Creativity
Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasises pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.[36]
Criticizing Kant's theory of knowledge exposed in the Critique of Pure Reason and his conception of truth – which he compares to Plato's conception of truth as its symmetrical inversion (order of nature/order of thought) – Bergson attempted to redefine the relations between science and metaphysics, intelligence and intuition, and insisted on the necessity of increasing thought's possibility through the use of intuition, which, according to him, alone approached a knowledge of the absolute and of real life, understood as pure duration. Because of his (relative) criticism of intelligence, he makes a frequent use of images and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use of concepts, which (he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things. For instance, he says in The Creative Evolution (chap. III) that thought in itself would never have thought it possible for the human being to swim, as it cannot deduce swimming from walking. For swimming to be possible, man must throw itself in water, and only then can thought consider swimming as possible. Intelligence, for Bergson, is a practical faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty, a product of evolution used by man to survive. If metaphysics is to avoid "false problems", it should not extend the abstract concepts of intelligence to pure speculation, but rather use intuition.[37]
The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.[38]
Bergson's Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) can be seen as a response to the mechanistic philosophies of his time,[39] but also to the failure of finalism.[18] Indeed, he considers that finalism is unable to explain "duration" and the "continuous creation of life", as it only explains life as the progressive development of an initially determined program – a notion which remains, for example, in the expression of a "genetic program";[18] such a description of finalism was adopted, for instance, by Leibniz.[18] It clearly announces Alfred North Whitehead's.
Bergson regarded planning beforehand for the future as impossible, since time itself unravels unforeseen possibilities. Indeed, one could always explain a historical event retrospectively by its conditions of possibility. But, in the introduction to the Pensée et le mouvant, he explains that such an event created retrospectively its causes, taking the example of the creation of a work of art, for example a symphony: it was impossible to predict what would be the symphony of the future, as if the musician knew what symphony would be the best for his time, he would realize it. In his words, the effect created its cause. Henceforth, he attempted to find a third way between mechanism and finalism, through the notion of an original impulse, the élan vital, in life, which dispersed itself through evolution into contradictory tendencies (he substituted to the finalist notion of a teleological aim a notion of an original impulse).
Duration
See also: Duration (philosophy)
The foundation of Henri Bergson's philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer's philosophy.[39] Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and consciousness in his doctoral thesis Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.[40]
Kant believed that free will (better perceived as The Will) could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of our private existence in the universe, separate to water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, we could therefore not know whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.[40] Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.[41] In reality, Bergson argued, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. Based on this he concluded that determinism is an impossibility and free will pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration.[42]
Intuitionism
See also: Intuition (Bergson)
Duration, as defined by Bergson, then is a unity and a multiplicity, but, being mobile, it cannot be grasped through immobile concepts. Bergson hence argues that one can grasp it only through his method of intuition. Two images from Henri Bergson's An Introduction to Metaphysics may help one to grasp Bergson's term intuition, the limits of concepts, and the ability of intuition to grasp the absolute. The first image is that of a city. Analysis, or the creation of concepts through the divisions of points of view, can only ever give us a model of the city through a construction of photographs taken from every possible point of view, yet it can never give us the dimensional value of walking in the city itself. One can only grasp this through intuition; likewise the experience of reading a line of Homer. One may translate the line and pile commentary upon commentary, but this commentary too shall never grasp the simple dimensional value of experiencing the poem in its originality itself. The method of intuition, then, is that of getting back to the things themselves.[43]
Élan vital
See also: Élan vital
Élan vital ranks as Bergson's third essential concept, after Duration and intuition. An idea with the goal of explaining evolution, the élan vital first appeared in 1907's Creative Evolution. Bergson portrays élan vital as a kind of vital impetus which explains evolution in a less mechanical and more lively manner, as well as accounting for the creative impulse of mankind. This concept led several authors to characterize Bergson as a supporter of vitalism—although he criticized it explicitly in The Creative Evolution, as he thought, against Driesch and Johannes Reinke (whom he cited) that there is neither "purely internal finality nor clearly cut individuality in nature":[44]
Hereby lies the stumbling block of vitalist theories ... It is thus in vain that one pretends to reduce finality to the individuality of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it encompasses the whole of life in one indivisible embrace.[45]
