BACK TO BERGSON...

 

(The obvious glaring omission of Nietzsche from the chronological sequence of major philosophers in the present Magnificent Shadows section, is easily explained by the fact that I have a separate Nietzsche section in this book, comprising over a hundred entries. Some of these have already been posted, many more are waiting to be posted in their good time. Meanwhile, let us move on with Henri Bergson.)

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Once again I have assigned myself a task for the future: How is Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah purely Bergsonian, in Bertrand Russell’s description? This will have to be an interesting separate entry, but now it is nothing more than a memo to myself. In other words, leaving Shaw behind, let us proceed with Bergson.

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Henri Bergson (1859-1941) has already been discussed elsewhere, but rather as a person whereas here he is treated only as a philosopher. Considering his generally acknowledged importance as a great groundbreaker in philosophy, there are good grounds for allotting him more than one entry, as the reader will soon see and hopefully agree with.

Bergson is credited with being the first proponent of process philosophy which rejects static values in favor of values of motion, change, and evolution. He sees novelty as pure creation rather than as the unraveling of a predetermined program. His philosophy puts emphasis on pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom. This is how he explains his “seeing the light,” in a letter to (the) William James:

I had remained up to that time wholly imbued with mechanistic theories to which I had been led at an early date by the reading of Herbert Spencer. It was the analysis of the notion of time, as it enters into mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw to my great surprise, that scientific time does not endure, that positive science consists essentially in the elimination of duration. This was the point of departure of a series of reflections which brought me by gradual steps to reject almost all of what I had hitherto accepted, and to change my point of view completely.

The first result of this change was his work Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience, which was an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or lived time, as opposed to what he viewed as the spatialized conception of time, measured by a clock, employed by science. He proceeded by analyzing the awareness that man has of his inner self to show that psychological facts are qualitatively different from any other, and charged psychologists in particular with falsifying the facts by trying to quantify and number them.

Next, he undertook the study of the relation between mind and body, the findings published in 1896 under the famous title Matière et Mémoire, whose conclusion was that memory, and so mind or soul, is independent of body and makes use of it to carry out its own purposes.

His most famous work, the 1907 L’Évolution Créatrice, accepts evolution as a scientific fact, but criticizes its philosophical interpretations for failing to see the importance of duration, and hence missing the unique nature of life. Introducing the concept of élan vital, continually developing and generating new forms, he is treating evolution as a creative, and not mechanistic, process.

His last major work, the 1932 Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion, identifies two moralities, or rather two sources: the one having its roots in the intelligence (the rational source, leading to science and its mechanistic ideal), and the other based on intuition (the irrational source, finding its expression not only in the free creativity of art and philosophy, but also in the mystical experience of the saints). In this last major book, Bergson comes the closest he has ever been to the Catholic notion of God. As he acknowledges in his 1937 Will, My reflections led me closer and closer to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism. He, however, never converted, as I had a chance to explain in my Bergsonian entry Shema Yisroel in the Tikkun Olam section, as he himself had a chance to explain before his death: I would have become a convert, had I never foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted. He did remain, to the end, true to his word, which was an act of unbelievable courage, as he must have realized that he would thus be destined to always stand alone in the eyes of posterity: as an unconverted Jew to the gentiles, and as a spiritual traitor to the Jews.