Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

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INSTINCT, CONSCIOUSNESS, LIFE

Raymond Ruyer, Tano S. Posteraro ((translation and introduction)) & Jon

Roffe ((introduction))

To cite this article: Raymond Ruyer, Tano S. Posteraro ((translation and introduction)) & Jon
Roffe ((introduction)) (2019) INSTINCT, CONSCIOUSNESS, LIFE, Angelaki, 24:5, 124-147, DOI:
10.1080/0969725X.2019.1655283

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 24 number 5 october 2019
The Horny Dog by Alexandru Manea.
A somewhat obscure twentieth-century
French philosopher of science, Ruyer
(1902–87) enjoyed a brief moment of inter-
national renown in 1974, upon the publication
of his exposé of the ideas of an enigmatic but
influential group of gnostic American scientists
(cf. Colonna, Ruyer 13–28). The conceit of the
book, The Gnosis of Princeton: Scientists in
Search of a Religion, was, however, a ploy.
Ruyer invented the scientists as a guise for his
own philosophy, with the hope of reaching a
wider audience. And it worked: the book was
an immediate best-seller. But much like
Bergson, Ruyer was subsequently forgotten –
and quite seriously as well. By the turn of the
century, all of his works were out of print.
“The fact is,” writes Fabrice Colonna, “that
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/19/050124-24 © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1655283
raymond ruyer
tano s. posteraro (translation
and introduction)
jon roffe (introduction)
INSTINCT,
CONSCIOUSNESS, LIFE
ruyer contra bergson
Ruyer has been purely and simply effaced
from the field of theoretical references”
(“Présentation” 1).
Ruyer is just starting to be rediscovered in
both the anglophone and francophone philoso-
phical worlds alike. One of his most important
works, Néo-finalisme, was reissued by Presses
Universitaires de France in 2012. By 2014 it
had made its way onto the French agrégation
exam in philosophy. Special issues dedicated
to Ruyer’s work have appeared in Les Études
philosophiques (2007 and 2013), Revue philoso-
phique de la France et de l’Étranger (2013), Cri-
tique (2014), and Philosophia Scientiae (2017).
In 2016, Néo-finalisme was translated into
English by Alyosha Edlebi and published by
124

University of Minnesota Press. A special issue
of Deleuze Studies was dedicated to Ruyer in
2017. Shortly after came the wide release of Eli-
zabeth Grosz’s The Incorporeal through Colum-
bia University Press, a chapter of which is
dedicated to Ruyer, no doubt introducing him
to an even larger audience. An English trans-
lation of Ruyer’s La Genèse des formes vivantes
by Jon Roffe and Nicholas B. de Weydenthal is
due out through Rowman & Littlefield Inter-
national in October 2019.
introducing raymond ruyer
The isolation of Ruyer’s work from both the
major trends in French thought and with
respect to the English-speaking world finds a
close parallel, if not an explanation, in his bio-
graphy.1 Raymond Ruyer was born on 13
January 1902 in the small municipality of
Plainfaing, close to the German border and at
the foot of the Vosges mountain range. His
father died when he was just two months old,
but despite this, and despite a cold relationship
with his mother, Ruyer recalls a happy child-
hood surrounded by a large Alsatian family.2
The story of his early life and study is that of
an autodidact. He had both Latin and
Homeric Greek by the age of fifteen, and was
a keen reader of work in every branch of the
sciences. After three years at the Ecole
Normale Superière, he garnered his first teach-
ing position in 1924 at a high school in Saint-
Brieuc just south of Paris. Exactly ten years
later, he took up a post at the Université
Nancy 2, less than a two-hour drive from Plain-
faing. From this point on, Ruyer lived his
whole life in the relative rural isolation of the
landscape of his childhood. This idyll, inflected
by the work of teaching and writing, was only
significantly broken up by four years spent in
Offizierslager XVII-A, a German prison camp
for officers in north-eastern Austria. It was
whilst imprisoned that Ruyer’s lifelong com-
mitment to a psychobiological perspective
came to maturity, under the influence of
other notable thinkers including the plant
physiologist Alexis Moyse, the experimental
biologist Etienne Wolff, and François
125
ruyer
Ellenberger, a geologist with whom Ruyer
formed a strong, lifelong friendship.
Ruyer’s long-standing geographical isolation
is mirrored in his distance from the intellectual
trajectories of French thought in the twentieth
century. He had no time for “extremist phenom-
enologists” (Ruyer, “Informations” 218) and
only vitriolic hatred for its closely related philo-
sophical movement: “I [am] appalled, down to
the very core of my being, by existentialism,
and everything that resembled it before the
word became fashionable” (“Raymond Ruyer”
3). His work contains no serious argument
with any of his contemporaries, and only
Bergson of his precursors receives more than
passing attention. Cameos by the famous
members of the canon – Parmenides, Plato,
Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel – are only for the
purpose of advancing Ruyer’s own position.
His interlocutors, then, were not philosophers,
and his texts most often keep company with a
rather unusual pair, the French mathematician
and economist Antoine Cournot, and the
English essayist and fantasist Samuel Butler.
While Ruyer’s position often most closely
resembles that of Leibniz, it is Butler’s 1912
Notebooks that he will advert to when any ques-
tion of his intellectual lineage arises.
Rather than developing or combating the
work of a philosophical forebear, Ruyer’s work
is oriented by an inflexible commitment to
scientific research into the nature of reality.
While almost all of his major works include
extremely critical attacks on the way that scien-
tists (biologists above all, he says in “Bergson et
le Sphex ammophile”) view the meaning of their
work, Ruyer never wavered from the view that
scientific results themselves constituted the
only meaningful body of knowledge. The task
of the philosopher, as a result, is not to place
science in the broader context of a putative total-
ity (as in Hegel), or – as if stooping down – to
explain to scientists the meaning of their
work. “No authentic philosopher has ever com-
posed a simple ‘scientific philosophy’, or a
simple ‘philosophy of science’. They have
wanted to guide or correct this current, but by
working with science and without attempting
to establish a para-scientific knowledge”
 instinct, consciousness, life
(“Raymond Ruyer” 9). The entire tenor of
Ruyer’s work is well encapsulated by Brahms’
famous exclamation Fix oder Nix! (Up to the
mark, or nothing), where the standard was
always set by the most advanced and robust
science of the day.
The essay translated below, “Bergson et le
Sphex ammophile,” appeared in 1959, one
year after the publication of La Genèse des
formes vivantes and the completion of Ruyer’s
systematic philosophy of biology. On the face
of it, Bergson and Ruyer appear to share
much in common. If this fact is difficult to
appreciate, it is probably for two reasons.
First, Ruyer dedicates himself in La Conscience
et le corps, the first book published after his
theses, to refuting Bergson’s theory of percep-
tion and overcoming the resolution proposed
to the mind/body problem on its basis in
Matter and Memory. Second, after La Con-
science, the only engagements with Bergson in
Ruyer’s published works are glancing, and
either mostly recapitulate the earlier criticisms
or serve to distance the two philosophers
further on related issues. “Bergson et le Sphex
ammophile” is unique in this respect, as it
reveals an affinity between Bergson and Ruyer
on the question of life, and situates their dis-
agreement over the theory of perception
within that context. In order to introduce the
article, and to assist in the appreciation of its
place vis-à-vis Ruyer’s main biological works,
we begin here by tracing the broad outlines of
Ruyer’s philosophy of biology before sketching
Ruyer’s early critical engagement with Bergson
and investigating some occluded points of
overlap between the two. We conclude by
setting the stage on which the argument of
“Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” unfolds.
ruyer’s thought in outline
Ruyer’s primary mode of argumentation is the
reductio ad absurdum, and the primary object
of this reductio is the claim that any real being
can be properly understood as an accretion of
discrete parts organized partes extra partes in
accordance with a fixed structure that trans-
cends it. In short, his approach is to press this
position to its limits to show how it both fails
to account for basic phenomena – for instance,
the nature of perception, at stake in his critique
of Bergson – and that it ends up pointing to a
remainder that it cannot explain.
For Ruyer, it is biological phenomena that
provide the most compelling cases for this
approach, and which outline in the starkest
way the nature of this remainder or excess that
will form the true object of his philosophy of
biology, and of his philosophy more broadly.
And here, the central example is embryogenesis.
The development of the embryo is impossible to
explain in terms of an ongoing accretion of parts
relative to a structure because, at every moment
of this development, the being in question is
qualitatively transformed. No matter where we
try to locate the alleged structure of the
embryo – whether by way of some kind of
retconned Platonism or in the differential
chemical gradients in the embryonic field – it
cannot explain this transformation-to-trans-
formation process, one capable of dealing with
a wide range of invasive experimental interven-
tions before being derailed into becoming some-
thing different.
What the mechanist account of embryogen-
esis, and of living beings in general, is incapable
of affirming while implicitly invoking are, for
Ruyer, two interrelated things. On the one
hand, as the embryo demonstrates, the unity
of a living being cannot be characterized by
invoking a fixed structure. There must instead
be, he argues, a kind of implicit, vague, imma-
nent form in play, something akin to a musical
theme and most like a latent memory, and in
relation to which the embryo improvises itself.
This is shown by famous experimental results
in grafting – for instance,
A graft of frog, of triturus cristatus or tae-
niatus, of axolotl, will only ever produce
tissue of frog, triturus, or axolotl; but accord-
ing to the place where it is inserted in the host
(whether this host is frog or triturus), it will
produce ventral skin, or branchia, or a
kidney. (Neofinalism 179)
That the graft tissue continues to develop along
the lines of its host might be explained
126