Laughter
In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Bergson develops a theory not of laughter itself but of how laughter can be provoked (see his objection to Delage, published in the 23rd edition of the essay).[18] He describes the process of laughter (refusing to give a conceptual definition which would not approach its reality[18]), used in particular by comics and clowns, as caricature of the mechanistic nature of humans (habits, automatic acts, etc.), one of the two tendencies of life (degradation towards inert matter and mechanism, and continual creation of new forms).[18] However, Bergson warns us that laughter's criterion of what should be laughed at is not a moral criterion and that it can in fact cause serious damage to a person's self-esteem.[46] This essay made his opposition to the Cartesian theory of the animal-machine obvious.[18]
Reception
From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism from different quarters, although he also became very popular and durably influenced French philosophy. The mathematician Édouard Le Roy became Bergson's main disciple. Nonetheless, Suzanne Guerlac has argued that his institutional position at the Collège de France, delivering lectures to a general audience, may have retarded the systematic reception of his thought: "Bergson achieved enormous popular success in this context, often due to the emotional appeal of his ideas. But he did not have the equivalent of graduate students who might have become rigorous interpreters of his thought. Thus Bergson's philosophy—in principle open and nonsystematic—was easily borrowed piecemeal and altered by enthusiastic admirers".[47]
Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged Bergson's influence on his process philosophy in his 1929 Process and Reality.[48] However, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead's collaborator on Principia Mathematica, was not so entranced by Bergson's philosophy. Although acknowledging Bergson's literary skills, Russell saw Bergson's arguments at best as persuasive or emotive speculation but not at all as any worthwhile example of sound reasoning or philosophical insight.[49] The epistemologist Gaston Bachelard explicitly alluded to him in the last pages of his 1938 book The Formation of the Scientific Mind. Others influenced by Bergson include Vladimir Jankélévitch, who wrote a book on him in 1931,[50] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Gilles Deleuze who wrote Le bergsonisme in 1966.[51] Bergson also influenced the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas,[52] although Merleau-Ponty had reservations about Bergson's philosophy.[53] The Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis studied under Bergson in Paris and his writing and philosophy were profoundly influenced as a result.[54]
Many writers of the early 20th century criticized Bergson's intuitionism, indeterminism, psychologism and interpretation of the scientific impulse. Those who explicitly criticized Bergson, either in published articles or in letters, included Bertrand Russell[55] George Santayana,[56] G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger,[57] Julien Benda,[58] T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis,[59] Wallace Stevens,[60] Paul Valéry, André Gide, Jean Piaget,[61] Marxist philosophers Theodor W. Adorno,[62] Lucio Colletti,[63] Jean-Paul Sartre,[64] and Georges Politzer,[65] as well as Maurice Blanchot,[66] American philosophers such as Irving Babbitt, Arthur Lovejoy, Josiah Royce, The New Realists (Ralph B. Perry, E. B. Holt, and William Pepperell Montague), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake, Roy W. Sellars, C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Roger Fry (see his letters), Julian Huxley (in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis) and Virginia Woolf (for the latter, see Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table).[citation needed]
The Vatican accused Bergson of pantheism, while free-thinkers[who?] (who formed a large part of the teachers and professors of the French Third Republic) accused him of spiritualism. Still others have characterized his philosophy as a materialist emergentism – Samuel Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan explicitly claimed Bergson as their forebear.[18] According to Henri Hude (1990, II, p. 142), who supports himself on the whole of Bergson's works as well as his now published courses, accusing him of pantheism is a "counter-sense". Hude alleges that a mystical experience, roughly outlined at the end of Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, is the inner principle of his whole philosophy, although this has been contested by other commentators.
Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception to those who associated him with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing his work with that of Bergson he wrote, "a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his utmost to muddle all distinctions." William James's students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson. See, for example, Horace Kallen's book on the subject James and Bergson. As Jean Wahl described the "ultimate disagreement" between James and Bergson in his System of Metaphysics: "for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action ... must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth"[page needed]. Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will overestimate Bergson's influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for "the spirit of the age".
As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked certain key concepts in Bergson's philosophy, above all his view of the New and the indeterminate:
the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time," he writes in his book on Hermann Lotze, "does not practically affect the method of investigation; ... the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. This is no great renunciation; for that consummation of science ... is by no one really expected.
