Morality in Evolution: The Moral Philosophy of Henri Bergson
Abstract
Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion is not a book to leave one indifferent. Those who are persuaded by its argument or inspired by its message are prone to manifest the same enthusiasm as Georges Cattaui who praised it as one of the greatest and wisest books conceived by philo sophers. Even those who take exception to the doctrine it expounds are impelled to acknowledge its significance. It was in his critique of Les Deux Sources that Jacques Maritain was moved to call the philosophy of Henri Bergson one of the most daring and profound of our time. When many years ago I opened Les Deux Sources for the first time, I turned out of curiosity to the last page and beheld these words, "l'univers ... est une machine it faire des dieux." Bergson was an evolutionist, but surely this was no ordinary evolutionist speaking, I thought. What must be the moral philosophy of a man who would write these words? When much later I undertook the present study, it was this same question which con cerned me.
Chapters (8)
Bergson began his philosophical career as an enthusiastic follower of Herbert Spencer. He embraced the mechanistic theories prevailing at the time and dreamed of extending the mechanistic explanation to the whole universe.1 The vague generalities to be found in Spencer’s First Principles were due, he thought, to the author’s insufficient grasp of the latest ideas in mechanistics. He would correct the weaknesses of Spencer’s work, provide the precision it lacked, and establish it on a more solid foundation.
Bergson’s intuition of duration had convinced him that true reality is duration — movement, life, a continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty. His critique of science and its organ, the intellect, had revealed that science has never grasped real duration and is, owing to the nature of the intellect, radically incapable of doing so. Reviewing the various philosophical systems, he discovered further that they have approached reality with the same habits of intellect as science, and have, therefore, also missed duration. The intellect conceiving reality as so many separate, solid bodies, parcels it out in view of the demands of practical life, and does not concern itself with the inner structure of things. The philosophers have accepted this fragmentation and have attempted to construct reality from the pieces. If metaphysics is only a construction, however, then, since there are many ways of fitting the fragments together, many rival systems of philosophy will be erected and scepticism must result.1
Bergson’s sharp distinction between intelligence and intuition had, he thought, saved metaphysics and the domain of the spirit from the attacks of Kant and of the scientific positivists. Can such a distinction be justified, however? Bergson believed that it could and that the evidence for it is to be found in the facts of human history, and particularly in the history of the evolution of life.
Go to experience, gather the facts, and let your theorizing never go beyond the data. This was Bergson’s method. In Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory he had considered certain psychological data. Creative Evolution was an interpretation of biological data. What does experience tell us now about morality? It tells us that there are two distinct forces at work in the moral life of man: (I) a pressure or constraint exerted by society upon its members, and (2) an appeal or attraction exercised by certain privileged souls upon the rest of mankind. Reflection upon these facts reveals that there are two distinct and irreducible moralities, the closed and the open.
Bergson’s account of moral obligation in terms of his doctrine of evolution was only the beginning of his treatment of morality. In tracing obligation back to society and beyond society to the life force itself, he was reducing it to a biological necessity, yet he was at the same time preparing the ground for the examination of a superior kind of morality and for a final explanation of all morality as originating in the ultimate creative principle of life and all its manifestations.
The rigorous employment of his empirical method led Bergson to the discovery that there are two distinct and irreducible moralities in the life of man — the closed or static, and the open or dynamic These two are not merely different aspects of a single morality since there is a difference of kind between them and not merely one of degree. Bergson traced each of the two moralities to a separate cause: the closed morality to social pressure, the open morality to aspiration. He found the first to be rooted in instinct and habit, and the second in the experience of moral heroes and mystics. Human beings behave as they do morally (I) because nature, acting through society, constrains them to do so, and (2) because certain heroic souls have had visions of a spiritual destiny for man and have inspired them with these visions. Social pressure and aspiration — these are the facts that must be taken into account in any inquiry into the nature and evolution of morality.
Bergson has described the closed society as static, circular, disciplined, caught up in automatism and organized for self-preservation. It represents a halt in the evolutionary process. The open society is dynamic, progressive, creative and characterized by freedom and universal charity. It represents a forward thrust. It is apparent that man has progressed beyond the state of the primitive closed society, and while he is still far from the ideal of the open society, morally he is advancing in that direction. How does this moral progress come about? Bergson answers the question in a remarkable analysis of the interacting relationship between the two moralities. The profound implications of his theory of knowledge are unfolded here, and perhaps nowhere else is the extraordinary originality and ingenuity of his moral doctrine, and the internal coherence of his whole philosophy, better revealed.
The full implications of Bergson’s intuition of duration are brought to light in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion which he presented to the public after forty years of philosophical reflection on reality sub specie durationis. Experience had revealed to him two distinct and irreducible moralities — the closed morality which he identified with nature, instinct, social cohesion — in a word, with biological necessity; and the open morality which he identified with the direct movement of the élan vital, intuition, creative emotion, and universal brotherhood. All the oppositions which had been set up in his earlier works are preserved here, for the closed morality is static, routine, conservative, while the open morality is dynamic, novel and progressive.
