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2024, Thaumàzein
Henri Bergson. Creative Evolution and Philosophy of Life Submission deadlines: May 31, 2023 (Title & Abstract) October 31, 2023 (Full Text) Vol. 12, Issue 1, 2024 [https://www.thaumazein.it/] Edited by Guido Cusinato, Enrica Lisciani Petrini, Donatella Pagliacci
In this paper I explore Henri Bergson’s notion of the meaning of life by focusing on two places where he discusses it in his work. The first is Creative Evolution (1907, CE), where a bio-ontological meaning of life is proposed in terms of the ongoing ‘advance’ of the élan vital. Bergson conceives of this vital tendency towards freer activity in terms of nature’s pursuit of a mechanics that would triumph over mechanism. The second is a lesser-known paper called ‘Psycho-physical Parallelism and Positive Metaphysics’ (1901, ‘PPPM’), where Bergson articulates the same themes concerning the evolutionary relationship between life and matter, only this time gives an ethical rendition of the meaning of life. Discerning the true sense of the distinction between mind and body, he claims, will allow us to understand the reason they ‘unite and collaborate’, and thereby to speculate on thought’s apparent trajectory towards an independence from matter. While the latter position appears to be inscribed within the former, this continuity nonetheless resists reducing the ethical to a biological essentialism. This is ensured by the ‘virtual’ nature he ascribes to life’s movement, which shows that the ethical meaning of life is ultimately grounded in an ontology premised upon the irreducibly open and inventive rather than on the reductively closed and repetitive. In turn, this conception of life’s virtuality further illuminates what Bergson might mean, from an ethical perspective, as regards a progressive independence from matter, which I propose in terms of a withdrawal from the body and the present, with a view to a superior moral activity.
The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy (ed. Scott M. Campbell, Paul W. Bruno), Bloomsbury
The Comprehensive Meaning of Life in Bergson2013 •
This chapter shows that if there are good reasons to consider Henri Bergson as one of the major figures in the filed of “philosophy of life”, it is still necessary to underline that the concept of life is here inseparable from the one of duration, which has itself ontological and epistemological entailments. I show that Creative Evolution is situated at the heart of this complex problematic, and proposes a theory of life that has strong ties with a critical theory of knowledge, through which Bergson is led to specify how science and metaphysics are different yet complementary. Once this is made clear, it is possible to grasp what Bergson calls “the true nature” of life. Traced back to duration, the notion of “life” acquires its comprehensive meaning and integrates the different dimensions that ordinary language spontaneously gives to it when speaking about organic, psychic, or even social life.
Background: A brief sketch of the work Sketching the Theory of Knowledge Two orders at large 1.The idea of disorder 2.The problem of Genera The problems of Laws The idea of disorder is an oscillation between the later two kinds of orders Creation and Evolution 1.The ideal genesis of matter 2. The origin and function of life The essential and accidental in the vital process (Vital Impetus) and in the Evolutionary Movement
2022 •
By the time of Creative Evolution, the vitalism controversy had more or less come to settle around the experimental embryology of Hans Driesch. Bergson mentioned Driesch in a footnote to Creative Evolution’s brief critical discussion of vitalism; Driesch referred to Bergson repeatedly and wrote a positive review of Bergson’s book; and the two have been considered together under the banner of “neo-vitalism” ever since. In this paper, I argue that the idea that Bergson is a neo-vitalist is a mistake. To demonstrate it, I present a brief overview of Driesch’s vitalism. Then I show that Bergson had already provided a criticism of it. As a consequence, Bergson’s own so-called vital principle —the élan vital––has to be conceived in a different way. It is, Bergson says, only an image for life. I show how he draws this image from the psychological register, from his study of effort in particular. By tracing it back to that context, I suggest that the élan can be conceived as an image for a form of effort that is de-subjectivized and generalized across the evolutionary process. In Creative Evolution, Bergson conceives this form of effort as tendency. Tendency is almost nothing like a vital principle in Driesch’s sense. I conclude by examining the extent to which this interpretation clarifies Bergson’s view of evolutionary convergence, which remains key for his relevance to the study of evolution today.
British journal for the history of philosophy
Bergson and the spiritualist origins of the ideology of creativity2020 •
Henri Bergson (1859-1940), the most prominent member of the nineteenth- century French spiritualist tradition, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as a practice consisting in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In this essay I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative intellectual practice was the result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existing spiritualist framework, between neo-Kantianism and evolutionism, which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging social sciences; Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy. This idea of philosophy as creation of concepts, is ideological insofar it was both anachronistic and a tool used in order to legitimate a type of practice that was under attack at that moment. Although it was a ‘French ideology,’ we can find similar positions in Germany at the same moment, especially in Nietzsche and in the so-called ‘philosophies of life’
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible
The Possible in the Life and Work of Henri Bergson2022 •
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) contributed major philosophical works on time, consciousness, evolution, and morality. His thinking remains central to debates on fundamental issues within philosophy and social science, particular around "process ontology." Bergson's work was of enormous influence to early-twentiethcentury social science, and has seen a resurgence in the twenty-first century. This is in part due to the reception of Gilles Deleuze's work, which engaged extensively with Bergson. In this entry, we focus on Bergson's treatment of the relationship between "the possible" and "the real." Bergson inverts the Platonic organization of these terms, where the real is constituted by the selection of ideal forms of possible. Bergson argues that this makes it impossible to understand how "unforseeable novelty" might emerge in the world. The possible is instead a "mirage" retrospectively posited as prior to the real. This treatment is part of a broader project of overcoming metaphysical mistakes which consist in seeing one philosophical term as adding fullness and positivity to another. In its place, Bersgson offers an account of life as dynamic, autopoietic emergence. In the final part of the entry we describe how an engagement with Bergson can afford social science approaches to memory, imagination, and lived experience as emergent patternings of life responding to life.
Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory
Henri Bergson (Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory, forthcoming)International Journal for Philosophical Studies
'Inheritance, Originality and the Will: Bergson and Heidegger on Creation', IJPS2014 •
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