According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, claims which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson's understanding of number in chapter two of Time and Free-will. According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor ("extended images") to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. "Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number possible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general", writes Russell (see The Philosophy of Bergson[page needed] and A History of Western Philosophy[page needed]).
Furthermore, writers such as Russell, Wittgenstein, and James saw élan vital as a projection of subjectivity onto the world. The external world, according to certain[which?] theories of probability, provides less and less indeterminism with further refinement of scientific method. In brief, one should not confuse the moral, psychological, subjective demand for the new, the underivable and the unexplained with the universe.[citation needed] One's subjective sense of duration differs the (non-human) world, a difference which, according to the ancient materialist Lucretius should not be characterized as either one of becoming or being, creation or destruction (De Rerum Natura).
Suzanne Guerlac has argued that the more recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Bergson is related to the growing influence of his follower Deleuze within continental philosophy: "If there is a return to Bergson today, then, it is largely due to Gilles Deleuze whose own work has etched the contours of the New Bergson. This is not only because Deleuze wrote about Bergson; it is also because Deleuze's own thought is deeply engaged with that of his predecessor, even when Bergson is not explicitly mentioned."[67] Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard agree with Guerlac that "the recent revitalization of Bergsonism ... is almost entirely due to Deleuze." They explain that Bergson's concept of multiplicity "is at the very heart of Deleuze's thought, and duration is the model for all of Deleuze's 'becomings.' The other aspect that attracted Deleuze, which is indeed connected to the first, is Bergson's criticism of the concept of negation in Creative Evolution. ... Thus Bergson became a resource in the criticism of the Hegelian dialectic, the negative."[68]
Ilya Prigogine acknowledged Bergson's influence at his Nobel Prize reception lecture: "Since my adolescence, I have read many philosophical texts, and I still remember the spell L’évolution créatrice cast on me. More specifically, I felt that some essential message was embedded, still to be made explicit, in Bergson‘s remark: 'The more deeply we study the nature of time, the better we understand that duration means invention, creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new.'"[69]
Comparison to Indian philosophies
Several Hindu authors have found parallels to Hindu philosophy in Bergson's thought. The integrative evolutionism of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher from the early 20th century, has many similarities to Bergson's philosophy. Whether this represents a direct influence of Bergson is disputed, although Aurobindo was familiar with many Western philosophers.[70] K Narayanaswami Aiyer, a member of the Theosophical Society, published a pamphlet titled "Professor Bergson and the Hindu Vedanta", where he argued that Bergson's ideas on matter, consciousness, and evolution were in agreement with Vedantic and Puranic explanations.[71] Nalini Kanta Brahma, Marie Tudor Garland and Hope Fitz are other authors who have comparatively evaluated Hindu and Bergsonian philosophies, especially in relation to intuition, consciousness and evolution.[72][73][74]
Bibliography
• Bergson, H.; The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius (La Philosophie de la Poesie: le Génie de Lucrèce, 1884), Philosophical Library 1959: ISBN 978-1-4976-7566-7
• Bergson, H.; Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889). Allen & Unwin 1910, Dover Publications 2001: ISBN 0-486-41767-0 – Bergson's doctoral dissertation.
• Bergson, H.; Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire, 1896). Swan Sonnenschein 1911, Zone Books 1990: ISBN 0-942299-05-1, Dover Publications 2004: ISBN 0-486-43415-X.
• Bergson, H.; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Le rire, 1900). Green Integer 1998: ISBN 1-892295-02-4, Dover Publications 2005: ISBN 0-486-44380-9.
• Bergson, H.; Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice, 1907). Henry Holt and Company 1911, University Press of America 1983: ISBN 0-8191-3553-4, Dover Publications 1998: ISBN 0-486-40036-0, Kessinger Publishing 2003: ISBN 0-7661-4732-0, Cosimo 2005: ISBN 1-59605-309-7.
• Bergson, H.; Mind-energy (L'Énergie spirituelle, 1919). McMillan 1920. – a collection of essays and lectures. On Archive.org.
• Bergson, H.; Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe (Durée et simultanéité, 1922). Clinamen Press Ltd 1999. ISBN 1-903083-01-X.
• Bergson, H.; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion, 1932). University of Notre Dame Press 1977. ISBN 0-268-01835-9. On Archive.org.
