Bergson's Philosophy Research Articles

A study of figure of intuition and metaphysical high level stage in philosophy of Bergson

A study of figure of intuition and metaphysical high level stage in philosophy of Bergson

On Duration and Multiplicity

This article addresses the increasing inclusion of durational art and performance within museum contexts. In particular, it considers the recent development of group shows of durational performance as exemplified by exhibitions such as Manchester International Festival's ‘Marina Abramovic Presents…’ (2009) and ‘11 Rooms’(2011). Durational performance has often been described as providing resistance to an ever-accelerating pace of life. This article examines this assumption. Considering the phenomenon of the group show of durational performance in relation to a range of theories of time – from E.P. Thompson's analysis of time-discipline under industrial capitalism, to Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration as qualitatively multiple, to recent work in sociology on time in the information age – this article considers how durational performance and the curatorial practices that surround it might both participate in and respond to contemporary experiences of time as multiple and (relentlessly) continuous.

Languages of Art and Languages of Science

At the turn of the 19th century, new inventions and technologies, such as the railways, the internal combustion engine, the motor car, and the airplane began to change human visual experiences. Karl Benz's Motorwagen was launched in 1886, and the Ford Model T car began to be made in 1908. The Wright brothers flew their airplane in 1903, and Louis Bleriot made his air journey from Calais to Dover in 1909. Riding the fast-moving machines provided previously unknown views, such as the blurred perspective seen from a speeding car. Furthermore, photography, and later film, enabled analysis of serial images. The surroundings in cities also changed dramatically, becoming man-made to a greater extent—to mention only the impact of gas and then electric lighting. A striking example of the new architectural possibilities was the iron structure of the Eiffel tower, built in 1889 for the Paris World's Fair Exhibition. Perhaps symbolically, its designer, Gustave Eiffel, was an engineer, not an architect 1. There also were changes in the intellectual framework for perceiving the world. From 1905 to 1911 Albert Einstein introduced the theory of relativity, which shook the “fixed” world of Newtonian physics. Henri Bergson's philosophy of human experience, which emphasized process and change, followed similar lines. Between 1900 and the beginning of the First World War in …

A questão da criação em Nietzsche e em Bergson

O artigo tem por objetivo confrontar a filosofia de Nietzsche - da vontade criadora - com a filosofia de Bergson - da duração. Procura perscrutar a compreensão que este filósofo tem da noção de duração, pensada como criação, isto é, como movimento contínuo que traz o passado e gera o futuro no presente: "jorro ininterrupto de novidade".

́Éric Méchoulan D’où nous viennent nos idées? Métaphysique et intermédialité

Eric Mechoulan D'ou nous viennent nos idees? Metaphysique et intermedialite. Montreal : vlb editeur, 2010. 288pp. As director of the Centre de recherche sur l'intermedialite, at the Universite de Montreal, Eric Mechoulan is fully aware that a fashionable buzzword like intermedialty runs the risk of quickly becoming a trendy piece of pseudo-academic jargon emptied of any significance through overuse and misuse by facile scholars and sophomoric students. He says so himself, early in his book D'oU nous viennent nos idees? Metaphysique et intermedialite (35). The fear of vulgarization implicitly underlies Mechoulan's project. On the surface, the purpose of this study is to show that ideas are not merely conveyed by various media (oral language, the written word, the printed press, etc.); rather, they are in fact engendered and shaped by the media that perform these epistemological transmissions (29-31). Five pages into the introduction Mechoulan states the obvious: One should not think that the institutional materiality and form of these transmissions has no effect on ideas and discourses (17, my translation). However, beneath this assertion, which would not surprise anyone who has read McLuhan (as Mechoulan obviously has: 43), what the author really wants to present is a thorough demonstration that intermediality is anything but a facile, trendy, sophomoric concept. Over the 245 pages of this rich and sometimes engaging book, Mechoulan goes out of his way to nuance the notion of intermediality and affirm that it is worthy of the kind of profound metaphysical contemplations that would have made Socrates and Descartes proud. It does not require well over 200 pages to convince anyone that the clever ideas a 16-year-old might text to a BFF in 2012 are likely to be formally and substantially different from the clever ideas that a 16-year-old Descartes might have penned in 1612. What does take almost 250 pages, however, is the weaving of an intricate tapestry of erudite citations and rarefied classical references that bestow upon the topic at hand an aura of philosophical respectability. Arguing that ancient Greek sophist Protagoras relies on intermediality to discuss the pedagogy of virtue by intersecting the two distinct rhetorical modes of explicative Socratic dialogism and gracious epic mythos certainly helps to elevate the term to the rank of learned concept (192-193). Of course, there is nothing wrong with trying to enhance the metaphysical capital of intermediality. As director of CRI, Mechoulan probably counts among his administrative responsibilities the task of convincing funding agencies that the whole enterprise is not entirely trivial. And in fact, he is quite successful in his attempt to demonstrate that intermediality provides a crucial heuristic tool to explain the ontological formation of western epistemology. For instance, the author convincingly articulates a genealogy of human intelligence through the intermediality of instinct and intuition (69). Discussing Bergson's philosophy of intuition, which cultivates new concepts from the experiential fringes of memory, the author represents intermediality as a wide net able to harvest the sea of nonsymbolic debris of meaning that traditional philosophy ignores and leaves behind. …

