Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1900)
I wish to record here the comments from Bergson’s Laughter (1900) on art and artists, which I found more thought-provoking than the analysis that makes up the bulk of this book. He notes that our selves and the natural world (or even our consciousness) are separated by a veil, which is “dense and opaque for the common herd” and yet ”thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet.”
Arguing that sense perceptions are, in a sense, economical: only features or aspects of things are recorded which are useful to us.
We had to live, and life demands that we grasp things in their relations to our own needs… Life implies the acceptance only of the utilitarian side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions: all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred… [W]hat I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions… Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them. And it is this classification I perceive, far more clearly than the colour and the shape of things.
The individuality of things or of beings escapes us, unless it is materially to our advantage to perceive it. Even when we do take note of it—as when we distinguish one man from another—it is not the individuality itself that the eye grasps, i.e., an entirely original harmony of forms and colours, but only one or two features that will make practical recognition easier.
Summarising:
In short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them. This tendency, the result of need, has become even more pronounced under the influence of speech; for words—with the exception of proper nouns—all denote genera. The word, which only takes note of the most ordinary function and commonplace aspect of the thing, intervenes between it and ourselves, and would conceal its form from our eyes, were that form not already masked beneath the necessities that brought the word into existence.
This, Bergson says, is true not only of the external world, but of our inner selves as well:
We catch only the impersonal aspect of our feelings, that aspect which speech has set down once for all because it is almost the same, in the same conditions, for all men. Thus, even in our own individual, individuality escapes our ken. We move amidst generalities and symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted against other forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our own good, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway between things and ourselves, externally to things, externally also to ourselves.
An artist is someone for whom this tendency towards parsimony of sense perceptions is blunted:
From time to time, however, in a fit of absentmindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached from life. Not with that intentional, logical, systematical detachment—the result of reflection and philosophy—but rather with natural detachment, one innate in the structure of sense or consciousness, which at once reveals itself by a virginal manner, so to speak, of seeing, hearing or thinking.
Almost always, he notes, this sensitivity to the true nature of things is partial:
Even for such of us as she has made artists, it is by accident, and on one side only, that she has lifted the veil. In one direction only has she forgotten to rivet the perception to the need. And since each direction corresponds to what we call a sense—through one of his senses, and through that sense alone, is the artist usually wedded to art.
The function of art, therefore is
… to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.