mechanistically or genetically, but that it can
adopt or “take up” the theme of the host organ-
ism cannot.
And on the other hand, the embryo, like all
living beings, is not – cannot be, according to
the reductio – composed of neutral, mutually
indifferent building blocks, like the atoms of
nineteenth-century physics. An embryo is a
dynamic, integral multiplicity, a unitas multi-
plex. Living beings are beings-in-formation,
immanent, differentiated morphogenetic indi-
vidualities that nevertheless possess a form of
unity of their own. Ruyer will give this unity a
variety of names, but in this context it is the
moniker primary consciousness that is most
apropos. This is fundamentally what conscious-
ness means for Ruyer – a point that will be deci-
sive in his encounter with Bergson. It is not a
reflective awareness of anything (he will call
this secondary consciousness), but the unity of
formation, improvisation and being itself.3
Now, it is true that at the level of their physi-
ology, fully developed animals closely approach
the mechanical state ascribed to them by the
nineteenth-century perspective: they are com-
posed of discrete limbs, themselves capable of
being replaced and extended by manufactured
objects (prostheses and tools), and organized
according to a fixed structure. But the
moment the behaviour of the same living
being is also considered, the same integral,
improvisatory character once again comes to
the fore. To be a frog, an organism does not
just possess a certain physiological profile but
a suite of behavioural tendencies as well,
where the deployment of the latter cannot be
predicted in advance. We see, then – in an iso-
morphy that is decisive for Ruyer – that the
analysis of behaviour and the analysis of biologi-
cal life not only tend towards the same con-
clusions but that they ultimately seem to
address the same phenomenon: the informed
but improvisatory transformations of a living
being in relation to an immanent, evocative
theme.
The correlate of this point is that there always
remains in every living thing, to a greater or
lesser degree, some reservoir of embryonic equi-
potentiality. The hydra – an invertebrate that is
127
ruyer
capable of regenerating almost the entirety of its
body from out of itself at any given moment –
gives us one extreme example of this, but
Ruyer’s more significant example is the cerebral
cortex. The brain is never “anatomically” fixed,
but constitutes a field of ongoing transform-
ation, where new connections can always be
formed provided the organism is alive. Thus,
to recall a memorable passage from Neofinal-
ism: “The brain is an embryo that has not fin-
ished its growth; the embryo is a brain that
begins to organize itself before organizing the
external world” (69). There is a sense, then, in
which the body, for instance the human body,
is nothing other than a tool produced by the
brain in an ongoing fashion:
We walk and see, we manipulate objects
because our cerebral nervous tissue is
directly capable of modifying itself and of
possessing itself absolutely in its thematic
forms and deformations. Our hands of
flesh and bone are only the auxiliary
machines of the “absolute hand” of our cer-
ebral cortex. While the corporeal hand was
being formed on the basis of the primordia
of the embryonic limb bud, it was already
“absolute hand” – surface in possession of
itself and sounding melody – independent
of the cerebral hand that did not yet exist.
(Genèse 239)
ruyer contra bergson
Given the proximity of these ideas to many of
the core tenets of Bergson’s philosophy of
biology, it may appear curious that Ruyer did
not engage more seriously, or perhaps charita-
bly, with Bergson’s Creative Evolution. He
could have found there a set of complementary
insights, if not novel resources, from which to
draw in extending his own thinking further.
But it seems as if this possibility was annulled
from the outset, as Ruyer’s orientation
towards Bergson’s philosophy of biology
appears to have been unfortunately predeter-
mined by his position on Bergson’s philosophy
of perception. Ruyer worked out the latter in
La Conscience et le corps, years before his own
turn to the philosophy of biology.
 instinct, consciousness, life
Bergson famously begins Matter and
Memory by breaking with two accounts of the
relationship between subjective perception and
the object world perceived. On the idealist
account, the universe is composed entirely by
the subject: it is the image of the universe pro-
jected on the basis of subjective, unextended
states, a for-itself without a correlative in-itself
– an image without a corresponding reality.
On the realist account, the universe is that
which grounds knowledge, but it is itself
unknown, a reality without its own image. The
striking – though, as Ruyer notes, not entirely
unique (Conscience 2 n. 3, 10) – alternative he
advances is to consider every thing to be an
image. A thing is thus neither the realist’s
really real correlate to conscious perception
nor the idealist’s “universe [that] exists only in
our thought” (Bergson, Matter 25). There is
nothing in excess of the image in the thing.
Correlatively, the images of material things as
I perceive them are not representations of the
universe at large but the effects of a reduction
of the complexity of that universe down to sets
of distinct, practically navigable bodies: percep-
tion-images which result from the subtractive
work of perception itself. The operator of this
reduction and translation is the living organism.
Bergson defines it as a “center of action” that
introduces a “zone of indetermination” into a
causal order (5, 23). Living bodies can react in
a number of different ways to what stimulates
them. Nervous systems and brains – as well as
their analogues in other life forms – receive
stimulation, transmit it to relevant motor
centres, and present the living being with the
largest possible number of responses to it. Per-
ception perceives these possibilities as images.
The brain does not contain them; it only
selects and transmits them. The difference
between being and being perceived is a differ-
ence in complexity, reduced in view of practical
interest. Consciousness, on this model, is the
domain not of perceptual images but of
memory. It is distinct from the brain but oper-
ative through it via the introduction of mem-
ories into the action-perception circuit.
Ruyer thought that this theory was wrong on
every count. The brain is not distinct from
consciousness; it is not a mere switchboard for
the transmission of images; and its images do
not exist outside of it. We must begin by realiz-
ing, for Ruyer, that what we normally think of
as the brain, “the brain of the physiologist,” is
not a real being but a “reconstruction” (Con-
science 8). True, it is a reconstruction based
on empirical scientific research, but this latter
itself is nothing other than a collation of percep-
tual experience. Whether we adopt an “objec-
tive,” scientific perspective or a “subjective”
perspective characterized by a description of
“what it is like” to have a brain, the brain
remains entirely on the side of the subject. In
other words, it is not that the brain is conscious
or that we can have conscious third-person
experience of the brain – the brain is conscious-
ness. It is for this reason that Ruyer writes that
“The field of consciousness is what is known as
the nervous system. The nervous system rep-
resents the appearance of the real being that is
the field of consciousness in the form of an
object” (26). And, more generally again:
“Neither we nor any other being are really incar-
nated. The duality of the body and the mind is
illusory, because there is no body, because our
organism is not a body” (27). Thus, in an aston-
ishing passage, versions of which appear in
many of his works, Ruyer argues that Bergson
was “right to say that the material brain does
not produce sensation. The material brain as
such, the brain object, does not exist; there is
no question of it producing anything” (10; cf.
Neofinalism 77).
When we turn to the objects of experience,
the same point holds. It is not that there are
objects “out there” – whether the unknown
things-in-themselves of traditional and critical
realism, or Bergson’s object-images – that
affect my brain, affections that are then trans-
lated into sensations. The photons studied by
physicists are not the objective material corre-
lates of subjective, perceived colours. Not only
do the latter only exist in sensation, and there-
fore after being photons “at large,” these
photons themselves only exist as already per-
ceived. What is real is essentially and uniquely
subjective. Lest this seem to merely be a recapi-
tulation of Berkeley with a scientific gloss, we
128