• Bergson, H.; The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (La Pensée et le mouvant, 1934). Citadel Press 1946: ISBN 0-8065-2326-3 – essay collection, sequel to Mind-Energy, including 1903's "An Introduction to Metaphysics."
See also
• Philosophy of biology
• Psychosophy
• Intuition (Bergson)
• Duration (philosophy)
• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
References
1. John Ó Maoilearca, Beth Lord (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic, 2009, p. 204.
2. Ford, Russell (2004), 'Immanence and Method: Bergson's Early Reading of Spinoza,'. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 42(2): 171–92. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2004.tb00995.x
3. Astesiano, Lionel: Joie et liberté chez Bergson et Spinoza. (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016)
4. Hancock, Curtis L. (May 1995). "The Influence of Plotinus on Berson's Critique of Empirical Science". In R. Baine Harris (ed.). Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought. Congress of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies held in May 1995 at Vanderbilt University. 10. International Society for Neoplatonic Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press. p. 139ff. ISBN 978-0-7914-5275-2. Retrieved 10 May 2010. That the philosophy of Henri Bergson is significantly influenced by the doctrines of Plotinus is indicated by the many years Bergson devoted to teaching Plotinus and the many parallels in their respective philosophies. This influence has been discussed at some length by Bergson's contemporaries, such as Emile Bréhier and Rose-Marie Rossé-Bastide. ...
5. R. William Rauch, Politics and Belief in Contemporary France: Emmanuel Mounier and Christian Democracy, 1932–1950, Springer, 2012, p. 67.
6. Merquior, J. G. (1987). Foucault (Fontana Modern Masters series), University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-06062-8.
7. "The Nobel prize in Literature". Retrieved 15 November 2010.
8. Robert C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France, 1900–1914, Univ of Calgary Press (May 1988), ISBN 0919813305
9. Gelber, Nathan Michael (1 January 2007). "Bergson". Encyclopaedia Judaica. Archived from the original on 29 March 2015. Retrieved 7 December 2015.
10. Dynner, Glenn (2008). Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society. Oxford University Press. pp. 104–105. ISBN 019538265X.
11. Henri Bergson. 2014. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 13 August 2014, from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/top ... ri-Bergson
12. "Z ziemi polskiej do Nobla" [From the Polish lands to the Nobel Prize]. Wprost(in Polish). Warsaw: Agencja Wydawniczo-Reklamowa Wprost. 4 January 2008. Retrieved 10 May 2010. Polskie korzenie ma Henri Bergson, jeden z najwybitniejszych pisarzy, fizyk i filozof francuski żydowskiego pochodzenia. Jego ojcem był Michał Bergson z Warszawy, prawnuk Szmula Jakubowicza Sonnenberga, zwanego Zbytkowerem (1756–1801), żydowskiego kupca i bankiera. [Translation: Henri Bergson, one of the greatest French writers, physicists and philosophers of Jewish ancestry, had Polish roots. His father was Michael Bergson from Warsaw, the great-grandson of Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg – known as Zbytkower – (1756–1801), a Jewish merchant and banker.]
13. Testament starozakonnego Berka Szmula Sonnenberga z 1818 roku Archived28 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine
14. Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2007, p. 9.
15. Lawlor, Leonard and Moulard Leonard, Valentine, "Henri Bergson", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/bergson/>
16. Henri Hude, Bergson, Paris, Editions Universitaires, 1990, 2 volumes, quoted by Anne Fagot-Largeau in her 21 December 2006 course at the College of France
17. "Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques". 2 (17). Paris. 1878: 268. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
18. Anne Fagot-Largeau, 21 December 2006 course Archived 6 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine at the College of France (audio file of the course)
19. Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. London: Continuum, 2002, p. ix.
20. p. 39
21. Seth Benedict Graham A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSO-SOVIET ANEKDOT, 2003, p. 2
22. "Florence Meyer Blumenthal". Jewish Women's Archive, Michele Siegel.
23. Bergson and his philosophy Chapter 1: Life of Bergson
24. Bergson, Henri (1911). La perception du changement; conférences faites à l'Université d'Oxford les 26 et 27 mai 1911 [The perception of change: lectures delivered at the University of Oxford on 26 and 27 May 1911] (in French). Oxford: Clarendon. p. 37.
