Even More on Bergson...
Life...
Becoming and Duration...
Free Will...
Intuition...
Metaphysics...
Body..
Elan Vital...
Born 1859 in Paris (the year of the publication Darwins Origin of the
Species)into a Jewish family. Held a number of posts including a post
at Ecole Normale Superieure as well as receiving the Chair de Philosophie
at the College de France. His lectures between 1900 and 1924 were very
fashionable in Paris. Academies Francais in 1914 and a Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1928.
Later in life he became more sympathetic to Catholicism; in his will he
states that the only thing stopping him being a catholic was his jewish
background, and a desire to sympathise with it in a time of Jewish persecution.
He dies in occupied Paris, after registering as a jew, which he could
have easily avoided.
His influence was marked. Proust use of Bergson is probably the most famous
- the invocation of memory from a smell in `the madeline incident' is
heavily influenced by Bergsons idea of Duree
Bergson reacts strongly against 19th century scientific positivism,
which had a dim view of `Metaphysics'. In Bergsons view Metaphysics is
the key, but he takes care to redefine it, taking away it's traditional
sense of evaluation of fixed meta truths, and making it instead as that
which is alive and constantly changing, and is apprehended by `intuition'.
Intuition is the basis of Metaphysics because it grasps things from the
inside (absolutely)rather than as an external (relative) truth. Intuition
is a kind of intellectual sympathy where the subject coincides with what
is unique and inexpressable; the difference between a map of a city and
the knowledge of someone who lives there.
This is clearly in opposition to `analysis' (the assembling of many views
to gain a picture of the whole) Intuition is a method is metaphysics,
analysis is a method of mathematics and propositional, rather than of
coincidence. Bergson wouldn't dismiss analytic knowledge per se, it is
vital in the way we get around the world, and accords with `common sense'.
However, the only thing that can be really comprehended from the inside
is ourselves, which is a little contradictory in a metaphysics. (See next
section)
Bergson goes on to examine the issue of time. In a traditional scientific
materialist way, time is characterised by it's strict relationship to
space, and a lack of direction in that events may be categorised as separate
and therefore theoretically reversible. However Bergson posits another
time experience alongside the space/time continuum, that of Duree, or
duration, which is the subjects sense of becoming in time instead of being
in it. Intensely local and unmeasurable except by impressions (there's
the Proust connection) this duree has a firm direction; from the past,
through the present and into the future. Also duree has no sharp boundaries
between past present and future, there is always a flow effect, a blurring
of any arbitrary drawing of boundaries. In this sense duree is our inner
experience, unique and unsharable.
Duree is identified as occurring at only the deepest and most personal
level of the self, overlaid with a plethora of events where we are acting
as being with attributes, common sense and so forth. The closer we get
to this inner level, the less it will be able to be expressed in public
language.
Free Will
This unique take on the individuality of an individuals experience, enabled Bergson to avoid the traditional problems of free will (one, that every thing is determined, two that everything is random) and at the deepest individual level emotions, thoughts etc flow into each other in such a way that to draw a cause and effect is pointless. In this way, even though I can say that, yes, the madeline holds associative memories, only Proust can have Prousts Duree experience. In the same way, difficult moral or emotional questions can not be solved by resorting to reason alone, or to a systematic psychology; there comes a point where everyone has to make decisions completely for and by oneself. Likewise, the libertarian view is subject to it's own contradictory logic; if to be free is to be uncaused, then you could never make a choice because making a choice is to have a cause for your actions (even in Duree).
There is quite a leap in Bergson from intuition as a term for the way we experience ourselves from the inside and a way of outlining a metaphysics: to be me is different from grasping the truth of what being me is. Bergson was aware of this leap, and his first conceptions of time were not generated by dwelling on how we are in the world, but by examining the more traditional problem of Zenos' Paradoxes and their classically metaphysical construct. To look into the whole thing more, Bergson started to draw on the worlds of biological life and evolution, which he saw as intuitive things, and look at becoming in this wider context; the connections between the life of the mind and the life of the body in a developing socius.
Body.
Also Bergson sets up a new attitude to the body, somewhat more sympathetic to Descartes Mind/Body split and Dualisitc approaches to the body in general. Bergson affirms both the reality of the spirit and the reality of the body. But rather than separating them he does a `gradient fill' on them, that is they shade into each other. It's impossible to treat our bodies as just another object, it is the way I interact with things around me, an inseparable part of our way of becoming in the world. Any attempt to apprehend the world is conditioned by our body, our sense of duree, which has a large component of bodily resonance. With these kinds of ideas, Bergson laid a way for a long line of French Philosophy (in particular but not exclusively) that deals with embodiment.
Elan Vital...
Bergson published Creative Evolution in 1907. In it he tied together the ideas of duree with general concepts of the evolution of life. Understood from a contemporary basis of chaos theory, and the idea of an infinite zoom - where mass effects can be observed from the behaviour of cells through to the behaviour of galaxies - this makes good sense.
Dissatisfied by Darwinian emphasis on a sort of mathematical determinacy,
Bergson developed ideas that related to complexity - why should a life
form actually be bothered to evolve into a complex life form when it could
survive just as well as a simple one? He characterised evolution as emergent
and creative. hE believed that there was no plan to evolution, and that
change could only be explained retrospectively and not predicted. This
idea lives on through the `punctuated equilibria' theory of development,
which itself ties in nicely with the bifurcation thing, where a system
goes from regular to chaotic to regular motion again unaided and unpredictably.
There is also nice correlation in all this to body-memory.