need to simply insist on the fact that beings are
not fundamentally perceived for Ruyer (note the
passivity of Berkeley’s percipi) but perceivers –
primary consciousnesses or “subjectivities”
(Conscience 3).4
So, in effect, Ruyer’s alternative consists in
pushing the Bergsonian account even further,
beyond any parallelism between subject and
object. Where the latter involved substituting
the independent image for the unknowable
object = x in-itself, Ruyer will replace both
subject and object with the reality of perception
in-itself. In this way, he avoids what he thinks of
as the ruinous consequences that attend Berg-
son’s approach: the need to invoke, despite his
best efforts, some kind of “magical” causation
to explain how an image in-itself and the sen-
sation I have of it can be correlated. Extrinsic
parallelism, with its unavoidable invocation of
causality, must be replaced with a strict identity
of perception and consciousness.
ruyer avec bergson
The concept of primary consciousness and its
relation to a trans-spatial domain of forms or
themes serves as one of the main threads
through Ruyer’s engagement with Bergson in
“Sphex ammophile” as well. But before
turning to the content and argument of this
article, we pause to catalogue some of the over-
arching commonalities between Bergson and
Ruyer that Ruyer’s own disposition towards
Bergson seems to have perhaps unduly
obscured.
At the most general level, Ruyer and Bergson
share the distinctive philosophical aspiration to
produce a metaphysics adequate to the reality
described by the most innovative scientific
developments of their times. Thus, for instance,
they both base their respective theories of
matter on the quantum reformulation of its ato-
mistic conception. Ruyer describes “the old
idea” of matter as made up of self-identical
units localized in space, acting and reacting
according to their changeless nature (Neofinal-
ism 148). The new idea is that the atom is a
quantum of action, a stream of expressive
activity. The atom is not to be conceived in
129
ruyer
terms of the “functioning” of a “fully-assembled
mechanism,” but as a dynamic process that is
continually “forming itself” in “a certain pro-
longed rhythm of activities” (147, 149). Refer-
ring to Faraday, Bergson says much the same
thing (Bergson, Matter 31, 266, 292, 304, 313,
330; cf. Creative Evolution 188).
Both thinkers provide system-defining
accounts of how it is that matter comes to
assume the appearance of distinct, spatially
determinate bodies interacting mechanistically.
That is, they both explain the genesis of the
“old idea” of matter from out of its quantum
formulation. For Bergson, it is the practically
oriented dictates of perception that account for
the appearance of Newtonian matter. For
Ruyer, it is the molar statistical aggregation of
molecular processes of individuals-in-formation
that is the culprit. But despite these differences,
both thinkers base their philosophies of science
on their accounts of matter as action and its
appearance as body.
More particularly, they both form the critical
foundations of their respective philosophies of
biology around their shared insight that the
mechanistic scientific determination of living
beings takes for granted a now-outdated vision
of matter, and applies to the organism the
spatial concepts derived from it. Both Bergson
and Ruyer use their critiques of this paradigm
in the life sciences to motivate their positive
philosophies of biology, both of which turn
around an alternative ontological domain. For
both, this is a domain populated not by fully
constituted actualities but by what Ruyer calls
“developmental form” or “mnemic theme”
and what Bergson calls “tendency” or
“memory.”
Both Ruyer and Bergson employ the same
relatively unique term for the modality of this
domain: the virtual. While Bergson postulated
the virtual in order to explain the creativity of
the evolutionary process, Ruyer offers the
mnemic theme in order to explain the genesis
of particular living things from out of equipo-
tential zones. Both understand the actual to be
derivative. Both articulate the distinction in
terms of mereological specification: the actual
is determined through separable parts that
 instinct, consciousness, life
function together causally, while the virtual con-
sists of preindividual tendencies (Bergson) or
themes (Ruyer) whose realization in the actual
always implies a degree of creativity or differ-
ence. They both solve the puzzles of psychologi-
cal, biological, and evolutionary resemblance (or
convergence) by conceiving actual individuals as
derivative on preindividual themes (what
Bergson called tendencies). Just as we might
find ourselves behaving in the same way in two
different scenarios, due to the invocation in
each of the same memory or habit, so too
ought we to posit behind “the organic resem-
blance of two individuals of the same species”
the same mnemic theme, their “specific poten-
tial” (Neofinalism 131). We can just as well
see in “the resemblance of organs between two
very different species” the actualization of one
developmental theme. Ruyer goes still further,
suggesting that “the resemblance of these
organs to our tools” indicates the presence of
the mnemic as well, so that across individuals,
species, and even technologies the ontological
fact remains the same: the actual suffused with
the virtual, the constituted individual with the
mnemic themes that exceed it (132).
On the basis of this modal shift, they both
reinvigorate a version of finalism in biology as
well. Bergson’s is an inverted finalism, the
ends of which are located at the virtual origin
of processes of evolution and development, sub-
sisting through their actual trajectories as the
impetus that initially impelled them. Isabel
Gabel has suggested that Ruyer developed his
own “neo-finalism” as a partial response to Berg-
son’s critique of “radical finalism” (Gabel 52).
Bergson argued that radical finalism, the doc-
trine according to which actual events and the
processes of their unfolding merely realize a
program set out for them in advance, involves
the denial of the positive reality of time.
Ruyer’s “neo-finalism,” apparently worked out
against this Bergsonian critique, thus attempted
to reconcile the end-directedness of processes of
formation with the efficacious reality of their
temporal unfolding. This means, for Ruyer,
that mnemic themes inform and direct the
course of developmental processes, activities,
and work, without thereby predetermining
them or resembling them in advance. Though
there are no doubt appreciable differences
between them, Bergson’s and Ruyer’s renewed
biological finalisms share more in common
than not. One implication shared by both is
that natural selection ought to be understood
as a secondary mechanism that sifts through a
more fundamental expressive activity. For
Ruyer, any evolutionary theory based in
natural selection has to be considered a statisti-
cal science; as such, it cannot address the origins
of life, variation, or its evolutionary trajectories.
Once all these are given, natural selection acts,
in Ruyer’s words, as “a simple instrument of
equilibration and external regulation”
(Élements 161). In Bergson’s words, natural
selection “explains the sinuosities of the move-
ment of evolution, but not its general directions,
still less the movement itself” (Creative Evol-
ution 102). For both, evolutionary science goes
wrong in restricting itself to the actual and in
attempting to explain away the appearance of
finality through the operation of blind mechan-
isms. It requires a philosophy of virtual finalism
as its supplement and corrective.
In sum, it does not seem unreasonable to
expect Ruyer to have found in at least some
aspects of Bergson’s Creative Evolution a comp-
lement to his own work in La Genèse and Neo-
finalism.5 Yet after La Conscience, and aside
from the theory of perception criticized in that
text, Ruyer does not engage extensively with
Bergson again, and many if not most of
Ruyer’s subsequent works contain no mention
of Bergson at all. The references to Bergson in
Ruyer’s main works in the philosophy of
biology are not only almost uniformly critical
but also usually brief and glancing as well.
The only such significant engagement with
Bergson other than La Conscience and
“Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” appears
across three pages of Élements de psycho-biolo-
gie (29–30, 42). Here, Ruyer introduces his
theory of the thematic character of formation
into the earlier text’s critique of Bergson’s
theory of perception. He extends his critique to
the conception of the body (qua nervous
system) that Bergson’s theory of perception
assumes. Ruyer contends that Bergson
130

incorrectly locates subjectivity in the capacity of
the nervous system to introduce indetermination
into a perception-action circuit (29). For Ruyer,
it is the cells of the nervous system, as true
forms primarily conscious of their formative
themes, that are capable of provoking the second-
ary consciousness of subjectivity. Ruyer con-
cludes that Bergson’s conception of the body
remains Cartesian: it relies on what is constituted
and actual while missing the thematic character
of its development (30). Later in the same text,
Ruyer makes one of his only references to Berg-
son’s élan vital (42). But it is a curious remark.
He invokes the élan only to reduce it to the dis-
tinction between instinct and intelligence, claim-
ing again that Bergson missed the thematic
character of the development of the living
being who is afterward capable of intelligence.
For there is intelligence at work already in its for-
mation. Its instincts appear afterward as isolated
and regimented dimensions of the intelligence
operative through its formative process. Ruyer
recalls this line on instinctual knowledge in
“Bergson et le Sphex ammophile,” but he is, as
we will see, remarkably less critical in the
article than he is in Élements. Nearer the end
of Élements Ruyer makes brief and passing refer-
ence to Bergson’s theory of sympathy on the
question of symbiotic relations (160). This too
is a line to which he returns, and which he
extends, in the later article.6
Aside from “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile,”
Ruyer even seems occasionally as if he studiously
avoided exploring what the two might have
shared in common. (He makes no real mention
of Bergson’s theory of the virtual, for instance.)
Perhaps this is a matter of the narcissism of
little differences, or perhaps it is owed to the
popularity of Bergson at the time. Whatever
the explanation, its consequence is that
“Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” appears to be
relatively unique in Ruyer’s corpus for its sus-
tained and charitable engagement with Bergson’s
philosophy of biology.
the wasp
“Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” does three
things. First, it provides a close and charitable
131
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reading of an aspect of Bergson’s philosophy
of biology that has been badly understood and
both overblown and unduly neglected for that
reason. This is Bergson’s theory of biological
sympathy as it is evidenced by the parasitic
instincts of solitary wasps. Against its detrac-
tors, Ruyer attempts to demonstrate the viabi-
lity of the theory, at least in outline. Second,
Ruyer provides a helpful and clarifying sup-
plement to Bergson’s dense and difficult argu-
ment that the wasp appears to “know” the
anatomy of its prey, the caterpillar, when in
fact the wasp acts out of an intuitive sympathy
for it. Ruyer introduces an analogy between
parasitism and fertilization, and uses the cases
of sexual dimorphism and the differentiation
of sexual organs in hermaphroditic organisms
to arrive at Bergson’s conclusion via what is
most likely a clearer line of reasoning. Finally,
third, Ruyer recalls his criticism of Bergson’s
theory of perception and situates it in the
broader context of the article’s topic. We are
thus given a fresh sense for the significance of
that criticism to Ruyer’s reception of Bergson’s
philosophy of biology more generally.
Ruyer’s “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile”
offers a complex defence of one of the most
eccentric passages of Bergson’s Creative Evol-
ution from the critics that he claims misunder-
stood it. This is the infamous passage in which
Bergson invokes Fabre’s reports on the instincts
of parasitizing wasps in order to connect a
theory about the “thematic” nature of instinct
to a theory about the “sympathetic” nature of
instinctual knowledge. Against the Neo-Darwi-
nian contention that sophisticated instincts
have been assembled over generations, step by
step, out of earlier, less complex behaviours,
Bergson holds that
instinct is everywhere complete but it is more
or less simplified, and, above all, simplified
differently […] Most likely, the degree of
complexity [of the “same” instinct in differ-
ent species or stages of development] has
nothing to do with any greater or smaller
number of added elements. We seem rather
to be before a musical theme, which had
first been transposed as a whole into a
certain number of tones and on which, as a
 instinct, consciousness, life
whole, different variations had been played,
some very simple, others very skillful. (Crea-
tive Evolution 171; translation modified)
This is the thematic conception of instinct.
After positing it, Bergson cites Fabre’s story
of the “Ammophila Hirsuta” [sic], a parasitic
wasp that “gives nine successive strokes of its
sting upon nine nerve-centers of its caterpillar,
and then seizes the head and squeezes it in its
mandibles, enough to cause paralysis without
death” (172). The Ammophila is a solitary
wasp; it has learned nothing from a community.
Yet it appears to possess so high a level of
knowledge about the anatomy of caterpillars
that the precise nature of what it was doing to
them eluded the entomologists themselves for
decades. Indeed, before Fabre, entomology’s
best explanation was that the wasp must be
injecting some kind of preservative substance
into its dead prey after killing it (Fabre,
Hunting Wasps 9). Entomologists had yet to
determine the internal organization shared
across each of the wasps’ favourite victims: a
centralization of motor functions to be put
offline by a series of precise stings (48). The
wasp seems to know the facts of her victim’s
nervous system intimately; and that knowledge,
acted without apparently being “known,” out-
stripped human intellect for quite a while.
How could it have acquired it? Bergson con-
tinues: “The Ammophila, we imagine, must
learn, one by one, like the entomologist, the pos-
itions of the nerve-centres of the caterpillar –
must acquire at least the practical knowledge
of these positions by trying the effects of its
sting. But there is no need for such a view if
we suppose a sympathy (in the etymological
sense of the word) between the Ammophila
and its victim, which teaches it from within,
so to say, concerning the vulnerability of the
caterpillar” (Creative Evolution 173–74). This
principle of “inner access,” opposed to the
exterior knowledge of the intellect, comprises
Bergson’s theory of instinct-sympathy.
Bertrand Russell famously remarked that the
“love of the marvellous may mislead even so
careful an observer as Fabre and so eminent a
philosopher as Bergson” (56). Most others
agreed: the story of the wasp and the theory of
instinct derived from it constituted a series of
mistakes better forgotten. It was no accident
that contemporaneous with Russell’s disparage-
ment was the growing success of behaviourism’s
endeavour to reduce all instincts to mechanical
reflexes. Instinct theory would have to wait
until the 1950s for Lorenz’s and Tinbergen’s
Darwinian ethology until it could once again
be considered a valid domain for scientific
inquiry. Ruyer is writing in that context. His
defence of Bergson’s theory of instinct is
threefold:
(1) Ruyer correctly observes that the thematic
conception of instinct is in principle dis-
tinct from Fabre’s account of the parasitic
instincts of solitary wasps. Thus, even if
the latter were to have been thoroughly
discredited by subsequent scientific devel-
opments, the former ought to retain its
conceptual autonomy and would still
have to be evaluated independently.
(2) Ruyer insists that the story of the wasp,
though not an indispensable premise in
Bergson’s argument, is in fact not only
accurate but also perfectly appropriate as
evidence in support of Bergson’s position
as well. This is the stronger claim. The
story of the wasp is accurate, for Ruyer,
because it can accommodate the data
that were supposed to have invalidated
it. Its invalidation is usually attributed to
the Peckhams, a pair of entomologists of
the early twentieth century compelled to
pursue the study of solitary wasps after
reading Fabre’s own reports. They note
that Fabre had claimed of Ammophila
that its instincts can “never have varied
to any appreciable extent from the begin-
ning of time,” since any deviation would
upset their capacities as parasites and
lead to their extinction (Peckham and
Peckham 52). And they respond that
the conclusions that we draw from the
study of this genus differ in the most
striking manner from those of Fabre.
The one preeminent, unmistakable
and ever present fact is variability.
132

