The Idea of the Open: Bergson's Theses on Movement

Bergson put forward the thesis that “the open is the whole,” and in this essay I would like to explore Bergson’s idea of the open, as well as the manner in which Deleuze appropriated and made use of it in his own work.The concept of the open, to be sure, is not unique to Bergson. Heidegger proposed his own concept of the open; there are poems by Rilke and Hölderlin on the open, which Heidegger picked up on and discussed; and Giorgio Agamben has recently written a book on the topic.While I will not discuss these other writers, it is clear that the theme of the open is an important concern in contemporary philosophy. Despite the enormous differences between Heidegger and Bergson, they seem to have been in agreement in linking together three notions:

• 1. the whole, or totality

• 2. the open, or the idea of opening; and

• 3. time and temporality, or what Bergson calls duration.

It is the interrelation that Bergson establishes between these three notions that I would like to examine in what follows.

BERGSON’S METHOD OF INTUITION

Bergson called his methodological approach “intuition”—perhaps an ill-fated terminological choice, since what Bergson means by this term has little to do with its use in everyday language (as in the phrase “woman’s intuition”) or in mathematics. For Bergson, the world is a world of mixtures—what is given to us in experience are always mixtures or complexes of space-time (10 Nov 1981)—and Bergson utilizes the term “intuition” to describe the method through which one can comprehend the mixtures that are given to us in experience.