Henri Bergson Research Articles

Remembering Droughts and Abundance: Ecological Memory in the Semi-arid Region of Northeast Brazil

In Floresta, a municipality in the semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil, the past is considered a time of greater regularity of the climate, natural wealth of the Caatinga biome, and solidarity among the residents of the city’s rural area. Memories of certain historical events can refer to an ‘ancient time’ in which ‘abundance,’ despite the calamities generated by droughts throughout the occupation of this territory, is considered one of its main socio- ecological attributes. In the context of the violent climatic transformations of contemporaneity, analyzing the actions of the memory of old inhabitants of the Brazilian semi-arid region will be a way of first, ethnographically questioning the history of droughts to which the entire ecology of this region has been reduced by historiography and national literature; second, inquiring the human centrality of modern memory—still today a defining theoretical paradigm of social and cultural studies of memory in anthropology. To this end, memories of droughts and abundance will be articulated with the concept of “duration” (la durée) of French philosopher Henri Bergson to think of memory and the duration of time as a way of ecologically living the past, the present, and the future.

HUMOUR AND LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF AFRICAN FOLKTALES

African folktales manifest intricate and peculiar linguistic features, making their performance remarkable and invigorating. This paper explores the dual impact of humour and linguistic features on the written and performative nature of African folktales, arguing that the linguistic features of African folktales are imbued with humour which enlivens their oral performances. The data utilised in this study were harvested from folktales across Africa, including some collected during oral performances in Ipe-Akoko in Ondo State, Nigeria. Ten folktales were purposely selected from written sources while two were collected during performance. The performances of the folktales fostered a comprehensive understanding of the impact that the linguistic features laced with humour have on the audience. The data were subjected to critical reading using content analysis. The theoretical framework of this study was anchored in Henri Bergson’s theoretical work; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic (1923). The results showed that many African folktales manifest sterling linguistic devices laced with humour that embellish the narrative structure of the written folktales while enhancing the performative experience of the audience during the performance in Ipe-Akoko. The study concluded that folktales function as a means of galvanising and lubricating African languages and other verbal components whenever they seem to be inadequate.

Truth in Time Travel: Subversions of Time in An Adventure

This article explores how Frances Lamont and Elizabeth Morison’s An Adventure (1913) disrupts temporal and spatial dichotomies through its supposed representations of time travel. An Adventure presents time as a shifting force that aligns with Bergsonian notions of temporality – specifically the concepts of objective and subjective time as defined in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1911) and “Time and Free Will” (1913). This article also considers how Freudian notions of “condensation” further outline the subjective rendering of time in An Adventure’s surreal journeys back in time to the French Revolution and how the narrative’s subjective presentation of time aligns with Ford Madox Ford’s later theories of literary impressionism, particularly his idea that modernist narratives are composed of “various unordered pictures”. This article ultimately argues that Lamont and Morison’s book benefited from the temporally minded scientific and social climate of the time and used the theoretical groundwork of thinkers like Henri Bergson, Ford Madox Ford and Sigmund Freud as starting points from which they could tell their tale as truth. Specifically, their formal construction of the text as scientific research seeks to consciously obscure the differentiation between fact and fable, effectively positing their nonlinear time slip as truth. If that truth is humored, Lamont and Morison are proposing a more radical conception of time than Bergson – a nonlinear conception of time – a proposition that sits in tension with their use of scientific diction and discourse.

The Music of Memory Gaston Bachelard on the Construction of Time and Memory

Gaston Bachelard's philosophical exploration challenges conventional assumptions regarding the relationship between time and memory. Departing from the common perception of time as a passive container for memories, Bachelard introduces an idea of the past that is predicated on a relational understanding of time. This paper will begin by contrasting Bachelard's relational view of time with Henri Bergson's substantivalist stance. Bachelard's metaphysical position on time provides the conceptual groundwork for his challenging of the fixity of past temporal experiences, and his redefining of duration as a rational construct. Finally, this paper will explore Bachelard’s concept of rhythmanalysis, or the process by which the individual is able to make sense of the different rhythms or frequencies of time. Bachelard does not define the past as a fixed temporal series of memories. Rather, memories and the past are fluid and continually open to interpretation by the individual. The relationship between time and memory, for Bachelard, is subsequently predicated on a constructive process which is characterized by the ability of the individual to reframe or reinterpret that process.