Variability in every particular – in the
shape of the nest and the manner of
digging it, in the condition of the
nest (whether closed or open) when
left temporarily, in the method of
stinging the prey […] (53)
The Peckhams asserted variability as a
requisite for any theory of instinct after
Darwin. And as a consequence, as
Keijzer observes, they “became portrayed
as the standard antagonists of Fabre: he
being the defender of the God-given and
eternal fixity of instinct, they the defen-
ders of a Darwinist view who claimed
and reported the presence of variability
of almost all aspects of insect behavior”
(Keijzer 510). For popular scientific
opinion, it followed that even instincts
as sophisticated as those of the solitary
wasps required for their explanation
nothing other than the Darwinian main-
stays of heritable variation coupled with
differential mortality over time. Bergson
appears to have made too much of a mis-
taken story, and in leveraging it as
support for his own theory of instinct he
risked discrediting the latter as a result.
Fabre was, however, already well aware
of the facts that the Peckhams employed
in their criticism of him. After exclaiming
over “how infallibly and with what trans-
cendental art [the wasp] acts when guided
by the unconscious inspiration of her
instinct,” Fabre observes “how poor she
is in resource, how limited in intelligence,
how illogical even, in circumstances
outside her regular routine” (Hunting
Wasps 107; cf. 119). He concludes that
instinct is perfectly fitted to its object
under ideal conditions; but any changes
in those conditions lead to variations
and deviations in the performance of the
instinct. Fabre privileges the sophisti-
cated consistency of instinct over its vari-
ations, and argues that the latter
represents a deficient, mistaken execution
of the former. The Peckhams privilege
the variations, and argue on the contrary
133
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that the sophisticated consistency of
instinct was built up out of them over
time. Their conclusion is not licensed by
new data. One could well accept the data
they use without accepting the conclusion
they derive from them. Indeed, this is just
what Bergson seems to have done. He
cites the Peckhams’ corrections to
Fabre’s story of the wasp, but asserts
nonetheless that “because instinct is,
like intelligence, fallible, because it also
shows individual deviations, it does not
at all follow that the instinct of the
Ammophila has been acquired, as has
been claimed, by tentative intelligent
experiments” (Creative Evolution 173).
Ruyer thinks that Bergson accurately
reports the extant evidence of parasitizing
instincts in solitary wasps. He contends
that the report is appropriately utilized
in service of Bergson’s position on the
thematic character of instinct as well.
Ruyer takes what he calls “thematism”
to be a well-established facet of compara-
tive ethology. He dedicates much of the
article to elaborating its details and
drawing implications for the study of
instinct. Ruyer concludes that to the
extent that Bergson’s reference to the
story of the Ammophila serves “to chal-
lenge the pseudo-scientific thesis […]
that considered instinct as a mosaic of
reflexes placed alongside genetic variation
and natural selection,” it is a legitimate
use of an accurate story to furnish what
would become a respectable scientific pos-
ition (“Bergson et le Sphex ammophile”
164).
(3) Ruyer argues, finally, that Bergson’s
theory of instinct-sympathy is best under-
stood as the attempt to outline a positive
solution to the problem that the case of
solitary wasps poses for Neo-Darwinian
theories of instinct. Here is the problem:
if it is true that instinct cannot be
explained as a mosaic of reflexes
assembled over generations by selection,
if it is thematic, then how does the wasp
possess and act it out? If the wasp did
 instinct, consciousness, life
not build it up step by step over evolution-
ary time, then what is the principle of
relation that obtains between the wasp
and the theme? Bergson’s theory of
instinct-sympathy suggests that the wasp
does not “know” its object, the anatomy
of its prey, in the same way that the ento-
mologist does: from the outside, based on
observation and induction. Rather, the
wasp is supposed to “sympathize” with
its object. Its parasitizing instincts are a
correlate of that sympathy. In order to
explain the precise nature of a “sympath-
etic” relationship between two organisms,
Ruyer turns from Bergson’s own account
in order to attempt a parallel and analo-
gous argument for the same conclusion.
On the content of the argument and its impli-
cations for the relationship between the two
thinkers, we should like to let Ruyer’s article
speak for itself.
•••
BERGSON AND THE
AMMOPHILA SPHEX7
raymond ruyer
On the question of instinct, Bergson was victim
of a veritable prank played by the memory of
readers, then aggravated by the writers of text-
books. All his concepts have clung, at least in
the minds of distracted readers, to Fabre’s
story of the Ammophila Sphex “that gives
nine successive stings to nine nervous centers
of its caterpillar, and finally snatches the head
and squeezes it in its mandibles, just enough
to cause paralysis without death.”8 Bergson
may well have immediately added: “No doubt,
it is far from the case that the operation is
always perfectly executed,” and quoted the
Peckhams to correct Fabre,9 but the impression
remained that Bergson supports his whole
theory of instinct on Fabre’s embellished
stories, and that the Peckhams later demolished
the observations on which Bergson relied. It is a
little like the way children read the simplified
story of the beginning of the war of 1914 in
their small History of France. The conspicuous
uniforms of the French soldiers are mentioned
there, and the children retain the impression
that the first of France’s defeats is due only to
red trousers.
It would already be unfair to condemn the
entire Bergsonian theory of instinct even if the
story of the Sphex was false because Bergson
cites and uses many other very accurately
reported facts. But most curious is that the
story of the Sphex is accurate – whatever its
critics say – and is also perfectly suitable as an
argument in support of the thesis for which
Bergson uses it. Bergson cites it in the course
of a critical discussion of Neo-Darwinian the-
ories, according to which “this or that useful
step, accomplished by the individuals by
virtue of an accidental predisposition of the
germ, would have been transmitted from germ
to germ while waiting for the chance to add
new improvements to it by the same process”
– according to which, in short, the instinct is
constituted by the progressive addition of new
elements.10
Bergson demonstrates the improbability of
this theory by logical arguments on the one
hand, and by the examination of facts on the
other. When we compare the different forms
of the same instinct, of the same instinctive
theme in various species of Hymenoptera, we
cannot arrange these forms in linear series in
order of increasing complexity. The instinctive
theme is really a central theme “which trans-
poses itself as a whole in different directions
and on which, also as a whole, is performed in
every species different variations,” the differ-
ences of complexity not always corresponding
to an order of filiation, as they should on the
Neo-Darwinian hypothesis.11 One could cite
innumerable examples in favour of the thesis
of “thematism”: various uses of thread by the
various species of spiders; types of display
among the birds; types of camouflage or parasit-
ism among the crabs; the theme of “brandishing
the pincers” among the twenty-seven species of
Uca cabs in Panama; the “courtship dance”
theme among the various Sticklebacks. The pro-
ponents of comparative ethology have been able
134

