast, is not a conjecture (Nishida 1990, 77). Intuition is an act, and because of this, it is certain. Like mystics, Bergson is wary of spoken words but not of completed works. However, Nishida also gives great importance to the achievement in his ethics. The perfect activity is the Aristotelian entelechia, “the self-realization” (Nishida 1990, 125):17 what Bergson, in Time and Free Will, compares to the falling of an overripe fruit (Bergson 2001, 176).
21The mystics Bergson later became passionate about are similar to these overripe fruits. They resemble the free acts which he describes in the Essai. As human beings, mystics are the acts that express the God-élan falling from the tree of the deep self of the universe (Nishida’s ri is a root). They are practically guided by God’s will, “as if God himself acts in them” (Bergson 1972, 1155), and their actions succeed in intensifying the original bond among human beings, which is fraternity rather than solidarity, because mystics are made for the world and not for themselves. Bergson claims that every mystic is a “new species, composed of one single individual” (Bergson 1974, 86; see also Nishida 1990, 45), who loves humanity while loving, and being loved, by the love from which humanity arises (Bergson 1974, 201). “God is love, and the object of love: herein lies the whole contribution of mysticism” (Bergson 1974, 240). Nishida agrees: all humans share a common soul and the good act spreads love, because love is the feeling of unity between humans, between humans and their works, and between humans and nature.
22Meaning God, love is the common origin of heaven and earth (Nishida 1990, 135), the source of life. Even if its force can sometimes weaken, for both Nishida and Bergson we can always feel it because “we live only in God” (Nishida 1990, 154) and God “loves people not to give worldly happiness but to return them to God” (Nishida 1990, 154). Being love, God is both a person and a creative power. Bergson’s complete mysticism is in fact a kind of “philosophical Christology” (Goisis 2013, 301) for the same reason as energetism is a kind of cosmic personalism. They both are “integral humanisms” (Montiani 1957) not in spite of also being panpsychisms (Nishida 1990, 75-76), but because they are. The humanity transfigured by mystics’ action is a common humanity to the extent that mysticism, as Michel De Certeau has pointed out, “has as its place an elsewhere and as its sign an anti-society representing the basis of human origin” (De Certeau 2010, 50, our eng. transl.).
23Transfiguration is a warming of this common and living origin. It is a warming because what is closed and static results from the cooling of a “fierce glow” (Bergson 1974, 226-227). Mystics heat up this fire and unleash it into society like flowing lava. They restore religion’s vital heat because they feel that the absolute can only be experienced through the creation of an additional place, namely through a deviation from what we already know about it. For Bergson, mystics brighten a new path by inaugurating an itinerary. They can do this because the knowledge we possess of God is “incomplete, no doubt, but not external or relative. It is reality itself in the profoundest meaning of the word” (Bergson 1944, 218). God is something we both receive and lack: a surplus for which to make less and create a vacuum. The acts of mystics provide this space. Thanks to them “the solid materials supplied by intelligence first melt and mix, then solidify again into fresh ideas now shaped by the creative mind itself” (Bergson 1974, 38).
24This process, notably, calls to mind the structure of scientific revolutions advocated by Thomas Kuhn (1970) because mystics break paradigms. They “go over the letter of the dogma, in order to retrace it in characters of flame” (Bergson 1974, 226), and Bergson is bewitched by their ability to embody the creative force of the élan in their acts. Mystics move the cosmic impulse forward and let it intervene directly, that is “no longer through the medium of the mechanisms, it had set up, and at which it had provisionally halted” (Bergson 1974, 47). In a way, therefore, they refine the vital impulse into spiritual energy and, by placing themselves at the point at “which the spiritual current, in its passage through matter, probably desired to reach but could not” (Bergson 1974, 202), they continue it. A trace of this “point” is still present as an aspiration and mystics expand it thus also prolonging the action of God.
- 18 The self is the activity of the world’s self-expression either because we are lived through the lat (...)
25Mystics scatter God’s flame, turning “that created thing which is a species into the creative effort and that which is, by definition, a stop into movement” (Bergson 1974, 223). Yet, they succeed because they are mere adjutores Dei (Bergson 1974, 221): tools in the hands of the God-élan (Bergson 1972, 1235), if not these very hands. Nishida agrees again: for a good act to be accomplished, we have to become an object. “Thousands of years after their death, Sakyamuni and Christ still have the power to move people only because their spirit was truly objective” (Nishida 1990, 77; Bergson 1974, 75). Pure subjectivity can perform nothing whatsoever: “indisputable truth is gained by discarding our subjective self and becoming objective” (Nishida 1990, 77).18
- 19 Notably, Nishida compares intuition to “the artist’s exquisite brush” (Nishida 1990, 33).