Happiness and Joy in Aristotle and Bergson as Life of Thoughtful and Creative Action

Abstract The view of happiness that I propose in this article and derive on the basis of Aristotle’s and Henri Bergson’s ideas recommends that we must first understand life as an activity – not as a sum of accumulated experiences and things; nor a set of projects; nor fateful or haphazard events that befall us, but as a formative activity in which we play a key role. Ἐνέργεια or de l’action are at the core of life and it is by getting a hold of this creative core that we stand to live happily (Aristotle) or joyously (Bergson). For both thinkers, the possibility of happiness and joy comes to the fore, to no small extent, as a certain orientation in our thinking, i.e., as φρόνησις and θεωρία, for Aristotle, and as philosophy for Bergson. Our thoughts inform our choices and actions as well as our view of the world, grounding our sense of meaning, purpose, and value of action. It is by reckoning with the ever-unfolding act of life and with our own actions in it (actions which can be vicious, senseless, and unexamined or creative and constitutive of a life well-lived) that we also take hold of the possibility of happiness and joy.

Freedom, Creativity, the Self, and God: Between Rabbi Kook and Bergson’s Lebensphilosophie

AbstractIn this essay, I examine the intersection between the concepts of freedom, the self, God, and creativity in the works of one of the most prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook (1865–1935), exploring his use of these concepts through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I first draw a historical and thematic parallel between Bergson’s and Kook’s philosophies that to date has not been considered extensively. I then argue that five different interpretative puzzles related to the topic of freedom in Kook’s teachings can be explained against the background of Bergson’s thought. This Bergsonian interpretation enables the reader to appreciate in what way different aspects of Kook’s thought—the metaphysical, ethical, epistemological, and theological—are interconnected and can be understood as an organic whole. I thereby show that the Bergsonian philosophical and systematic models are an important, and yet unexplored, interpretative tool for the study of Kook’s theological and philosophical thought.

Border-Crossing of Taisho Vitalism and Radical Theory of Individuality in Colonial Korea ―― On Genealogy from Henri Bergson, Osugi Sakae to Yeom Sang-seop

Border-Crossing of Taisho Vitalism and Radical Theory of Individuality in Colonial Korea ―― On Genealogy from Henri Bergson, Osugi Sakae to Yeom Sang-seop

What is an ‘open society’? Bergson, Strauss, Popper, and Deleuze

ABSTRACT This paper examines the different interpretations of the distinction between closed and open societies put forward by Henri Bergson, Leo Strauss, Karl Popper, and Gilles Deleuze. These vary both in the features attributed to the two kinds of society, especially to openness, and in the authors’ evaluations of what they describe. The similarities and differences between their views are documented in detail, and their significance considered.

Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion: God, Freedom, and Duration

Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion: God, Freedom, and Duration

Understanding humour as the catalyst to social reform: A study of Mahesh Dattani’s Where There Is a Will (1988)

Mahesh Dattani (b. 1958) is a reformist playwright of modern India whose works have been interpreted as texts of social critique. Academics such as Erin B. Mee and Asha Kuthari Chowdhari have attributed his works to the ‘invisible issues’ permeating India’s urban middle classes. They have highlighted how Dattani portrays topics such as gender inequality, homosexuality and communal violence to appeal to the public in pursuit of social reform. This article proposes that humour, in addition to these themes, is an equally essential aspect of Dattani’s reformist visions. It argues that Dattani’s humour resonates with what J. L. Styan calls the ‘dark comedy’. It explores the use of humour in Dattani’s play, Where There Is a Will (1988), through Henri Bergson’s concepts of comical inversion, rigidity and symmetrical repetition, to examine the comical elements of the events, dialogue and characters. This approach assists Dattani in posing reformative queries and, according to Styan, eliciting responses from the readers/audience.

Henri Bergson and New Materialism

Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memorypresents a panpsychist ontology. Bergson pushes the dualism of mind and matter to breaking point. Matter is reconceived as the sum of all images. Idealism and deterministic materialism are bypassed. We get an indeterministic and emancipative model of the world. The idea that matter is inherently creative and endowed with both perception and memory is highly relevant today. Materiality, far from being dead or passive, is equipped with agency. Bergson’s themes coincide with the concerns of contemporary New Materialism. Authors working in the latter school explicitly cite Bergson as a key influence. Bergson can help us understand what “newness” means in New Materialism. That being said, recent scholarship has pointed to certain unpalatable political implications of Bergson’s works, in particular the anthropological premises of Two Sources of Morality and Religion. In my article, I seek to address such critiques. In my view, by reading Bergson ontologically as a New Materialist process philosophy, some of the unfortunate cultural and ideological presuppositions Bergson did not reflect upon may be ameliorated to a great extent.