to make veritable etymologies of instinctive
behaviours. A certain “root” (in the linguistic
sense) of behaviour undergoes displacements,
variations, complications, simplifications,
changes of sense in the related neighbouring
species. Bergson limits himself to briefly citing
the social instinct among the various Apidae
(where the differences in complexity do not cor-
respond to an order of filiation) and finally the
paralysing instinct of various species of Hy-
menoptera, where the theme – the etymological
root – “to paralyse a prey and to deposit its eggs
there” is varied or weakened according to the
different species of prey: spider, beetle, caterpil-
lar, cricket.
The fact that one can so easily combine Berg-
son’s thesis with the modern conceptions of com-
parative ethology proves that far from being
behind on the science Bergson anticipated it.
He was perfectly right to challenge the pseudo-
scientific thesis, fashionable at the time when
he wrote Creative Evolution, which considered
instinct as a mosaic of reflexes placed alongside
[juxtaposés] genetic variation and natural selec-
tion. The variations of an instinctive theme
resemble linguistic variations, and it is almost
as absurd to explain the variations of the theme
“paralyse” in the various species of Hymenoptera
by accumulation of genetic mutations as it would
be to explain the variations of the unknown Indo-
European root signifying “girl,” which makes
duhitar in Sanskrit, thugatêr in Greek, Tochter
in German, by genetic mutations of various
Indo-European groups.
The contemporary ethologists do not reject
natural selection, or even the possibility in
certain cases – never directly verified, to tell
the truth – of a genetic origin of behavioural
variations. But they more often invoke the the-
matic variation of behaviour as the primary
material on which selection then works, and as
the first origin of specification by isolation and
segregation.12 As if, to continue our example,
a linguistic difference in a group led secondarily
to a separation of two or more subgroups, or
reinforced an already initiated [amorceé ]
segregation.
To put it more simply, Bergson’s discussion
bears on both the Neo-Darwinism and the
135
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Neo-Lamarckism of the time. Our comparison,
in Lamarckian spirit, of the variations of the
instinctive theme with those of a linguistic
theme, is limited in that the linguistic trans-
mission is socio-cultural, and not biological
like the transmission of instinct. Instinct,
according to Bergson, is no more an intelligent
discovery of some individuals of the species,
degraded into habit and transmitted by her-
edity, than a mosaic of fortuitous mutations.
The linguistic theme is unconscious or sub-
conscious in individual speakers. That is why
it seems to have a life of its own, independent
of its bearers and transmitters – in which it
resembles an instinct. But it is evidently not
related to the organic form of the species and
in this it differs from instinct. Instinct is inse-
parable from the organic formation and has its
origin in a super-individual [sur-individuel]
and even super-specific [sur-speć ifique]
“domain of consciousness,” which is to say in
the cosmic consciousness of the élan vital.
This consciousness “gives us the key to all
vital operations,” and is the common origin of
all species, of all formative instincts, and of all
instincts of behaviour. We see that if Bergson
rejects Neo-Darwinism, he limits himself to cor-
recting the Neo-Lamarckism in a way that is
truly radical, by transporting it from the
psychological or psychobiological level to a
metaphysical level. The vital consciousness is a
consciousness, but it is no longer an intelligent,
calculating consciousness, as is human con-
sciousness, which is based on the perception of
external objects and bears on these objects
from the outside.
This yields the key to a Bergsonian theory
that has until now appeared entirely verbal, lit-
erary, metaphorical: the theory of instinct-sym-
pathy. After having made critical usage of the
example of the paralysing Sphex, Bergson pro-
poses a positive solution, in rather vague
terms, we must admit, and with a discomfort
emphasized by the use of conditional verbs.
We are wrong, says Bergson, in wanting to
translate the “science” of the Hymenoptera in
terms of intelligence and consequently assimi-
lating the Sphex with the biologist who knows
the caterpillar from the outside:
 instinct, consciousness, life
The Sphex would have to learn one by one,
like the entomologist, the positions of the
nervous centers of the caterpillar […], but
it would no longer be the same if one sup-
posed between the Sphex and its victim a
sympathy (in the etymological sense of the
word) which teaches it from within, so to
say, about the vulnerability of the caterpillar.
This feeling of vulnerability may owe nothing
to external perception, and result from the
mere presence together of the Sphex and
the caterpillar, considered no longer as two
organisms, but as two activities. It would
express in a concrete form the relation of
the one to the other. Certainly, a scientific
theory cannot appeal to considerations of
this kind. It must not put action before
organization, sympathy before perception
and knowledge. (Bergson, Creative Evol-
ution 174)
Reading such passages, the biologist shrugs
his shoulders and taking advantage of the con-
fession that the conception of instinct-sympathy
has nothing in common with a scientific theory
he returns to his experiments on the role of hor-
mones or on the “innate trigger mechanisms.”
However, the biologist would do well to
remember the instinctive situations where he
found himself as representative of the human
species. For example, married very young and
naive, before having completed his studies and
having very precise scientific notions about pro-
creation, embryology, sexual hormones, he
knew how to behave in the presence of his
wife in such a way that he had a child –
though not without a lot of awkwardnesses and
clumsinesses analogous to what the Peckhams
detect in the behaviour of the Sphex.
Everything happened as if he had known –
before having consulted any treatise – the
anatomy, or the physiology, of the reproductive
organs of man and woman. He would have done
entirely as well if he had been, like the biologists
of the eighteenth century, “ovist” or “animalcu-
list,” or if he had been a convinced Aristotelian
and if he had believed that man brings form to
feminine matter. He would have done just as
well – probably better – if he had not been an
intellectual, and even if he had not been a
civilized man, and had ignored the role of the
father in procreation and had believed to be
making [ frayer] only “a way to the spirits”
[un chemin aux esprits], like the Melanesians
or Kanakas.
By “sympathy,” Bergson means a “non-intel-
lectual knowledge [savoir]” or, more exactly, a
“non-perceptual knowledge,” a knowledge that
has no need of information about the external
object conveyed step by step along transmission
channels. What to say? The problem of instinc-
tive behaviour becomes much clearer if it is
posed in the form: “Is it a matter of knowledge
[savoir]? or of ability [pouvoir]?” In general, if a
being does what he does, it is first that he knows
and second that he can do it. I swim, because I
can swim (I do not have muscular cramps), and
because I know how to swim (I learned to swim,
and I do not have neurological disorders, no
apraxia). In many languages, knowledge
[savoir] and ability [pouvoir] are poorly distin-
guished when it comes to a learned action and
not an acquired notion (for which all the
languages agree to use the word “knowing
[savoir and connaître],” and not the word “the
ability to know [pouvoir]”). We say in English
and in German: “I can swim,” whereas we say
in French “I know how to swim.” Is it English
or French that is right? English or German
would certainly be wrong to talk about “ability
[pouvoir]” if these languages meant by this –
what they do not – a purely physical power
[pouvoir], a “power to function.” In fact, they
mean a capacity, a psycho-physiological “com-
petence,” an “effective knowledge [savoir].”
The danger of confusion is between physical
power [pouvoir] and effective mental knowledge
[savoir psychique]. And this possible confusion
is extremely important in the problem of
instinct.
If the yellow-winged Sphex paralyses the
cricket and its three pairs of legs, if the Ammo-
phila paralyses the nine nervous centres of the
caterpillar, Bergson says it is because it knows
how to do it. The positivist biologists would
object to this answer: it is simply that it can
do it mechanically. Given the structure of its
body with the stinger, and the structure of the
body of the victim, it stings as it can. But, the
136

Bergsonian could respond, even admitting all
possible clumsinesses, whence does the Sphex
know that his stinger is at least made for sting-
ing and that he uses it for that in a more or less
adroit fashion instead of remaining unrespon-
sive in front of the cricket or the caterpillar?
This “knowing how to use [savoir employer]”
an organ, retorts the positivist biologist, is
itself only an “ability [pouvoir]” or a “micro-
ability” of nervous systems of the Sphex.
These systems are arranged so that, stimulated
or triggered by the image of the caterpillar,
they function so as to control in turn the oper-
ation of the stinger. Nowhere is there knowl-
edge, only abilities. And abilities in the
strictly positivist sense of the term: it is not a
matter of potentiality beyond the actual [poten-
tialite ́ sur-actuelle], which would revert to a
competence, to a “virtuality of ability,” that is
to say again to a knowledge. It is a matter only
of an “ability to function,” as when it is said
that a gearshift in a car can take four positions
or that a ratchet can rotate in one direction.
Thus defined, today the debate is evidently
decided in Bergson’s favour, at least in favour
of instinct-knowledge, and against the notion
of an instinct-ability, an instinct-function.
Instinct is thematic in each of its phases. In
each of its phases it includes an element of
“sense,” of abstract and unspecified knowledge
[savoir abstrait et non preć isé], cognition [con-
naissance] beyond mechanical actuality
[l’actuel mécanique]. The internal hormonal
sensitization evokes a half-oriented search be-
haviour, an observable counterpart of a
concern, of an anxious presentiment. The stimu-
lus, or rather the external object putting an end
[mettant fin] to the search behaviour, is not a
mechanical trigger, a key of precise form that
would correspond to an automaton lock [un
automate à serrure], it is an object or a situation
corresponding to a certain instinctive “gnosis” –
according to the very exact technical term – that
is to say to a cognition [connaissance] or to a
capacity for re-cognition [re-connaissance].
Experimental studies – especially those of
Buytendijk, Tinbergen and the Dutch school –
have used lures and simulacra to show that
only a part of the stimulant is really effective
137
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as stimulus-signal. But this “part” is not a part
in the geometrical sense of the word, it is a
“schema”: angeborene auslösende schéma
[innate triggering schema], a kind of particu-
larly expressive extract. The animal perceives
this attractive or dangerous “expressive
extract” as the man perceives a very familiar
situation, by a trait, a detail, or a characteristic
aspect, as when he “runs after a petticoat” or
“avoids a military cap.” The stimulus-signal
always seems like a simplification, a secondary
reduction of a “gnosic” situation; it is not the
primary and constituent element. Also, it is
often impossible to use the method of simulacra
to extract a specific stimulus-signal to which the
animal is sensitive in the general situation, as
E.S. Russell pointed out.
Last, instinct is also thematic in the move-
ments, or rather, the actions of consumption.
They might sometimes take on the appearance
of a motor melody that can even unfold itself
meaninglessly [se dérouler á vide]. This might
make one think, according to Tinbergen, of
well-localized and hierarchized nervous mechan-
isms that function once triggered in an auton-
omous way. Yet the actions of effection or
consumption – that is, precisely the case of the
Sphex stinging the caterpillar – are more often
very flexible, regulated by [réguleś à mesure
sur] indication stimuli or orientation stimuli,
or again, by internal irritations that the actions
seek to relax in one way or another. In all
these cases, both those described by Lorenz
and Tinbergen and those described by the
American school hostile to “autonomous melo-
dies,” the observable movements of the animal
always constitute actions. They are not really
stereotypes like the movements of an automaton
of cams and spikes, they are significant, they
seek a realization, even if they do not imagine
it in advance. They are oriented by a knowledge
[savoir], and not pushed according to the power
of a fully assembled mechanism.
But the decisive argument against pure
instinct-ability, actual mechanical ability, is pro-
vided by the basic complementarity of equival-
ence between instinct and organization, as
Bergson saw perfectly. Let us admit, in fact,
that the Sphex uses its stinger as it can,
 instinct, consciousness, life
according to the structure of this organ, and
according to the actual structure of nervous
mechanisms which, once triggered by the sight
of the caterpillar, control the use of the
stinger. In any case, it was necessary over the
course of the ontogenesis of the Sphex that
every part of its hypothetical nervous mechan-
isms, as well as the stinger with its muscles
and accessory glands, be constructed from
scratch from the fertilized egg. This construc-
tion was epigenetic for the one as for the
other. It is not explicable by an “actual mechan-
ical power” of the egg, but by a “capacity,” a
“competence,” a “virtual power,” a “potential-
ity.” Either all these words mean nothing, or
else they designate more or less well what
must be considered as a “knowledge [savoir].”
But then, against the well-established facts
demonstrating the thematic character of
instinct, why connect the instinctive actions to
fully assembled nervous mechanisms? For in
any case these mechanisms themselves have
been constructed not by the functioning of
other mechanisms, by hypothesis not yet
given, but by what must be called a knowledge
or a morphogenetic instinct “behind” the egg
or embryo observable in actual space. Unless
we adopt a long abandoned and refuted con-
ception of the nature of genes or fall back on
the old preformationist errors about DNA mol-
ecules there is no way to escape the
consequence.
Rejecting the epigenetic character of the
ontogenesis of instinct is useless since we must
in any case accept the epigenetic character of
the ontogenesis of the organs that instinct uses
and that nervous mechanisms are supposed to
control. The bird makes its nest – in the
strong sense of “make [ faire],” with know-
how [savoir-faire], if not with “know-why
[savoir pourquoi].” It is not a simple mechanical
intermediary between the mechanisms of its
brain and the materials of the nest, because
the body of the bird, brain included, is made
precisely like the nest, with know-how, and
without us able to find any part of effector mech-
anisms already assembled.
Why would epigenesis, that is to say the
emergence of formative action, be realized in
one go? Why should it, in one go, assemble
mechanisms that would henceforth only have
to function, instead of continuing to improvise
assemblages [montages] and formative beha-
viours, to complete the assemblages already
acquired and integrate their functioning with a
meaningful global action? Instincts are rela-
tively complementary with organic forms pre-
cisely because organic forms are themselves
the result of embryonic instincts, of the
embryo’s “knowing how to act [savoir agir].”
In certain cases by the mere sight of organic
forms one can guess which instincts use them:
a stinger is made to sting, a wing to fly, the
hard beak of the unhatched chick to break the
shell. But from the examination of forms alone
it is not always possible to guess the instinct
that uses them. All spiders possess just about
the same seric glands, and yet some of them
make a regular web, others an irregular web,
others emit threads to be lifted away by the
wind, others simply line their nest. Lloyd
Morgan argues that no one could have deduced
the remarkable migrations of the eel by examin-
ing the structure of its body – and even less, we
will add, by examining the structure of its genes
and of DNA molecules, even with an ideal pre-
cision. From the anatomy of the antlion, one
can conclude that it is carnivorous, not that it
digs a hole in the sand and waits for an ant to
fall in. For that matter, it happens that similar
instincts are manifested by animals with very
different corporeal structures. Ants and ter-
mites have very similar social behaviours, yet
they belong to quite distant families.
Forms and instincts – or, more exactly, for-
mative instincts and behavioural instincts –
are relatively independent while complementing
each other precisely because they are of the
same nature. Instinct is not only a secondary
function – and functioning – of forms already
constructed by formative instincts. Instinct
uses acquired knowledge [l’acquis], but it over-
flows it [le déborde]. It is the form (of the organ-
ism as of the behaviour) which is a function of
the activity. It is necessary not to get things
backwards. So, when we say that the bird
makes its nest, that the nest is its work
[œuvre] and not an automatic result, this
138

