Logic of Fluidity

Translated by Thao Nguyen

[Jean Epstein, “Logique du fluide,” Alcool et cinéma (unpublished in Epstein's lifetime), in ESC2, pp. 210-215.]

Spoken language, verbal thought, and their logic have been formed by and for man's relationship with his fellow human beings and his surroundings in order to rule the outside world, and also under the rule and after the model of this world as we perceive it through our naked senses. Depending on circumstances, either immobile or changing figures could predominate among aspects of this physical world, but the human mind gave precedence, a special attention, to diversified forms that with more or less speed appear constant or rigid, as if they were signs and means of safety, markers of exploration and study. Up to this day, we are left, from such esteem for permanence, with an atavistic habit. We always particularly enjoy the most resistant constructions, the hardest materials, unchangeable measurements, obstinate characters, immutable divinities and ideals. We despise fragility, softness, and fickleness. Not only is it our empirical practice and our science, but it is also our religion, our philosophy, and our morals that have been first conceived according to the primacy of solid elements.

Without doubt, Heraclitus reacted against this with his doctrine of universal conflict and universal movement, but, against this Ionian school, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea championed the cult of what always remains equal to itself, the faith in a permanent identity, foundation of the entire rational system.1 This Eleaticism so profoundly influenced thought that twenty centuries went by before Heraclitus’ conceptions could find credibility with a rather wide audience – before Bruno, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Engels, et al. succeed in rehabilitating becomingness, change, and flux as essential aspects of being. These new philosophies of mobility found matching and supporting theory in certain sciences that we are beginning to interpret any material, any energy, any life, as a result of the incessant moving of atoms, of a perpetual molecular agitation, of an absolutely general evolution. But this philosophy as well as this science, neither of which had much visibility and were reserved to a limited audience, could only have an indirect and practically insignificant influence on the masses’ mentality.