Self-abnegation, Decentering of Objective Relations, and Intuition of Nature: Toomas Altnurme’s and Cao Jun’s Art

Abstract This article analyzes the artwork of two seemingly distant contemporary artists – Toomas Altnurme and Cao Jun – elucidating their creative processes through the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson. In Section 1, I offer reasons for a side-by-side examination of Altnurme’s and Jun’s art. In my discussion of Altnurme’s art in Section 2, I argue that his process exemplifies Heidegger’s view that artists must abnegate themselves in order for their creations to come into being. In Section 3, I elucidate Jun’s painting in its power to decenter the usual, object-oriented, circumspection of the mind. I ground my analyses in Freud’s concept of dream logic. Freud’s work on dreams allows me to approach Jun’s creative process as a work of translation whereby the artist translates the preconscious elements into images that we – the audience – then see on canvas. In Section 4, where I offer a comparative examination of both artists, I rely on Bergson’s articulation of the importance of intuition in order to show that both Altnurme and Jun create artworks that disclose to us the non-objective dimension of life wherein action or process and possibility take precedence over objectively existing things.

H. Bergson on the Problem of Origin of Life

Henri Bergson’s conjectures about the origin of life avoid providing a solution to the problem, and yet he did make some suggestions. A close reading of his texts reveals the philosopher’s implicit assumption of an origin of life on Earth through natural processes. This paper is concerned with the concept of an élan, and focuses on the evolution of this philosophical concept in Bergson’s thought. The argument divides the élan from its constant companion, vital, in order to highlight its non-spiritual aspect which applies to what that Bergson described as “physiological life.” I emphasize that élan has a history, and that there must have been a moment when an élan began. Finally, the argument moves from élan’s history/origin to life’s history/origin.

“Educating children to follow the voice of their conscience” – a comparative study of the Dutch educationalists Philipp Abraham Kohnstamm (1875–1951) and Martinus Jan Langeveld (1905–1989) within the context of early twentieth-century Europe

ABSTRACT Two of the greatest Dutch educationalists of the twentieth century, Philipp Abraham Kohnstamm (1875–1951) and Martinus Jan Langeveld (1905–1989), believed that education meant, above all, the formation of a conscience. They developed their ideas in a time full of developments within Europe: the rise of fascism, two world wars, and pioneering theories on human development by Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), among others. Kohnstamm’s and Langeveld’s educational theories were also influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by optimistic ideas about the spontaneous development of the child and the unique personality of humankind, as expressed in movements such as New Education, New Psychology, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941). This article aims to compare these two Dutch educationalists on conscience formation to contextualise their differences and similarities and subsequently understand them within European developments, such as New Psychology, and specifically the Dutch context of the twentieth century.

The format relationship in humorous content: infomercial and skit

The present research has the objective of conceptually referring to the classic format of infomercials and the format that the Porta dos Fundos channel produces its advertising videos. The study of infomercials is important for advertising, because this format is one of the most used in the promotion of products and services in direct marketing. Through branded content, the Porta dos Fundos channel developed its own format for inserting advertising content into its content productions. The work aims to convert the advertising videos of the Porta dos Fundos objective with the classic form of Polishop infomercials, understanding how the formats converge with their characteristics. To analyze the study corpus, a content analysis methodology was used, proposed by Laurence Bardin (1979). In addition to it, the theoretical construction was based on the theories of humor proposals by Henri Bergson (1978) and from bibliographic studies conceptualized as branded content, tie-in and product placement strategies that Porta dos Fundos used in its advertising videos.