The Poet and the Intellect: Partners in the Understanding of Complexity in Motion: Discussion of “Figures of Understanding the Process of Image Subjectification” by Maurizio Pinato and Anna Moia

This discussion depicts Pinato and Moia's article as the drawing together of the intellectual power of complexity systems theory and the intuitive wisdom of Bergson's philosophy to bring forth, both within the textual style of the authors' article and within the clinical process they describe as image subjectification, a dialogic tension between clarity and ambiguity—a tension that facilitates the seizing and grasping of those tiny points of potential growth within a traumatic clinical narrative that appears repetitive and flat. The image that arrives within the mind of the analyst is understood as a snapshot view of complexity in motion.

Bergson and Politics: Ottoman-Turkish Encounters with Innovation

This article seeks to explain how Bergson's philosophy was translated into a genuine political position in the Ottoman-Turkish context. I first overview the impact of Bergson's philosophy on continental politics at the beginning of the twentieth century; I then try to explain how Bergson's philosophical claims acquired definite political connotations; and lastly, I aim to display how political Bergsonism became a border language between republican radicals and conservatives in Turkey in the 1920s. I argue that, at the crossroads of all currents of European modernity, political Bergsonism heralded the birth of a new vision of conservative modernity that molded the underlying values and principles of the transformation of Turkey into a modern society.

Shaping Duration: Bergson and Modern Sculpture

In this article, I consider the relevance of Bergson's theory of durée for an understanding of sculpture by focusing on the work of three canonical artists in the history of twentieth-century modernism: the French Cubist Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and the London-based Vorticist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. While these sculptors produced widely divergent aesthetic forms, I argue that they all endorsed Bergson's notion of durée as a spontaneous process of qualitative differentiation. These artists reconfigured their medium in terms of Bergson's process philosophy, whether in the guise of an artists’ generative imagination (Duchamp-Villon), representations of the human body as a living center of indetermination (Boccioni), or the act of direct carving as an intuitive response to a sculptor's chosen material (Gaudier-Brzeska). These Bergsonian paradigms enable us to reassess Jack Burnham's evaluation of Bergson's impact in his seminal text Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (1968). Finally, by drawing on recent discussions of cybernetic and new media art, I will highlight the limitations of Burnham's categorical dismissal of Bergsonism as an outmoded metaphysics, irrelevant to newer conceptions of “sculpture as system.”

