Bergson’s Dictum Revised
Edwin L. Young, PhD
April 7, 2005

In the past, I have cited Henri-Louis Bergson, French philosopher, the first to elaborate what came to be called a process philosophy and a Noble Prize winner (1927). I was impressed with his dictum that to understand a thing one must use one’s imagination to try to put oneself inside the thing and identify with everything that is unique about the thing to such an extent that it is almost as though one knows what it is like to be that thing. In another vein, one finds a somewhat similar idea the drama. Method actors (Stanislavsky Method) use this intuitive approach in order to be able to play the part or the role of a character in a play. As they enact the character’s part, they want to get to the point at which they feel they actually ‘are’ the person they are playing. They try to do this so completely that they forget about memorized lines and actions and simply act as though they are being themselves, act spontaneously. Some actors call this transformed state being in the ‘zone’. Today, most Academy Award winners are masters of this technique.

I now want to extend, or add to, this intuitive method to include the following perspective. To understand a thing one must use one’s imagination to see in the mind’s-eye all of the external factors impinging upon the thing. If the thing we are trying to understand is a person, then we must construe the structures within which the person exists. We must try to detect and describe the person’s life circumstances, what their age is and what their body is like; what their abode is like; where they live; where they go during their days, weeks, etc.; what work they do; what adversities they have to contend with; the people they come in contact with and they type and extent of their involvement with these people; the roles they and these others play vis-à-vis each other; what their status aspects are; what their affiliations are; and what the culture is like within which they live. Social workers use a version of this when they write social histories of clients. Also, Kurt Lewin, a German-born American social psychologist known for his field theory of behavior, which holds that human behavior is a function of an individual's psychological environment. He had been on the faculty of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in Germany and after coming to the US and toward the end of his career, he founded and became director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his field theory of behavior, he stated that to fully understand and predict human behavior, the whole psychological field, or "lifespace," within which the person acted had to be viewed; the totality of events in this lifespace determined behavior at any one time. Drawing from these structural ideas and putting them all together, they can be viewed as a psychological still-life picture of the external structures within which this person must act.

These structures, as described in and about themselves, are static. Structures, by themselves, do not do anything. They just ‘are’. However, Lewin attempted to reinforce his theories by using topological systems (map-like representations) to depict graphically psychological forces. Working from this concept, we gain a new perspective. When we add to this static picture the way aspects of the structures interact with each other and influence each other, we are injecting the concept of systems into the otherwise static picture. We can see that systems transform structures so that they now appear dynamic. There are many varieties of systems theory. General systems theory—presented in its fullest and most persuasive form by Bertalanffy in mid twentieth century—is an extension of the tenets of organismic biology. It is an attempt to provide a common methodological approach for all of the sciences, based upon the idea that systems of any kind—physical, biological, psychological, and social—operate in accordance with the same fundamental principles. If one looks at systems as a whole and from a point of view ‘above’, as though from a satellite, each system is seen as a domain or type. Each type of system is separated out from other systems. Each must be studied independent of the others. Yet, the view from above sees a whole, which is integrated and interdependent. Each system is a dynamic process. On the other hand, the view from above differentiates the different systems and therefore, from this perspective, one must see each system as existing within a larger structure. If one studies one system, one must eventually refer to the larger structure encompassing all systems. Ultimately, to account for the behavior of any one system, the interaction with and their interdependent impact upon each other must be invoked. Lewin sense of the systems concept and Bertalanffy’s are quite different from each other in this regard. Lewin regards structures as paramount and dynamic systems operating within and constrained by structures. For Bertalanffy, structures are irrelevant. Systems are primary and types of systems may effectively be studied in isolation from each other. My use of the concept involves shades of both while being broader than Lewin’s and narrower than Bertalanffy’s.