The poverty of embodiment in the work of Juhani Pallasmaa

In books such as The Eyes of the Skin, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa posits unmediated sensual encounters as the site of authentic engagement with the built environment. Such ideas are prevalent in mainstream architectural discourse today. In this article, I show that they are also highly problematic. Pallasmaa rejects visual intentionality, construing it as the instrument of an objectifying reason that distances us from our ‘being-in-the-world’. Referring to the phenomenologist philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and indebted to Henri Bergson’s concept of duration through lived experience, Pallasmaa’s theory promises a poetic inhabitation of the world, irreducible to reason and characterised by an animistic embodiment, allegedly offering a more meaningful architectural experience. Informed by contemporary rationalist thought and drawing on neuroscientific, anthropological and philosophical arguments, I first argue that Pallasmaa’s project is weakened to the point of collapse by the misunderstanding of his intellectual resources, particularly with respect to the use of incompatible concepts of embodiment in Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works. I then show how his ideas of embodiment, disinterested vision and sensuality constitute an impoverished account of lived experience that, far from overcoming alienation, mystifies it. I specifically discuss Pallasmaa’s analysis of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, his comparisons of human- and animal-created structures and his forays into neuroscience. Finally, I dispute Pallasmaa’s claim that an immediate sensual encounter is the route to authentic engagement with the world, and question whether the unmediated lived experience he yearns for is even possible.

러셀, 베르그손, 그리고 이분법적 대립의 문제들

This article aims to probe critically Bertrand Russell’s attack on Henry Bergson, one of the most influential thinkers in the early twentieth century, in the article, “The Philosophy of Bergson,” published in The Monist in 1912. According to Russel, the philosophy of Bergson is fundamentally dualistic, depending on the binary opposition between matter and life, space and time, Yet, Russel’s such a critique overlooks that Bergson seeks to a monism which merges matter with life by viewing both of them in terms of duration and to overcome the limitations of the dualistic division subject and object, the fundamental frame of the modern epistemology of the West. In addition, Russell fails to grasp accurately that for Bergson, intuition is not a binary opposition to intellect but the way of thought that penetrate into the essence of matter and life byovercoming the abstract and mediatory way of thinking of intellect.

Living temporality: Speculative engagements with elderly people on bioscience and the body

This article reports on speculative engagements in group conversations with elderly citizens on the biomedical possibilities of modifying aging in the future. The participants oriented themselves towards the future of aging through memories and present embodied perceptions. To constrict the analysis, we draw on Isabelle Stengers’ speculative thinking and, to conceptualize the multiplicity of temporalities in our data, we build on Henri Bergson's theorization on time. The analysis of the conversations on technoscientific change illustrate how experiences of aging and the life-span are constituted in and through relations with human and more-than-human others. We theorized these connections of the personal and the collective as living temporality with two temporal logics: Intergenerational time involving other humans in the past, present and future, and evolutionary time that connects the aging body to other living beings and the planet. Within these articulations of the experience of time various alternative perspectives into what is considered as ‘normal’ aging emerged as counternarratives to biomedical models of temporal change. Methodologically, we show that as speculative thinking foregrounds experiential knowledge, it provides a vessel for unruliness and freedom that allows other types of aging futures to emerge alongside bioscientific ones.

Animals’ Mobilities in Popular Fiction: Time, Duration, and Desire in Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey

Abstract In Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel The Incredible Journey, three domestic animals undertake an arduous trek through the forests of northern Ontario to be reunited with their owners and family. As an example of “homing instinct” stories, The Incredible Journey has been influential, notably as a result of the 1963 Disney film. The genre is easily dismissed as sentimentally anthropomorphic, but this paper treats Burnford’s novel as a sophisticated treatment of animals’ mobilities in terms of literary animal studies. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, The Incredible Journey is presented as an adventure in time rather than in space, contrasting the human perspective of maps and miles with the Bergsonian concept of duration, the real experience of the passage of time, and with related themes of free will, instinct, and desire. This paper concludes that Burnford offers a less anthropocentric perspective on animals’ mobility.

Two Political Itineraries of European Bergsonism: Georges Sorel and Thomas Ernest Hulme

The article examines, through the case studies of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) and Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917), processes of politicization which Henri Bergson’s philosophy underwent in early 20th century Europe. It begins by outlining the paths that brought the two thinkers to read and endorse Bergson’s philosophy. Despite the fact that the former only really accepted the psychological arguments of the Données while the latter engaged much more with Bergson’s metaphysics, both were drawn to the French philosopher in virtue of the anti-determinist elements present in his thought. But when it came to bring this opposition to determinism to bear on political theory, their paths separated: whereas Sorel incorporated Bergsonian ideas in his revision of Marxism, Hulme found himself unable to erect a political theory on the basis of a metaphysics of flux. This significant difference is explained in generational terms. A Bergsonian cosmology of openness and transformation was seen as an excessively relativistic philosophical base for politics by Hulme because of the greater stakes that political commitment demanded from his generation – hence his conviction that politics could only be rooted in eternal, unchanging, absolutes.