When1: 1889
When2: 1932
Who: Henri-Louis Bergson [Bergson, Henri-Louis]
What: philosopher
Where: Paris, France
works\ Essay on the Immediate Givens of Consciousness or Time and Free Will [1889]; Matter and Memory [1896]; Laughter, an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [1900]; Introduction to Metaphysics [1903]; Creative Evolution [1907]; Time and Free Will [1910]; Two Sources of Morality and Religion [1932]
Detail: He lived 1859 to 1941.
Epistemology
Consciousness can only know the present. However, people intuit continuous time, as irreversible, never-repeating, and always-altering change {duration, Bergson}. People must feel psychological truth by instinct.
Memory interacts alive, current, and active mind and inert, past, and passive matter. Memory recollects past states during present activity.
Perceptions are limitations to and uses for active life force.
Life and movement are beyond science, so philosophy is intuitions about life force, time, and matter.
Laughter happens when people see humans acting mechanically.
Ethics
Life and will are free and creative, make unpredictable products, have no purpose or end, and are just action. Creation is good in itself. Action is for its own sake.
Metaphysics
Change is the basis of reality. The life force {élan vital, Bergson} causes purposeful evolution through change and development against matter's passive resistance. The life force is dynamic, while matter is inert. Life and matter necessarily oppose. Life tries to organize and unify matter into new forms while matter tends toward separateness.
Time is essence of life. Duration is dynamic and continuous and not a series of states.
Mind
Through acting, life has produced instinct and intellect. Intellect is passive. Instinct is active. Intellect can deal with things as stable states, in separate objects or in series, explaining why matter appears as objects. Instinct deals with things in time, by harmonizing and blending present and past states.
Social Sciences>Philosophy>History>Mind
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Date Modified: 2022.0224