thesis is true contra the mechanical conception
of instinct; but it should not be used contra
the conception of an ontogenesis of instinct.
The bird that makes its nest is at once the indi-
vidual bird (already “made” by embryogenesis),
and, through it, the specific bird-type. The indi-
vidual bird is at once work and worker; by
working at its nest it still continues to be
worked [œuvré]. The knowledge is not entirely
its own knowledge. Above all, by its already
constructed nervous system, it brings orienting
or controlling “gnoses” to an instinctive theme
that “arrives” in its nervous system in the
same way that formative themes arrive in
embryonic primordia over the course of their
organic formation.
Tinbergen’s experiments on the instinctive
reactions of young blackbirds in the nest to
the arrival of the nourishing parent have
shown this mixed character of instinctive
action. When the young chick extends its open
beak towards the nourisher, the action seems
unified. Yet it is composed, with a certain obser-
vable lag [décalage], of an autonomous motor
theme (open the break upward), combined,
when the chick has ceased to be blind for two
or three days, with an orientation towards the
nourisher. This orientation represents the part
played by the individual nervous system that
has become functional. In short, to use Weiss-
mann’s scheme, the bird does not “make” the
egg, the egg is made in it. On the contrary, it
“makes” its nest, but the nest is in part also
made in it or through it, like the egg, by the
same specific knowledge that follows the conti-
nuity of the germ.
Embryology and the psychobiology of
instinct are increasingly revealing themselves
to be two chapters of the same science. The
same scientific concepts are used: primordia,
territories, formative themes, autonomous
development, stimuli-signals, stimuli-orientors,
induction, regulation, competence, importance
of timing. The “chemistry” of instinct is the
same as the chemistry of embryogenesis; the
hormones of the sexual instinct are the same
as the hormones that realize the genetic sex or
potentially make it change in laboratory exper-
iments. Organic teratology, by arresting
139
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development, fusion and condensation, displa-
cement and translocation, is exactly analogous
to the teratology of instinct, as we can verify
by comparing E. Wolff and Freud.
We seem to have lost sight of Bergson.
Instead, we have followed a parallel path that
leads to a very similar point. If “action is
before organization” as Bergson suspected,
then instinct is a “knowledge,” a consciousness,
not a functional ability but a knowledge and a
primary consciousness more fundamental than
individual consciousness and knowledge,
which are mere developers of primary knowl-
edge. This is the same definition that Bergson
gives of “sympathy,” and the life-consciousness
equivalence.
However, it must be recognized that Berg-
son’s own considerations, and the way in
which he represents this “primary conscious-
ness” of life, are vitiated by a grave error due
to their recapitulation of Matter and
Memory’s misguided theory of perception.
According to this theory, the sensory appara-
tuses do not produce the image, the sensory rep-
resentation, because the universe is in principle
already only an ensemble of images. Here
Bergson has given in to Berkeleyan influences
and generated elegant solutions by systematic
reversal of the terms of the problem and by
return to the immediate. The sensory appara-
tuses are, like the rest of the body, apparatuses
for action, not for the generation of represen-
tations. Perception is a selection. The image
(in principle) in its entirety is reduced to what
interests my action. The image of the object
(which interests me) is not formed in my
visual centre, then projected in the place
where the real object would be: “the object,
the rays that it emits, the retina and the inter-
ested nervous elements form an integral
whole, and it is there where the object is, and
not elsewhere, that the image is formed and
perceived.”13
If we are not mistaken, to try to understand
how the Sphex possesses a non-intellectual,
extra-sensory “knowledge [savoir]” of the
anatomy of the caterpillar, Bergson uses two
different theories without being clearly aware
of the duality:
 instinct, consciousness, life
(1) The thesis that life is unitary, that it forms
a “whole sympathetic to itself” (Bergson,
Creative Evolution 167), that this unity
pre-exists the super-imposed secondary
dissociations, the divisions of labour, of
the cells of the organism, individuals in a
colony or society, or different species in
a fauna or a flora, and that this unity
reappears when necessary: “The instinc-
tive knowledge that a species possesses
of another species on a certain particular
point, therefore has its root in the very
unity of life” (ibid.).
(2) The thesis (recalling Matter and Memory)
that perception (which bears on another
living being, or on a distant star) is in prin-
ciple a knowledge [connaissance] at a dis-
tance, without an intermediate
progression of information:
A man born blind, who had lived
among others born blind, could not
be made to believe in the possibility
of perceiving a distant object without
first perceiving all the objects in
between. Yet vision performs this
miracle. In a certain sense the blind
mind is right, since vision, having its
origin in the stimulation of the
retina, by the vibrations of the light,
is nothing else, in fact, but a retinal
touch … But we have shown elsewhere
that the philosophical explanation of
perception must be of another kind
… Now, instinct also is a knowledge
[connaissance] at a distance (168).
This second thesis is very different from the
first (as stated previously). It relates not to life
but to perception in general, to which is attrib-
uted a quasi-magical character of influence at a
distance. Apart from Bergson’s very artificial
reasoning here, it would be proven if Rhine’s
contestable and suspicious experiments on
extra-sensory perception could be verified and
confirmed. On the contrary, the first thesis (on
the primary unity of life, on the unity of
spatially distinct organisms, and even of organ-
isms of different species) is much more solid
and today relies on a large number of biological
facts.
An organism has a primary unity underlying
the spatial distinction of its parts. The exper-
imental study of ontogenesis, regulation, and
regeneration has shown that the living individ-
ual is primarily an equipotential domain, not
an assemblage [mosaı̈que]. Even after a certain
spatial distribution of formative themes, each
region still retains equipotentiality in relation
to the theme it has received. It differentiates
itself first as a whole and according to this
general theme before distributing it in its
turn. From one equipotential region to another
the synchronizations and harmonizations are
operated by stimuli (chemical inducers); but
in the interior of each region the stimuli path-
ways play only a secondary role. If one cuts
one of these regions it forms two complete
organizations in the place of one; if one joins
two of these symmetrical regions (before any
internal “distribution”) they form only one
organization (whence symmelia, cyclopia, and
all the monstrosities by fusion). In the adult
organism a whole network of internal communi-
cations, nervous or chemical, is indispensable to
harmonize the life of the whole. But in the egg
or young embryo it is not the same; the unity
depends on a primary equipotentiality, as if
the organism in formation were analogous to a
field of consciousness, to an acquired visual sen-
sation, where the details are at once distinct and
yet form an immediate conscious unity without
needing to be seen again by an internal eye. Or,
better understood, the analogy or dependence is
in the opposite direction, and it is the visual cor-
tical area that is clearly conscious, unitas multi-
plex, of a field only because it retains the
equipotential property of a young embryonic
organism or area in the adult.
From the primary unity of an organism one
passes easily to the primary unity of two organ-
isms. Two univitellin twins [of a single egg]
differ little more than the right hand and the
left hand – especially if like Marie and É milie
Dionne they manifest a mirror symmetry. The
male and female of a dioecious species [having
male and female reproductive organisms in sep-
arate individuals] are two distinct organisms.
The male and female organs of a monoecious
or hermaphroditic species are formed in two
140

