Deborah Hauptmann

Dear Yuvacan,

Yes, I am so sorry that I did not respond to your mail. Do I understand correctly that you have, in fact, already come to Holland and returned home again?

I am afraid that since the faculty fire my agenda has been so full I hardly have time to think - much less the freedom to meet with persons, such as yourself, and discuss things as important as your thesis research. Nevertheless, I am very pleased to know that you are undertaking such a difficult challenge as applying Bergsonian philosophy to architecture.

Naturally the issue of durée (duration or durance when following Moore) is at the core of Bergson philosophy. No doubt you are familiar with his letter to Harold Höffding (1917) whereby he identifies the issues you too outlined in your abstract, he writes:

"In my opinion, any summary of my views will deform them in their ensemble and will thus expose them to a multitude of objections if it does not look at what is first and does not always return to what I consider the core of my doctrine: the intuition of duration. The representation of a multiplicity of reciprocal
( karşılıklı)penetration( nüfuz etme), most different from numerical multiplicity – the representation of a heterogeneous, qualitative and creative duration-, that is the point I started from and where I constantly return…."

Perhaps, I should also mention that in attempting to extrapolate his notion of intuition (as method) to design method you are taking on a very large task. In your abstract you write that "after defining duration ... intuition can emerge as a way of comprehending the qualitative degrees in multiplicity..." However, you should understand that intuition (in Bergson) is something that does not merely 'emerge' as you suggest (or perhaps as we would both hope), but something which takes a highly concerted( birlikte yapılmış.)effort of reflection, again from the letter to Höffding, he writes:

‘… for me, practical knowledge is truly knowledge of reality itself, of absolute reality, that place where it truly belongs (where it stays in its own domain). Thus intelligence whose role is to master no organized matter, is able to know this matter absolutely, although incompletely. In the same way, instinct, which is made to use life, know life absolutely and from the inside, although incompletely and hardly consciously. Thus human intuition – that extends, develops and translates in thought what is left from instinct(ic gudu) in man – is able to embrace(kapsamak) life more and more completely. Knowledge, whether intellectual or intuitive, becomes relative( Göreceli) only when the faculty of knowing applies to things it is not made for. Such is the knowledge of life that conceptual intelligence (mechanism) claims to give us; and such was the way we represented matter long ago, with images taken from the world of life (hylozoism).holistic’

Or in Creative Evolution, paraphrasing simply: 'Intuition (is not instinct) if it is anything at all it is reflection'.

In this work we see him dealing with the two doctrines of mechanism and finalism - Bergson will more closely accept certain conditions of the latter – this is not unlike the way in Matter and Memory he put forward idealism and realism (materialism) and also opted to align himself more closely with the latter than the former. Here we see his method, he cannot invent an entirely new philosophy which does not at least touch upon principles which are already known – there is no ‘tabula rasa’ so to speak – but the philosophy of durée and the method of intuition are no less original and unique even if they take partial benefit and recognition from representations already real, as contemporary philosophy (i.e. Deleuze) takes the virtual in its differentiation from that which was, and now real for us as we go on to ‘invent’ with it further…..

Well, I will not now continue with this further. However, if you do decide to put your work forward in English I would be pleased to see later drafts. In the meantime I have attached a copy of a paper I wrote on the concept of multiplicity. It is not the paper I delivered at the Bergson conference which you referred to in your previous mail, but it is a paper that derived from a lecture I gave and so it is written in very straightforward terms and, for you, no doubt very accessible. It Perhaps you will enjoy it.

All my best,

Deborah Hauptmann