MYSTICISM AND THE OPEN SOCIETYwhose shape is known in advance. It is of little importance whether the development of
evolution is understood in terms of an impulse from the past or an attraction to the
future; in both cases, the succession of species and of forms of life is nothing but a surface
phenomenon, and time is deprived of its power of creation.
Any attempt to think the becoming of human societies in the light of a philosophy
of history shares, for Bergson, the same teleological delusion of finalism. Human becom-
ing cannot be an exception to evolution: no law of history traces the movement of human
societies in advance; humans live in duration, as does everything else. From this point of
view, the notion of progress is nothing but one of the forms of the retrospective illusion
of the possible.
But a Kantian position that would locate the origin of morality in reason is equally
untenable for Bergson, not only because the regulative ideas of reason introduce a form
of teleology but also because, for Bergson, reason itself is a product of the evolution of
life. Reason belongs to evolution’s becoming, a becoming that produces new ideas and
new concepts at the same time as it produces new forms of life.^14 It is precisely from the
perspective of the becoming of forms of life that Bergson will attempt to think the sources
of morality, religion, and the political, and of their reciprocal articulation.
The Two Sourcesopens with the question of moral obligation. It is a fact that we all
obey—most of the time, in any case. But why? Children obey their parents and their
teachers, but whom exactly do they obey? Bergson remarks that this obedience is not so
much granted a singular person as it is granted the place this person occupies: children
obey parents insofar as they are parents, teachers insofar as they are teachers, because
parents and teachers occupy a well-determined place in society. Their authority derives
first and foremost from a social position. Behind moral obligation, society can be dis-
cerned. As one would have expected, the comparison between society and an organism
appears right away (even if, as we shall see, Bergson will change the meaning and value
of this traditional comparison). In organisms, the different parts are subordinate to one
another according to biological necessity. Human societies, too, are in need of such ‘‘bio-
logical links,’’ but since they are made up of individuals who are, at least in part, free,
cohesion comes from elsewhere. In human societies, the link is established by the force
ofhabit. We take up habits, sometimes of giving orders, more often of obeying, that make
us stay in the place that society assigns us. In other words, habit is the equivalent in
human societies to what instinct is in animal societies. It is not by an antlike instinct that
we play the social roles that are ours, but by habit.
We must not be mistaken, however: Bergson by no means affirms that social and
political forms of organization are biologically determined or determinable. Every habit
is radically contingent. The only thing that is not contingent is thehabit of taking up
habits. This is, furthermore, the difference Bergson establishes between human and non-
human living beings; it is human beings’ largest margin of liberty, it is the non-necessity
of any given social structure. Nonetheless, no human society could constitute itself or
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