regions of the same embryo. There is nothing
unwarranted in admitting, with Bergson, or in
Bergson’s style, that when a male and female
of the same species are brought together, like
the Sphex and the caterpillar, the stimuli-
signals evoking instinctive sexual behaviours
represent only an accessory guidance; that the
male “does not have to learn one by one, like
the biologist, the positions [of the reproductive
organs in the female], nor to acquire the practi-
cal knowledge [connaissance] of these positions
by experimenting [the effects of copulation]”
(173). One can even add, with the text of Crea-
tive Evolution, that “everything happens as if
there were, [between the male and the female],
a sympathy which informs [the male] from the
inside about [the sexual characteristics of the
female]” (173–74).
It is better to stop here, and not continue with
Bergson, who adds: “This feeling [of the sexu-
ality of the female] may owe nothing to the
external perception and result from the mere
presence together [of the male and the female]
considered no longer as two organisms, but as
two activities” (174). In fact, it is highly doubt-
ful that orienting stimuli-signals, guiding exter-
nal perceptions, could be completely absent in
the most surprising instinctive performances,
such as eel migrations, for example. There is
nothing magical about the evocation of instinct;
like development, it always has inductors, most
often chemical. But it is true that once evoked,
instinctive actions overflow the evocator, the
inductor, the stimulating perception by their
complexity. The animal is guided by light, or
smell, it is not guided by it like an automaton.
The external stimulating perception does not
bring it [the animal] complete information.
The instinct evoked is informed by itself: once
again, it is “knowledge [savoir].” This knowl-
edge is of the same nature as “competence” (in
the sense that embryologists use this word), as
the competence, for example, of an embryonic
area to unitarily differentiate according to the
theme that was distributed to it when it is
induced to do so by a chemical inducer emanat-
ing from a neighbouring area.
The obligation for the male to be sensitized
by hormones on the one hand, and to perceive
141
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the female according to a certain auslösende
schéma [triggering schema] on the other, does
not exempt him from having a “competence”
of the same nature as the competence of the pri-
mordium of the male organs to differentiate in
the hermaphroditic organism.
Bergson does not give enough credit to
science when he adds: “Certainly, a scientific
theory cannot appeal to considerations of this
kind. It must not put action before organization,
sympathy before perception and knowledge”
(ibid.). It is the experimental embryology
itself which furnished the theory of instinct
with these notions of “competence,” “equipo-
tentiality,” “evocation,” which Bergson antici-
pates with a vocabulary obviously less precise,
but less inadequate than it seems at first sight.
Can we finally pass, then, from the male–
female situation (of the same species), to the
Sphex–caterpillar situation? The step is impor-
tant, and the jump is difficult, especially if one
renounces the “magical” theory of perception
at a distance of any object as one certainly
must, to contaminate or to “complicate
[corser]” the thesis of the primary unity of the
organism, of organisms and even species. Diffi-
cult, but not absolutely impossible, because
after all, living species, even the most distant
from each other today, are born from a bifur-
cation in an organic domain which does not
differ essentially from a twin bifurcation [une
bifurcation gémellaire]. It is not even absol-
utely excluded that there is a “finality in the
service of others,” or, to use Bergson’s
expression, “primary sympathy” from plant to
animal, as we have believed to be the case with
galls where the plant seems to accommodate a
dwelling for the parasitic insect, or again with
entomophilic plants.
To tell the truth, we are personally very scep-
tical on this point, and this is why we preferred
to comment and to defend Bergson’s general
theses on instinct-knowledge [savoir] and
instinct recovering primary consciousness,
which is the very texture of life, substituting
the example of the male–female situation for
the Sphex–caterpillar situation.
The very possibility of this hesitation and
substitution is strange only at first glance. If
 instinct, consciousness, life
we have to dissociate the two types of instinctive
situation, if the male and female organisms
present together still benefit from a primary
organic unity in the one case and they no
longer benefit in the other – where it is a
matter of predator–prey or host–parasite –
then from where does their resemblance come?
And, finally, how to explain the Sphex’s “knowl-
edge [savoir]” of the caterpillar? Must we return
decidedly, at least in cases of this kind, to Neo-
Darwinism, and to the accumulation of acciden-
tal mutations? But no Neo-Darwinian can argue
that in the male–female case and in the often-
complex courtship instincts, the instincts of
the male and the instincts of the female are
formed separately by accumulation of
mutations. The two instincts are often coordi-
nated in a very rigorous way, like the male and
female forms of a dioecious plant. Selection, if
it intervened, had to intervene on the male–
female organic unity with which we therefore
cannot, in any case, dispense. Orthodox Neo-
Darwinism therefore compounds the incongru-
ity rather than elucidating it. It unduly accentu-
ates the contrast between the two situations.
The solution to this problem has been given
by studies on disjunctions, displacements,
transpositions, and readjustments of instinc-
tive themes in comparative animal ethology,14
on the role of selection in these displacements
and readjustments on the one hand, and of
these displacements on the selective action on
the other. Once distributed, the initially
unitary theme – that is, capable of inaugurating
the formation of an entire individual or a global
behaviour – becomes a multiplicity of themes,
coordinated but nevertheless obliged from now
on to perfect that coordination. Selection bears
on the adjustment from theme to theme and
also on the displacements used by these disso-
ciated themes much more than on the fortui-
tous mutations of the genes or molecules of
DNA.
Selection does not resemble a mechanical
sorting, but an organic learning by trial and
error at once directed and fortuitous. Even in
sexual formations and behaviours, there are,
despite the primary organic unity, many the-
matic dissociations and consequently many
secondary adjustments obtained at first hapha-
zardly. The distance is smaller than it appears
between sexuality and parasitism or predation.
Fertilization is a break-in; in mammals, the
embryo is a parasite on the mother, and is
implanted in the uterus like mistletoe on an
apple tree. Many animals are killed by sexual
rapprochement. Laying eggs on a parasitized
animal is a behaviour that differs little from
that of some species of male whose gametes
occasionally migrate throughout the whole
body of the female. It is very probable that in
many symbioses, parasitisms, or predations,
whole stretches of sexual behaviour have been
introduced after displacement and modification,
just as one can still recognize themes of attack,
combat, flight, as well as the offer of nourish-
ment or infantile behaviours in many courtship
behaviours.
The resemblance between the male–female
situation and the Sphex–caterpillar situation is
thus explained in this way. In the abstract,
nothing is more opposed than natural selection
and the unity of an organic domain. But in
fact, one penetrates the other to various
degrees. The unitary organic themes are still
at work, but more or less dissociated and re-
adjusted to the potential of the species.
Chance and selection count little in the interplay
of the sexes. They count more in symbioses and
parasitisms. The evolutionary history of paralys-
ing Hymenoptera, entomophilic flowers,
mimetic forms – especially of those that even
imitate physical accidents – must look a little
less than Bergson believes like an invention in
orthogenesis, or like the linear evolution of a
technical or artistic form in a homogeneous
human culture, and a little more like a
“history” in the strong sense of the word, like
a political or linguistic history, complex and
capricious. The history of the evolution of
instincts, like organisms, is a mixture of organ-
ization and chance, of sense and of fortuitous
displacements of sense, of improvisations to
suit the circumstances, and corrections [rattra-
pages] by means of fortune. Bergson is certainly
wrong to speak of a theme “which transposes
itself as a whole and on which, also as a
whole, variations can be performed.”15
142