26In 1932, Bergson became bewitched by the charisma of mystics and, more generally, by the charisma of prophets and great interpreters. These human beings succeed in affecting19 people around them, showing that we manage to get “a hold over the will” (Bergson 1974, 88) neither through logic nor obligation. In the speeches of mystics there is instead a call, something that “echoes” (Bergson 1974, 203-204). This “something” produces “a spiritual union, a more or less complete identification” (Bergson 1974, 88) solving the subjective into the objective, great and creative emotion from which we all come. Mystics dive into this emotion and interpret it for us, thereby striving to represent what is not representable. Their artisanal mastery is “the knack of an art” (Nishida 1990, 33) and their force is proportional to the intensity of the “super-intellectual emotion” (Bergson 1974, 36) they release.
27In The Two Sources Bergson suggests that mystics attract people like magnets (Bergson 1974, 204). Their mere presence stirs others to action because mysticism, in itself, is “a return to movement, and emanates from an infectious emotion” (Bergson 1974, 45). Mystics “have no need to exhort” (Bergson 1974, 26; see also Bergson 1972, 1543): their mere existence suffices and they have “only to show themselves” (Bergson 1974, 45) because they fully exist and complete existence “is mobility in individuality” (Bergson 1974, 300). Although mystics are unique, they have followers and increase in number, as we have seen. Their heroic furor infects people around them and, even if Bergson does not quote Giordano Bruno’s Heroic Frenzies (Bruno 2013), mystics are furious in a very Brunian sense. Brunian furor, like the mystical flame, spreads like a “conflagration” (Bergson 1974, 52) and Bergson, in The Two Sources, resorts many times to a fiery vocabulary (e.g., lava, fire, flame, fusion, sparks, ash, eruption) to describe the effect of mystical actions.
- 20 From this point of view, it would be interesting to compare Bergson’s considerations about mystics’ (...)
28Mystics are model-less examples that become models for other people.20 However, they become so just because they are somehow modelled. Mystics, that is, inspire because they are inspired. They are like musicians who make people dance (Bergson 1974, 32). But mystics make people dance only as long as they are dancing themselves. The energy they spread into society is the same they receive, and this energy is supplied at the very moment it is requested (Bergson 1974, 221), even if “to request,” here, does not mean “to decide.” Mystics receive energy because energy wants them and they say “yes” to the energy’s “willing will” (Mossé-Bastide 1955, 327, my translation). Mystics are the first affected: they differ from other people only in so far as they “open their souls to the oncoming wave” (Bergson 1974, 90) which flows within everyone.
29Through mystics’ personality, divine energy reaches other human beings like a “current that passes from their soul to God and flows back again from God to mankind” (Bergson 1974, 45). Mystics are conductors: agents of propaganda and of propagation at once. The message they receive is a truth to be made (Bergson 1975, 32), a call for action that compels us like “an inclination which we should not want to resist” (Bergson 1974, 39). God, for Bergson, is this irresistible inclination. Yet, the Good of energetism also attracts this way. For Nishida the Good is rational, but reason is force, force is personality, and personality is joy (Nishida 1990, 122-123).
30As we are possessed by the Good, the tendency of our will is spontaneously dominated by a law that forces the will with the imperative authority of an incomparable power. This law, Nishida says, has the greatest influence, though its “imperative authority” is only one side of the Good. The other one is its “natural enjoyment,” which is a “more necessary quality” (Nishida 1990, 124). Bergson agrees: mystics neither command nor obey, because they exist beyond the two senses in which power is said (Bergson 2009, 139). They act only insofar as they are self-confident and self-assured. And they are so because they feel that something in themselves overcomes them and the demand for the expansion of this “something” is a surge of love (love, for Nishida, is always love of someone — Nishida 1990, 175-176). This security, according to Bergson, allows mystics to see no obstacles. They see things simply, “and this simplicity, which is equally striking in the words it uses and the conduct it follows, guides it through complications which it apparently does not even perceive” (Bergson 1974, 221).
31Mystics enjoy an acquired innocence that does not generate knowledge because no one can convert into notions the encounter with God. Nonetheless, given that God is unconscious too, at least if consciousness is discursive knowledge, nobody can even anticipate the emergence of God (Nishida 1990, 130-131). We can only be ready to see God “from behind” (De Certeau 1970, 101) or, as the mystic Boehme has argued, with “a reversed eye” (quoted in Nishida 1990, 81). When this happens, we feel active and acted at the same time because mystics drag being dragged, blindly dragged, like the pianist’s hand. Bergson points out that they are active towards other people since they are “patients in respect to God” (Bergson 1974, 221). And Nishida agrees: we dominate only what we follow (Nishida 1990, 77).