25. Reberioux, M. (January – March 1964). "La gauche socialiste française: La Guerre Sociale et Le Mouvement Socialiste face au problème colonial" [French right-wing socialism: La Guerre Sociale and Le Mouvement Socialiste in the face of the colonial problem]. Le Mouvement social (in French). Editions l'Atelier/Association Le Mouvement Social (46): 91–103. JSTOR 3777267. ... deux organes, d'ailleurs si dissembables, ou s'exprime l'extrême-gauche du courant socialiste français: le Mouvement socialiste d'Hubert Lagardelle et la Guerre sociale de Gustave Hervé. Jeune publications – le Mouvement socialiste est fondé en janvier 1899, la Guerre sociale en décembre 1906 –, dirigées par de jeunes équipes qui faisaient profession de rejeter le chauvinisme, d'être attentives au nouveau et de ne pas reculer devant les prises de position les plus véhémentes, ...
26. King Albert's book: a tribute to the Belgian king and people from representative men and women throughout the world. London: The Daily Telegraph. 1914. p. 187.
27. See Chapter III of The Creative Evolution
28. Canales J., The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton, Princeton Press, 2015.
29. Minutes of the meeting:Séance du 6 Avril 1922
30. Signs, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Richard C. McCleary, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964.
31. On the relation between Einstein and Bergson in this Committee, see Einstein, Bergson and the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations. On the involvement of Bergson (and Einstein) in the Committee in general, see Grandjean, Martin (2018). Les réseaux de la coopération intellectuelle. La Société des Nations comme actrice des échanges scientifiques et culturels dans l'entre-deux-guerres [The Networks of Intellectual Cooperation. The League of Nations as an Actor of the Scientific and Cultural Exchanges in the Inter-War Period] (in French). Lausanne: Université de Lausanne..
32. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
33. Quoted in: Zolli, Eugenio (2008) [1954]. Before the Dawn. Ignatius Press. p. 89. ISBN 978-1-58617-287-9.
34. Gilbert, Martin. The Second World War: A Complete History (p. 129). Rosetta Books. Kindle Edition.
35. "Henri Bergson – Philosopher – Biography". http://www.egs.edu. 3 January 1941. Archived from the original on 27 May 2010. Retrieved 17 February 2010.
36. Bergson explores these topics in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, in Matter and Memory, in Creative Evolution, and in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics.
37. Elie During, « Fantômes de problèmes », published by the Centre International d'Etudes de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine (short version first published in Le magazine littéraire, n°386, April 2000 (issue dedicated to Bergson)
38. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 11 to 14
39. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 11 to 13.
40. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Henri Bergson": "'Time and Free Will' has to be seen as an attack on Kant, for whom freedom belongs to a realm outside of space and time."
41. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Author's Preface.
42. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Henri Bergson": "For Bergson – and perhaps this is his greatest insight – freedom is mobility."
43. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 160 to 161. For a Whiteheadian use of Bergsonian intuition, see Michel Weber's Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics. Foreword by Nicholas Rescher, Frankfurt / Paris, Ontos Verlag, 2006.
44. L'Évolution créatrice, pp. 42–44; pp. 226–227
45. L'Évolution créatrice, pp. 42–43
46. Henri Bergson's theory of laughter. A brief summary.
47. Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 10
48. Cf. Ronny Desmet and Michel Weber (edited by), Whitehead. The Algebra of Metaphysics. Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute Memorandum, Louvain-la-Neuve, Éditions Chromatika, 2010 & Michel Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics. Foreword by Nicholas Rescher, Frankfurt / Paris, ontos verlag, 2006.
49. Russell, B.; "The Philosophy of Bergson," The Monist 1912 vol. 22 pp. 321–347
50. entitled Henri Bergson.
51. transl. 1988.
52. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 2000, pp. 322 and 393.
53. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2001). Bjelland, Andrew G.; Burke, Patrick (eds.). The incarnate subject : Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the union of body and soul. preface by Jacques Taminiaux ; translation by Paul B. Milan. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books. p. 152. ISBN 1-57392-915-8.
54. Peter Bien, Three Generations of Greek Writers, Published by Efstathiadis Group, Athens, 1983
55. see his short book Russell, Bertrand (1977). The philosophy of Bergson. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions. p. 36. ISBN 0-8414-7371-4.on the subject).
56. see his study on the author in "Winds of Doctrine"
57. see Being and Time, esp. sections 5, 10, and 82.
