Bergson, Henri
Bergson, Henri
(1859-1941) As the most influential of modern temporalistic, anti-mechanistic and spiritualistic metaphysics, Bergson’s writings (Les donnees immediates de l’experience, Matiere et Memoire, L’evolution creatrtce, Le rire, Introduction a la metaphysique, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, etc.) were aimed against the dogmatic and crude naturalism, and the mechanistic and static materialism which reached their heights in the second half of the last century.
The vital center of his doctrine is duration rather than intuition. Duration is the original thing in itself, the “substance” of philosophic tradition, except that to Bergson it is a specific experience, revealed to the individual in immediate experience. All things, consciousness, matter, time, evolution, motion and the absolute are so many specialized tensional forms of duration. The phrase elan vital sums up his vitalistic doctrine that there is an original life force, that it has passed from one generation of living beings to another by way of developed individual organisms, these being the connecting links between the generations. Bergson regards as pseudo-evolutionary the effort to arrange all living beings into a grand uni-linear series. True or creative evolution is pluri-dimensional, i.e., the life force is conserved in every line of evolution of living beings, causing all of the numerous varieties of living forms, creating all new species, and dividing itself more and more as it advances. As the vital impetus is not moving towards any fixed, predetermined and final end, an immanent teleology is within the life force itself.
It is an error to see Bergson’s philosophy as being exclusively an intuitive critique of knowledge. Such a mode of exposition constructs of his thought a mere “ism”, a species of intuitionalism. Bergson was the first to try to give the term intuition a scientific basis. He transformed and regrounded the static pattern of the older forms of intuitionism by giving it a biogenetic and psychologically dynamic justification. Intuitive knowledge is not limited to the favored few, is not a private, purely solipsistic affair, but is a general property of all thinking minds. Bergson’s conception of intuition represents a fusion of scientific objectivity and artistic directness.
Moreover, it is a serious wide-spread error of interpretation to consider Bergson as an anti-intellectualist. His alleged anti-intellectualism should be considered as a protest against taking the static materialism and spatialization of Newton’s conception of nature is being anything but a high abstraction, as a rejection of the extreme claims of mechanistic and materialistic science, as an effort of reason to transcend itself in harmony with the greatest idealistic thinkers, as an effort of thinkers to stress the dynamic nature of reality, and as a persistent criticism of reason, a continuation of the Kantian tradition. His much misread conception of intuition may be viewed as akin to Spinoza’s intuitio, to wita completion rather than a rejection of reason. — H.H.