... what Wyndham Lewis calls ‘the Time-mind’ or ‘the Time-view’. The adherents of this mind are very numerous and apparently diverse, among them Einstein, Darwin, Spengler, William James, as well as writers such as Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Proust, artistic schools such as naturalism and futurism... The principal villain however is Bergson... The charismatic metaphysics of Bergson, as Lewis must have remembered from his lectures, described human identity, at its most primal and non-intellectual, as the creature of a numinous time deeper than the mere succession of the clock... Lewis... understood Bergson to be advocating a rampant subjectivism, dissolving into pure consciousness objects that one might have otherwise naively assumed to exist independently of one’s experience of them. Repelled by Bergsonian flux, Lewis proposes as an alternative ‘a philosophy of the eye’, a celebration of ‘the concrete and radiant reality of the optic sense’... The appeal to ‘deadness’ is a rebuke to Bergson’s exalted concept of a universal evolutionary vitality which ‘makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave flowing over matter’. Bergson ended Creative Evolution (1907) by encouraging the philosopher of the future to see ‘the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming’. Lewis was not remotely attracted by the idea of melting into anything – ‘we should retain our objective hardness, and not be constantly melting and hotly overflowing’ – so he had a double complaint to make: not only does Bergsonian thought strip you of ‘the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you commonly apprehend’ but it also takes away ‘the clearness of outline of your own individuality which apprehends them’. Bergson often writes with heady rapture about things interpenetrating and merging, and Time and Western Man is largely a statement of Lewis’s opposite preference, ‘them standing apart – the wind blowing between them, and the air circulating freely in and out of them’.
Lewis repeatedly champions here ‘the beautiful objective, material world of common sense’ over ‘the “organic” world of chronological mentalism’ and remarks at one point that ‘my case is an overwhelmingly good one.’ But whether his argument amounts to much is another matter. This is the sort of thing he says, a comparison of our experience of a statue, existing in space, and a piece of music, existing in time, the upshot of which is meant to be that we have a strong ‘space’ sense which the prevailing Time-mind ignores or denies: ‘You move round the statue, but it is always there in its entirety before you, whereas the piece of music moves through you, as it were. The difference in the two arts is evident at once, and the different faculties that come into play in the one and the other.’
- Seamus Perry in the LRB