58. see his two books on the subject
59. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927), ed. Paul Edwards, Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1993.
60. "The Irrational Element in Poetry." 1936. Opus Posthumous. 1957. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Random House, 1990.
61. see his book Insights and Illusions of Philosophy 1972
62. see "Against Epistemology"
63. see "Hegel and Marxism"
64. see his early book Imagination – although Sartre also appropriated himself Bergsonian thesis on novelty as pure creation – see Situations I Gallimard 1947, p. 314
65. see the latter's two books on the subject: Le Bergsonisme, une Mystification Philosophique and La fin d'une parade philosophique: le Bergsonisme both of which had a tremendous effect on French existential phenomenology
66. see Bergson and Symbolism
67. Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 175.
68. Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard (12 July 2011) [18 May 2004], "The revitalization of Bergsonism", Henri Bergson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retrieved 20 August 2012
69. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemi ... graphical/
70. K Mackenzie Brown. "Hindu perspectives on evolution: Darwin, Dharma, and Design". Routledge, Jan 2012. Page 164-166
71. KN Aiyer. "Professor Bergson and the Hindu Vedanta". Vasanta Press. 1910. Pages 36 – 37.
72. Marie Tudor Garland. "Hindu Mind Training". Longmans, Green and Company, 1917. Page 20.
73. Nalini Kanta Brahma. "Philosophy of Hindu Sadhana". PHI Learning Private Ltd 2008.
74. Hope K Fitz. "Intuition: Its nature and uses in human experience." Motilal Banarsidass publishers 2000. Pages 22–30.
Further reading
• Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life. London: Routledge, 2002.
• Bachelard, Gaston. The Dialectic of Duration. Trans. Mary Mcallester Jones. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000.
• Bianco, Giuseppe. Après Bergson. Portrait de groupe avec philosophe. Paris, PUF, 2015.
• Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, Princeton Press, 2015.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
• Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre, Derrida-Bergson. Sur l'immédiateté, Hermann, Paris, coll. "Hermann Philosophie", 2014. ISBN 978-2-7056-8831-8
• Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
• Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
• Horkheimer, Max. "On Bergson's Metaphysics of Time." Trans. Peter Thomas, revised by Stewart Martin. Radical Philosophy 131 (2005) 9–19.
• James, William. "Bergson and his Critique of Intellectualism." In A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. 223–74.
• Lawlor, Leonard. The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics. London: Continuum Press, 2003.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Bergson." In In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. John O'Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963. 9–32.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Bergson in the Making." In Signs. Trans. Richard McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 182–91.
• Mullarkey, John. "Bergson and Philosophy." Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
• Mullarkey, John, ed. The New Bergson. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.
• Russell, Bertrand "The Philosophy of Bergson". The Monist 22 (1912): 321–47.
External links
Henri Bergsonat Wikipedia's sister projects
• Definitions from Wiktionary
• Media from Wikimedia Commons
• News from Wikinews
• Quotations from Wikiquote
• Texts from Wikisource
• Textbooks from Wikibooks
• Resources from Wikiversity
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Henri Bergson's theory of laughter. A brief summary.
• « 'A History of Problems' : Bergson and the French Epistemological Tradition », by Elie During
• Gontarski, Stanley E.: Bergson, Henri, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.
• M. C. Sanchez Rey « The Bergsonian Philosophy of the Intelligence » translation
• Newspaper clippings about Henri Bergson in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Henri Bergson, Nobel Luminaries - Jewish Nobel Prize Winners, on the Beit Hatfutsot-The Museum of the Jewish People Website.
Works online
• Works by Henri Bergson at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Henri Bergson at Internet Archive
• Works by Henri Bergson at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by Henri Bergson at Open Library
• Works by Henri Bergson in French at "La Philosophie"
• Complete works in French on the "Classiques des sciences sociales" website
• L'Évolution créatrice (in the original French, 1907)
o 1911 English translation at the Wayback Machine (archived 23 April 2006) of Creative Evolution (html)
o multiple formats at Internet Archive
• 1910 English translation of Time and Free Will at the Wayback Machine (archived 24 April 2006) (HTML)
o multiple formats at Internet Archive
• 1911 English translation of Matter and Memory at the Wayback Machine (archived 24 April 2006) (HTML)
o multiple formats at Internet Archive