- 21 See Nishida 1990, 26; 44; 90. “Knowing equals acting” [chi soku gyō] echoes a concept dear to the N (...)
32For both Nishida and Bergson intuition is the consciousness of an act. But the consciousness of an act can only act, just as the consciousness of a breath can only breathe and the consciousness of a light can only enlighten. An act is not a fact, and it is the reasoning on the unpredictability of the act that, in the third chapter of Time and Free Will, allows Bergson to affirm that the only way we have to predict someone’s behavior is to behave like that someone (to imitate Christ, as we saw above, is to act like he did). For early Bergson, if we want to predict someone’s behavior we have to be, i.e., to act, like that someone because to be is to act (Bergson 2001, 192). Nishida translates: to be soku to power, to think soku to act.21
33To know something, when knowledge is intuition, is to become it (Nishida 1990, 77; Bergson 2009, 27). Therefore, the completion of contemplation by action is not an option: to see the Good means to accomplish it (Bergson 1959, 273-274; Bergson 1972, 88; Nishida 1990, 23-24; 50; 62-63). If we do not accomplish it, as the mystic Socrates had already argued, it is simply because we did not grasp it. The good act, like the mystical act, immediately ratifies the encounter with God because God, for both Nishida and Bergson, is like a piece of music listening to which we can only dance (Nishida 1990, 22). The élan is pure creation and, to coincide with a creative impulse, is to create.
- 22 In Nishida’s Last Writings, the self is still seen as the activity of consciousness, but the focus (...)
34Mystics revive the élan and, thanks to the energy they spread into society, we can easily free ourselves by creating ourselves. Creation, for Bergson, “is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely” (Bergson 1944, 271). Moreover, as we create, we understand each other directly. When we attend to what is beyond distinctions, we are, and live, without distinctions, connected with the whole world (Nishida 1990, 66).22 As soon as the subject and the object are mutually forgotten (Nishida 1990, 32; 48), only an “independent, self-sufficient, pure activity” (Nishida 1990, 47) remains. To follow the latter, to obey the latter, is to be free, i.e., active from a passion.
35For Nishida we feel our self “to be creative, free and infinite active” (Nishida 1990, 77) proportionally to the more we listen at the intimate demand from which our personality arises. A good act, according to him, succeeds in expressing our inner demands only after having received them and we receive them, we become aware of our deep demands, only in the non-dualistic state of experience. The true self is the pure experience, and the pure experience presents itself, in the moment of direct experience, when we are enraptured by our demand calling us and slowly spreading like “exquisite music” (Nishida 1990, 48). As we listen to it, as we experience the universe as one melodious sound, we “forget ourselves and everything around us” (Nishida 1990, 48) because our true self is made of the same matter as the universe and, when we feel it, we agree with the Good of the universe and of mankind by merging with God’s will.
36The Good which is at stake in Nishida’s energetism is the realization of the personality, but within our personality begins the activity of the unifying force of the universe. This force is the same for everything in nature and so, to realize our personality, means to become one with this constantly active Energy. For Nishida the relationship between the world and God is the same as the relationship between the phenomena of consciousness and their unification (Nishida 1990, 39; 54). Yet, Bergson too claims that the essence of life is psychic: “the Absolute is revealed very near us and, in a certain measure, in us. It is of psychological and not of mathematical nor logical essence” (Bergson 1944, 324). The true self, for both, is the pure experience and the pure experience is the “sole reality” (Nishida 1990, 42-46). Consequently, whoever expresses his or herself immediately sympathizes (Nishida uses Bergson’s term — Nishida 1990, 82; 113; 117-118; 139; 174) with other people. The goal of the free or good act is not internal to consciousness. It arises from the inner necessity of the self but the self, “as the unifier of spirit, is the fundamental unifying activity of reality” (Nishida 1990, 76) and not a thing we possess.
- 23 The term translated as “sincerity” [shisei] echoes an idea dear to Mencius and Confucian thought: t (...)