... En su testamento confesaría que no se convirtió al catolicismo para permanecer junto a sus correligionarios judíos durante las persecuciones sufridas en Alemania y en distintas partes de Europa a lo largo de la década de 1930 (Copleston, 1996). 13 La distinción analítica es necesaria, según el autor, para superar las limitaciones de las tradiciones morales racionalistas (que buscan el fundamento en la razón en vez de entender cómo la inteligencia es un simple medio en los procesos morales, tanto de la sociedad cerrada como de la sociedad abierta) y de las corrientes sociológicas (que, sin saberlo, limitan su estudio a solo una de las fuentes de la moral, la concerniente a la moral cerrada) (Gallagher, 1970). ...
... Esto no significa que la inteligencia no medie en el cumplimiento de las obligaciones del individuo: denota que la fuente de la totalidad de la obligación no es racional, sino que es impuesta por la sociedad. Las religiones particularistas, creadoras de mitos, son vistas por Bergson como propias de este tipo de moral(Gallagher, 1970).Las características distintivas de la especie humana, que afloran en su progreso vital, hacen que esta sea capaz de producir una moral distinta a la moral cerrada: la moral abierta o moral de la aspiración. Si la moral de la obligación era propia de grupos sociales cerrados, impersonal, infrarracional y garante de su preservación social, la moral de la aspiración atañe a la humanidad, es personal y suprarracional, pues pone en acto la ...
El trabajo compara el lugar que ocupa la pregunta sobre la posibilidad y la viabilidad de la civilización capitalista en los proyectos filosóficos de Adam Smith y de Henri Bergson. Se reconstruye cómo, y hasta qué punto, estos dos autores conciben el tránsito entre sociedades humanas particulares y una sociedad humana de alcance mundial mediada por la relación mercantil; qué esperanzas y peligros consideran que se ciernen en aquel proceso, y si examinan (o no) necesario y pertinente integrar a sus respectivos proyectos filosóficos la pregunta acerca de las condiciones y circunstancias históricas que pueden hacer posible la realización de las promesas de la modernidad.
... In other words, as Idella J. Gallagher writes, "duration is all of one piece, an unbroken progress in which the whole of the past is accumulated and preserved and borne along with the present moment." 13 Only so conceived can duration be free from subjective confinement. ...
There is an old but still unresolved debate pertaining to the question of Bergsonian monism or dualism. Scholars who think that Bergson is ultimately monist clash with those who claim that he has consistently maintained a dualist position. Others speak of contradiction and point out his failure to reconcile dualism with monism. What feeds on the debate is Bergson’s undeniable change of direction: while his first book is flagrantly dualist, his second book takes a sharp turn toward monism. Without denying the intricacy generated by the change of direction, this paper argues that the originality of his position is overlooked every time that the problem is presented in terms of Bergson being dualist or monist. Notably, it contends that Bergson’s third book, Creative Evolution, overcomes both dualism and monism by removing their contradiction through a durational or slanted approach to Being.
In the spring of 1923, a 36-year-old Julian Huxley was reading a new science fiction novel, then referred to as a “scientific romance” or “scientific fantasy.” The fantasy—entitled Men Like Gods —was written by the famous author H. G. Wells (1866–1946) and told the story of a man who accidentally falls into a time-space portal and ends up in Utopia, which is like Earth but roughly 3000 years into the future. Here the man encounters the Utopians, human-like beings with telepathic powers. Through the use of advanced science, the Utopians have mastered their surroundings, eliminated disease, and altered their biological makeup to become stronger, faster, and smarter.
Huxley had reviewed favorably Wells’s science fiction in the early 1920s, appreciative of the fact that Wells dealt with the implications of the new biology in his books. The Wellsian futurism often dealt with the long-range implications of the new biology for human destiny. Huxley wrote that he believed Wells attempted “genuine” utopias as opposed to satirical utopias. By “genuine utopias,” Huxley seemed to imply future visions that were true and sincere and that might be possible to achieve. Wells himself had insisted that his utopias not be static, but instead forward moving. They were to represent a hopeful stage in a long ascent of stages. In her study of utopian thinking, political scientist Elisabeth Hansot noted a marked difference between a classic and a modern utopia; unlike classical utopias, modern utopias had become time-oriented and viewed change as desirable. To both Wells and Huxley, rather than being final destinations, a utopia of the modern age was dynamic and with unlimited possibilities for change and progress.
In 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.
The aim of this paper is to give new insights into the concept of decadence and, by doing so, to promote the methodological benefits of a trans-disciplinary approach to socio-philosophical notions such as " progress " and " decline ". Analysis of decadent literature leads to valuable insights into the problem of " decadence " in the time of postmodernism, i.e. an epoch abundant in trans-historical re-imaginations of modernism, usually accompanied by methodological preference for interdisciplinarity. In the first part of the paper we reflect upon the role of " dissipative " style in the evolution of literary forms. In the second part we analyze an example of persiflage in decadent style during the time of decadence in Croatia, and in the third we speak about cultural pessimism, cultural optimism, and cultural sustainability, commenting on Bourget, Nordau, Spengler, Bergson, and contemporary theoreticians.
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