Biological themes, like words, are composites.
But, overall, Bergson’s mistake is minor.
•••
The Bergsonian conception of instinct is there-
fore generally correct. Its weaknesses are due
rather to its less auspicious connections to
neighbouring theories.
The instinct–intelligence opposition, and
especially the bifurcation between animal instinct
and human intelligence, is certainly forced. This
is incompatible with the incontestable thesis that
does not dissociate instinct and organization. The
body of man is formed like that of animals. His
psyche is fundamentally the same. Comparative
ethology finds in man the same instinctive
bases as the mammals: internal sensitization,
stimuli-signals and gnoses, phenomena of displa-
cement, etc. Autonomous motor melodies are
rarer, but they are not lacking, as A. Gesell and
Piaget have shown. And, moreover, they are
also rare in other mammals.
As Baerend’s observations have demon-
strated, on the one hand, even the instincts of
insects include variable phases of rigidity and
flexibility [souplesse], the phases of flexibility
and “broad” adaptation not being due to a
mixture of intelligence but to a sort of thematic
breadth of instinct itself, “foreseeing” a collab-
oration with learning, if one can so speak. The
instincts in man and the higher animals are
exceptionally “broad,” but they are authentic
instincts.
On the other hand, the characterization of
instinct as the capacity to form organic tools,
and intelligence as the ability to form inorganic
tools, without being false does not help us grasp
– at least as Bergson presents it – the modality
of the passage from the organic tool to the fab-
ricated tool. The use and fabrication of a tool,
by man, and exceptionally by the monkey, is
still an “organic formation” if one thinks
about it, like any intelligent activity more gener-
ally. In fact, the use and fabrication of the tool
are directed by the brain and imply spontaneous
changes in the brain tissue of the motor and
sensory areas that direct the movements of use
and fabrication. Fabrication, technical
143
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invention, is a provisional and erasable cortical
morphogenesis. It thus relies on the primary
organic self-structuring property applied to
these objects instead of being applied to
organic tissues as tissues, thanks to the fact
that the brain is at once organic tissue and a
screen where the forms of external objects are
projected.
Why do all animals with a cortex “informed”
by sensory organs – that is to say a good part of
vertebrates, and even metazoans – not fabricate
tools if they have organs, beak, mandibles,
hands, etc., capable of holding a material
object? Why do only some insects, some birds,
and the anthropoid apes sporadically use
thorns, pebbles, sticks? It is because the
crucial transition [le passage capital] is less
the use of tools than the constitution of symbo-
lism. The monkey intelligently uses a stick, but
for lack of an idea, of a cerebral assembly
[montage] corresponding to the stick, it does
not put it in reserve or set it aside as a “perma-
nent tool.” The constitution of a symbolic
activity was the decisive fact, much more than
the use of a tool for a present problem. It is
this fact that has allowed for both social
culture and external technics.
Bergson has tried to escape from the common
error for which all panpsychists fall, which con-
sists in attributing to instinct, formative or not,
an evanescent or asymptotically null conscious-
ness. Consciousness of the instinctive act, says
Bergson, is not null, but annulled [annulée]:
the representation is stopped up [bouchée] by
action. Consciousness is there, but neutralized.
As the action hesitates, the representation
appears (144). But this theory of Bergson’s is
very bizarre in addition to the fact that it agrees
badly with the conception of instinct-intuition
in contrast with pragmatic intelligence. It is
applied only to certain actions of man or
animals with advanced brains. The obstacle to
the action in progress requires “mental exper-
iments” based on imagination. But let us apply
it to the formative instinct or the instinct of
animals without developed brains: if we prevent
an embryo from gastrulating, or if we disturb a
Stentor with grains of carmine, it is very doubtful
that a representational consciousness appears.
 instinct, consciousness, life
The mistake is to make “consciousness” the
synonym for “representation.” Representational
consciousness is only a secondary consciousness,
involving a cerebral tissue modulated by external
objects. Primary consciousness is the very form
of organization and of its behaviours, as it is in
itself, without having to reflect the image of
another thing. It is presentation (of itself), and
not re-presentation (of another thing). This
form for itself is perfectly distinct and precise,
as precise and distinct as a visual field. But it is
a visual field in which it would see only itself
and its own possibilities. Existing as an absolute
domain of space and time, it is present unitarily
to its own parts and to its own thematic develop-
ment as well.
As for the fabrication of tools, Bergson does
not realize that representational, cerebral con-
sciousness is itself possible only through the
primary consciousness of the cerebral tissue as
organic tissue. We only see things, and we
only fabricate them, because our protoplasmic
tissue “sees” and “fabricates” itself.
All individualized forms, cerebral, proto-
plasmic, or even chemical, are indissolubly
“conscious.” Consciousness is not a “current
sent through matter,” as Bergson says in an
unfortunate metaphor.16 Matter as such,
apart from religious or philosophical myths,
is only a secondary mode of primary individua-
lized forms when they constitute aggregates
edge to edge [bord à bord], without their own
unity.
Bergson’s real philosophical misfortune is to
have been born at a very bad time. At the end of
the nineteenth century, one had doubts about
the artificial character of mechanistic and deter-
ministic science but one saw no other solution
than to seek the truth outside of science. One
could not anticipate the scientific revolution
that micro-physics was about to bring by disco-
vering the domains of individuality beneath the
secondary and statistical laws. Micro-physics
also permits one to follow the progressive com-
plication of lineages of individualities, from the
atom to macro-molecules, to viruses, to cells, to
multicellular organisms on the one hand, and
the appearance of classical secondary laws
when multitudes of individuals are considered
in their assembly [ensemble] and in their stat-
istical effects on the other.
Bergson works true wonders to catch a
glimpse of what would come clearly to the scien-
tists themselves a few years after Creative Evol-
ution. His conception of the “ideal genesis of
matter,” relaxing in geometry and numbers; his
conception of movement as primary relative to
substantial mobiles (301–02); his conception of
the appearance of quality, are so many presenti-
ments: in effect, two physics were to be consti-
tuted, or rather two stages of physics and of
science in general. Science itself would soon
realize that mechanisms at our scale and the prin-
ciples of mechanics, far from being fundamental,
represent, if not a “relaxation,” as Bergson said,
at least a statistical appearance obtained from
leaving out a very large number of “actions.”
These actions, individualized, irreducible to
mechanical operations – since they appear only
as the result of these actions – already have the
essential characteristics of actions attributable
to the most complex individualities. They are
expressed by “an energy multiplied by time,”
which is not very far from Bergson’s fundamen-
tal thesis. Time is inherent in their structure,
time is structuration of action, emerging and
creating, and is not the simple unfolding of an
already given spatial structure.
Bergson was born relative to the scientific
revolution of the twentieth century as if Des-
cartes had been born before Galileo and had
written almost all the same things, the Medita-
tions and the Principles. We will appreciate
Bergson’s merit all the more if we consider
that even today so many philosophers, so
many scientists lost in their speciality, and
especially so many biologists – such as Fonte-
nelle, too faithful to the Cartesianism of his
youth – still imagine that science has remained
with the principles of nineteenth-century
physics and completely misunderstands the
extent of the revolution brought about by
micro-physics. This revolution
is as important as the Galilean
revolution, which it corrects –
otherwise than Bergson had
anticipated, but in the sense of
his presentiments.
144

notes
Raymond Ruyer’s “Bergson et le Sphex ammo-
phile” was first published in French in Revue de
métaphysique et de morale 64.2 (1959): 163–79.
The article is reproduced here in English by kind
permission of Presses Universitaires de France,
the publisher of the original article.
1 Although this isolation continues to this day –
the first volume to appear on Ruyer’s thought in
any language was the publication of conference
proceedings (Vax and Wunenberger) – the ice
appears to be thawing. Two studies of Ruyer’s
work as a whole have appeared recently. See
Colonna, Ruyer; Louis and Louis. In the world of
French philosophy, scholars are beginning to
appreciate the extent to which Ruyer influenced
better known figures such as Simondon and
Deleuze as well. The influence is clearest in Simon-
don’s case, as he explicitly responded to some of
Ruyer’s work and incorporated revised versions
of its themes into his own thinking (cf. Gagnon;
Bardin). Ruyer’s influence on Deleuze, although
apparently profound, was somewhat subterranean,
and is still in the process of being excavated and
explained (cf. Bogue; Roffe).
2 These details are recounted by Ruyer himself in
the first and only volume of his Souvenirs.
3 On the distinction between primary and second-
ary consciousness in Ruyer, and the problems that
it appears to court, see the incisive analysis in
Barbaras.
4 Cf. ibid. 18–19.
5 This connection remains largely overlooked in
the secondary literature. Kerslake is an important
exception, as it includes what is perhaps the only
mention in English scholarship of Ruyer’s defence
of Bergson’s theory of instinct – with reference
to the article translated below (62–65). Bremondy
is a notable exception as well, though its focus is on
Ruyer’s critique of Bergson’s theory of perception
and thus does not explore the possibility of positive
overlap between the two thinkers. Ansell-Pearson
refers to Bremondy’s article and its relevance for
an understanding of the significance of Ruyer and
Bergson for Deleuze. Colonna refers to some of
Ruyer’s attempts to position himself vis-à-vis
Bergson (Ruyer 20). Finally, Alliez makes brief
mention of the two together (236 ff.). The litera-
ture remains incomplete. We offer this article in
145
ruyer
large part as a contribution to beginning to fill
this gap. Beyond the commonalities between
Bergson and Ruyer catalogued above, there are a
number that still remain to be explored as well.
These include, for instance, the location of
freedom internal to the activity of nature as an
immanent expression of all self-constituting forms
(Ruyer) or self-organizing centres of action
(Bergson), as well as the complex relationship
between naturalized freedom and naturalized con-
sciousness, such that both thinkers appear in their
way to be endorsing a kind of panpsychism. This
last point, however, is one on which Ruyer will dis-
tinguish himself from Bergson by insisting on a dis-
tinction between two forms of consciousness. We
return to this consideration below.
6 The catalogue of Ruyer’s other invocations of
Bergson is, as we have indicated above, brief. All
mention of Bergson in Neofinalism is critical and
insubstantial (8, 12, 38, 128, 137, 208). There are
only two mentions of Bergson in La Genèse, and,
again, neither is very significant (66, 122). One of
few positive mentions of Bergson appears in “The
Vital Domain of Animals and the Religious World
of Man,” which was translated into English in
1957, two years before the publication of
“Bergson et le Sphex ammophile.” In this article,
Ruyer refers to Bergson’s discussion of the
instincts of the Sphex wasp in order to deny the
contention that animals are world-less automatons
merely mechanically reacting to stimuli (40). Ruyer
suggests that Bergson’s discussion of wasps shows
that instinct is a means of access to another crea-
ture, a kind of supple knowledge, not the deploy-
ment of a blind mechanism triggered by the right
cues. “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” appears
to return to, expand upon, and complete this
appreciation for the role played by parasitism in
Bergson’s thought. Finally, a last brief engagement
with Bergson appears in an English article from
1988 excerpted from what was at the time a still
unpublished work, entitled Au Dieu inconnu,
Source de toute vie. This work was since published
in 2013 under the new title L’Embryogenèse du
monde et le Dieu silencieux. The excerpted trans-
lation, “There is No Subconscious: Embryogenesis
and Memory,” recalls some of the argumentation
of “Bergson et le Sphex ammophile” on the topic
of memory (“No Subconscious” 35–36). Ruyer
argues, contra Bergson, that habitual memory is
delocalized and thematic, continuous with embryo-
nic developmental and therefore virtual, while
 instinct, consciousness, life
image memory is abstracted from it. He thus
inverts the priority of Bergson’s distinction
between the two, and concludes that Bergson’s
conception is “not only false, but the very antipode
of the truth” (ibid.). It is worth noting that Ruyer’s
discussion of the topic in “Bergson et le Sphex
ammophile” is far less critical.
7 Trans. Tano S. Posteraro. This article originally
appeared in French in 1959, as “Bergson et le
Sphex ammophile,” in the Revue de métaphysique
et de morale 64.2, 163–79. The title is somewhat
confusing. Ammophila is the name of a genus in
the thread-waisted wasp family; Sphex is the
name of another.
8 Fabre, Nouveaux souvenirs 114 qtd in Bergson,
Creative Evolution 172.
9 Peckham and Peckham 28.
10 Bergson, Creative Evolution 168–69.
11 Ruyer seems to run together the following two
passages from Bergson, Creative Evolution 171. (1) “In
other words, instinct is everywhere complete, but it
is more or less simplified, and, above all, simplified
differently”; (2) “We seem rather to be before a
musical theme, which had first been transposed,
the theme as a whole, into a certain number of
tones and on which, still the whole theme, different
variations had been played […]” [Translator’s note.]
12 Cf. Tinbergen, L’Étude 280.
13 Bergson, Matter 37–38. Note that by rejecting
Bergson’s theory we do not return to the theory
of “projection.” Our thesis is that the visual sen-
sation is in our head, and that it stays there. It has
no more to be projected than to be straightened
since it is the whole of our visual consciousness.
14 Cf. especially Tinbergen, L’Étude; Social
Behaviour.
15 Ruyer is referring again to Bergson, Creative
Evolution 171 (see n. 9). [Translator’s note.]
16 Ruyer is referring to ibid. 265. [Translator’s
note.]
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