37For Nishida by realizing ourselves we become indispensable in the evolution of the universe. The good act is a private action whose effect is public. Seen from inside, its goal coincides with the personality, while seen from outside, with the unification of all beings. The good act stems from the development of the self and culminates “in the large-scale unified development of all humankind” (Nishida 1990, 142). As a result, a society can really progress only if its members fully act developing their talents. Bergson agrees: individualism does not mean egoism. Individualism is its “polar opposite” (Nishida 1990, 137). The peculiarities of the individuals are mere variations of an infinite consciousness, just “waves on the surface of a great intuition” (Nishida 1990, 17; see also Bergson 1974, 198), for if we do not create our deep or “sincere”23 demands (Nishida 1990, 133-134; 140), i.e., the spontaneous demands for a greater unification, they simply come from God. God is the living root of the universe and so, in satisfying our demands, we satisfy those of the universe. As we express the self externally, the love of mankind is generated because Atman soku Brahman, psychology soku cosmology.
38In Nishida’s energetism, it is true, the Good is an ideal, a demand for consciousness which is greater and more powerful than others (Nishida 1990, 122-142). But, to the extent that our consciousness is always active — “it begins with an impulse and ends with the will” (Nishida 1990, 48) — and the reality of the immediate experience is the activity of the will (Nishida 1990, 28-29; 77; 109-110; 162), the “ideal” Good is nothing but the complete fulfilment of the will. The will, according to Nishida, is the deepest unifying activity in consciousness, the very action of the self: “the deepest power unifying this whole is our so-called self, and the will is that which most completely expresses this power” (Nishida 1990, 125). The will is the fundamental act of self-unification and the immediate manifestation of the unifying force in which reality is grounded. All phenomena of consciousness develop and complete this unity because this unity is the deepest trans or supra-individual act of consciousness (Nishida 1990, 83; 159-160). Nishida is very clear about this: “our wills are effective to the degree that they become objective” (Nishida 1990, 77) because the ideal we feel as an inner demand is not properly “ours”. The ideal is the demand for the will’s highest expression, but the will is not ours.
39Energetism’s will calls to mind Nietzsche’s will to power. Both express the determination of “want what we can” or of “want what we are” rather than the caprice of “do what we want” and “be what we desire.” What we can, as well as what we are, is not something we decide. Curiously, during his trip to the USA, Bergson found traces of this amor fati in the American spirit, thereby connecting their idealism with mysticism. In his opinion, the American patriotism of the time reveals the feeling of a mission to be accomplished which is the same as Socrates’: to achieve democracy. Hence, either back from his trip in 1913 or during his speech to the France-Amérique committee on his return from a mission to the United States after they entered the war in 1917, Bergson praised American activism (see Zanfi 2008, 168 ff.) evoking “an idealism that verges on mysticism, and which is always strongly impregnated with feeling” (Bergson 1972, 994, my translation).
40By “idealism,” Bergson means “the habit of considering life not as if it were simply made to be lived, but as if its object and raison d'être were the realization of something which does not yet exist and which, once realized, will give life a richer content and a new meaning” (Bergson 1972, 994, my translation). Like the mystic Socrates, who was so passionately invoked in The Two Sources, the Americans to which Bergson referred some years earlier, oriented their entire existence toward the democratic ideal. The whole of existence is here at stake because, in order to consent to the will of the Socratic daimon and respond to the call of a power within us though not ours, we must deprive ourselves of everything that would prevent this power, i.e., the God/Good-function or the democracy-function (Nishida's enérgheia), from exercising itself through us. We have to become its organ by eliminating everything that is not sufficiently pure, resistant, and ductile for God to use it (Bergson 1974, 46). In short: we have to practice the mystical detachment from life, for if nature attaches us to life with instinct, life, selfish and close life, is not everything.
41In mysticism, as in democracy, it is about going further, and when we go further, the comforts we enjoyed at home — Ego first — turn into a cumbersome baggage and become inconveniences. To go further is “to kill our false self and, after dying once to worldly desire, gain new life” (Nishida 1990, 145). For Nishida, “as long as one has even the slightest belief in the finite self, one has yet to acquire a true religious spirit” (Nishida 1990, 150), because only “those without a self, those who have extinguished the self, are the greatest” (Nishida, 77). Nishida shares with Bergson the idea that navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse. Yet, we navigate, we experience the élan of the universe in our consciousness, only after having thrown our Ego away. It is difficult to do. However, a soul that completes intuition by action, “a soul strong enough, noble enough to make this effort […] would be content to feel itself pervaded, though retaining its own personality, by a being immeasurably mightier than itself, just as an iron is pervaded by the fire which makes it glow” (Bergson 1974, 201).
42This is why not all of us imitate mystics, even if we all feel we must do it. Not all of us imitate mystics because most of us are afraid of being burnt. We all feel we must do it because, even if we lose much when we are close to the sacred fire, we all intuit, in our hearts, that we lose so much “to gain all” (Bergson 1974, 220).