One of Deleuze's Bergsonisms

In this article I attempt to reveal some continuities between the anti-psychoanalytic stance adopted by Gilles Deleuze in his later work and Henri Bergson's early philosophy. On account of these continuities I hope to provide a glimpse into what I believe is a century-old tangent of philosophical resistance to the methods and theories of Freudian psychoanalysis. In order to achieve this, I start with a brief meditation on the challenges and benefits of cross-generational inheritance and collaboration in philosophy. The purpose of this is twofold – to explore some general conditions for such collaboration and to tease out some of the implications of these conditions for the substantive argument my specific reading of Bergson via Deleuze occasions. I then expound on Bergson's theory of duration and some of the uses to which Deleuze puts it in the latter part of his career. In this I outline several fecund similarities between Bergson's critique of associationism and Deleuze's attack on Freud. Finally, I attempt a partial evaluation of Freudian psychoanalysis from the joint, albeit naturally disjointed, perspective of my primary sources.

Ritornare a Tilgher: Bergsonian Themes and the Human Condition in the Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator

Since its apearance in 1922, Adriano Tilgher's critical assessment of Luigi Pirandello has been evaluated in a negative light, especially its categories of vita and forma, — which Tilgher borrowed from Pirandello himself, specifically from the short story La carriola — considered as nothing more than abstract philosophizing and ultimately held responsible for the drying up of Pirandello' inspirations. Vita and forma were generically reduced by the vast majority of Italian critics, especially those valuing Croce's idea of art as lyrical intuition, to the camouflaging Pirandello's characters were forced to adopt to fit into the social fabric, thereby losing their metaphysical charge. In fact, when properly interpreted in the light of Henri Bergson's vitalist philosophy, vita and forma prove to be key concepts in the restoration of Pirandello to the canon of the European avant-garde. After a survey of some of the comments made by Italian scholars on the role of Adriano Tilgher's criticism, the article attempts to recognize his importance as the first critic to provide an exhaustive interpretation of Pirandello's thought. Finally, the paper will try to explore the novel Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator as a fruitful application of such principles.

THE NATURAL CYBORG: THE STAKES OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION

abstractBergson's engagement with evolutionary theory was remarkably up to date with the science of his time. One century later, the scientific and social landscape is undoubtedly quite different, but some of his insights remain of critical importance for the present. This paper aims at discussing three related aspects of Bergson's philosophy of evolution and their relevance for contemporary debates: first, the stark distinction between the affirmation of the reality of change and becoming, on the one hand, and any notion of progress on the other; second, the insistence on the intimate interplay between forms of knowledge and forms of life; third, his idea that machines and organisms, technology and biology, are not separate domains but, rather, stem from and answer to the same problems and needs that living beings express. Such a Bergsonian framework may prove very helpful in reassessing the implicit assumptions of several contemporary debates on the ethical and political stakes of evolution, biosciences, and technologies, as well as the increasingly problematic boundary between “biology” and “culture.”

"Between two Reigns": Incommensurability of Paradigms in Nikos Kazantzakis's Odyssey

Nikos Kazantzakis's The Odyssey can profitably be analyzed in terms of Thomas Kuhn's theory regarding the structure of scientific revolutions. Odysseus finds himself in a transitional period between a decaying cultural/civilizational paradigm and a new one he is inventing. He contributes to the destruction of the old paradigm, which represents Western civilization in decline, in order to replace it with his own new theory of the world and of human destiny inspired mainly by Henri Bergson's evolutionist philosophy as reinterpreted by Kazantzakis in his treatise , Askitiki, incommensurable with Western Kultur. Equally incompatible are the new terms used to formulate this vision. To Odysseus's followers, as well as to Kazantzakis's readers conditioned by the old paradigm, the new world-view is incomprehensible. An additional impediment for the readers is the author's almost unintelligible demotic form of Greek. Kazantzakis aspired to create a new cultural/civilizational paradigm, but he failed since his epic remained an individual affair not adopted by any larger community.

‘Infinity, Intuition, and the Relativity Of Knowledge: Bergson, Carrau, and the Hamiltonians’

This paper presents a discussion of William Hamilton's thesis of the relativity of knowledge and of its reception in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury French philosophy. Scholars usually claim that Kant's transcendental philosophy is the main target of Bergson's rejection of the relativity of knowledge. In contrast, Bergson's plea for ‘intuition' as absolute knowledge should be replaced within the context of the long-lasting debates between French spiritualists and the Hamiltonians about the relations of metaphysics with psychology. In the service of this discussion the author locates an important anticipation of Bergson's philosophy of intuition in the forgotten figure of Ludovic Carrau.

A presença do filósofo

O artigo homenageia a obra de Bento Prado Jr, enfatizando a originalidade e o aspecto crítico de sua postura filosófica. Neste sentido, ele analisa a força do conceito de “Presença” – eixo central da tese de doutoramento do autor, publicada sob o título Presença e campo transcendental –, capaz de desenhar de maneira inédita um ponto de convergência entre as filosofias de Bergson, Sartre e Merleau-Ponty.

Phallocentrism in Bergson: Life and Matter

Henri Bergson's philosophy presents the relationship between life and matter in both dualistic and monistic terms. Life is duration, a rhythm of incalculable novelty that approaches pure creative activity. In stark contrast, matter is identified with the determinism of homogeneous space. After Time and Free Will, Bergson concedes some share of duration to matter. In this context, his dualism can be understood as a methodological step towards the articulation of a monistic metaphysics of duration. This article suggests that the distinction between life and matter is also motivated by an unconscious imperative to establish a sexed hierarchy. Bergson repeatedly presents life as seminal, while matter is figured in terms of passivity.

T.E. Hulme, Bergson, and The New Philosophy

This essay asks if the reception of Bergsonian philosophy in the journalism of T.E. Hulme might provide formulae to analyse contemporary ideology. For a short time, writers across the political spectrum adopted Bergson's philosophy to attack liberal positivism. Despite his instinctive conservatism, Hulme's earliest pieces on Bergson echo the vitalism of the radical left. However, as it became clear that Bergson's thought tended inexorably towards progressive politics, Hulme responded by developing a ‘Tory Philosophy’. Using John Gray's political philosophy as a template, these distinctions are applied to analyse situations in the present day.

Marcel Poëte's Bergsonian Urbanism

Marcel Poëte was a founding figure of French urbanisme, or town planning, both its pedagogy and its codification as a discipline and practice in the early twentieth century. The philosophy of Henri Bergson was central to his writings on the city and teaching at the École des Hautes Études Urbaines. I argue that Poëte's use of Bergson's philosophy, his ideas of the vital impulse and duration, may be understood in two ways. First, Poëte's Bergsonian urbanism participates in the greater context of continental fascism wherein Bergson's vitalism fomented a critique of scientific positivism and class hierarchy. Second, Poëte imports Bergson's ideas of time, la durée or duration, and “creative evolution,” into urbanisme as a means of resistance to vulgar functionalism in architecture and town planning.

Interval, Sexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.

Toward a Philosophy of the Urban: Henri Lefebvre's Uncomfortable Application of Bergsonism

Although Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) publicly and consistently eschewed the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), his writings in effect made great use of the latter's key ideas and method. Like Bergson's philosophy, Lefebvre's urban criticism denounced the spatialization of time and gave priority to lived experience over the abstractions employed by static intellectual or traditionally analytical models of experience. Throughout The Urban Revolution, The Production of Space, The Critique of Everyday Life, Volumes 1–3, and the writings posthumously collected in Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre's urban philosophical project appropriated the ideas Bergson advanced in his three major works, Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution, through their application to the problems of social life—a de facto collaboration that Bergson never lived to appreciate and that Lefebvre would never recognize. This connection is important not only as a corrective to the scant attention paid to Lefebvre's work by philosophers, but also because it reinforces both thinkers' own emphases on interdisciplinarity and on reconciling theories of knowledge with theories of life. The combined work of the two philosophers suggests a philosophical basis for the current emphasis of theory in both cultural studies and human geography in that it stresses the importance of acknowledging movement, process, and mobilities in approaches to the problems of urban life. The composite of Bergson–Lefebvre provides the basis for articulating a philosophy of the urban.

Interval, Sexual Difference: Luce Irigaray and Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.