El pensamiento y lo moviente

by Henri Bergson

El pensamiento y lo moviente (1934) es el último libro de Henri Bergson. Y no es poco decir en un pensador que arrastró desde siempre una intuición única. Intuición desplegada en un abanico multicolor, y no obstante única. Tal intuición es, para el filósofo, algo simple, infinitamente simple, tan extraordinariamente simple que el filósofo jamás ha llegado a decirla. Y por eso ha hablado toda su vida.
Solamente quien posee una visión puede filosofar. Y la suya era la de una vida sub specie durationis, inserta en el flujo continuo e indivisible de la realidad, entablando con ella una larga camaradería, ganando su confianza. El filósofo, a la manera del buen sastre, trabaja “a medida”, un traje para cada ser, aquel que le calza, que es el suyo. Pero mientras tanto el ser se ha convertido en algo huidizo, por tanto el esfuerzo del filósofo es singular, y su herramental clásico –analítico- se convierte en herrumbre. Solo una filosofía a la vez moviente puede penetrar en el murmullo impersonal de la vida profunda, donde el tiempo se vuelve eficaz, cargado de esa diferencia de tensión que es quizá el elemento clave de la existencia.Un tiempo que dura, una evolución preñada de imprevisible novedad, creadora, un presente espeso y a la vez elástico, que se dilata hacia el pasado y hacia el porvenir.
Dicha intuición, visionaria, que es ya la de Bergson sin pertenecerle del todo, se ha dilatado al máximo, hasta esta cima del pensamiento que nos presenta un cambio único que se estira como una melodía indivisible, donde lo importante no es “algo que cambia” sino “el cambio mismo”, y donde aflora la imagenque es tal vez más potente que el concepto, en tanto puede atraernos aquella intuición huidiza. Pero entonces quizá haya que pensar en un universo de imágenes per se, más allá de una “conciencia imaginante” a la manera sartreana. Universo enunciado por Bergson mediante una fórmula luminosa: undevenir sin necesidad de soporte.
¿Qué es esta visión? ¿Es falsa, es verdadera? Poco importa. Nos volverá más fuertes y más alegres, eso es todo.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Metaphysics, Psychology, France, French Literature, Classics

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

Popular and accessible works of French philosopher and writer Henri Louis Bergson include Creative Evolution (1907) and The Creative Mind (1934) and largely concern the importance of intuition as a means of attaining knowledge and the élan vital present in all living things; he won the Nobel Prize of 1927 for literature.

Although international fame and influence of this late 19th century-early 20th century man reached heights like cult during his lifetime, after the Second World War, his influence decreased notably. Whereas such thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre, and Lévinas explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought, Bergsonism of Gilles Deleuze in 1966 marked the reawakening of interest. Deleuze recognized his concept of multiplicity as his most enduring contribution to thinking. This concept attempts to unify heterogeneity and continuity, contradictory features, in a consistent way. This revolutionary multiplicity despite its difficulty opens the way to a re-conception of community, or so many today think.

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

070111: there is some beautiful, evocative, thoughtful writing in here, hence 4. but this is more a collection of essays or lectures rather than an argued work, though it is not hard to find bergsonian themes. this is probably not the best work to start. it helped to read guerlac before. interesting on pragmatism, i have never heard of ravaisson, but the continuing emphasis on intuition certainly bergson...

[Ron Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult book. I'm glad I read it, but much of it was forced reading. His ideas about time and the value of immediate experience are worthwhile, though. It is a useful counterpoint to a scientific skepticism that sees truth only in what can be measured and quantified. He sees intuition as a type of seeing from within that can lead one to a kind of truth that cannot be had by mere external observation.

Bergson gives us a creative universe that is not predetermined as a result of merely mechanistic functions. As a part of that universe, we have the chance to create. A new burst of creativity comes along when a person, in his own time and place, does something completely new and different, like Shakespeare creating Hamlet. It was not inevitable that Hamlet be written. It required a Shakespeare. Truth and reality is in a constant state of becoming that is far more subject to creative forces than it is to mechanistic ones.

I frankly don't understand his argument about duration. He seems to be saying each moment of time stands on its own, not having duration, and therefore never connecting with the next moment or event in an influential way. Therefore, we have the free will to point the next moment in any direction we want -- or something vaguely like that.

There may just be too much distance between his brilliant mind and my average one, but I still think he could do a better job of explaining his arguments in an understandable and less repetitive way. I find myself agreeing with the conclusions, but with only the foggiest notion of how he got there.

[Mirco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Toute vérité est une route tracée à travers la réalité.
Each truth is a path traced through reality.
HB

Reading Bergson's old french prose is not always a journey without sweat. Nor his frequent repetitions are easy to swallow. But, for the courageous reader, some gems lies scattered in this brilliant collection of essays: Bergson manages to turn upside down the unchallenged dogmas of western thoughts.

Possibility is less than reality? Wrong.
Eternity is more real than time? Wrong.
Movement is made up of static states? Wrong.

The list continues....So, if what you are after is genuine mind-expansion, you have no choices: read the old master, and enter the world of Living Time

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Nature is what it is, and as our intelligence, which is a part of it, is less vast than nature, it is doubtful whether any one of our present ideas is large enough to embrace it. Let us then work to expand our thought: let us strain our understanding: break, if need be, all our frameworks: let us not claim to shrink reality to the measure of our ideas, when it is for our ideas, as they grow larger, to mould themselves upon reality.” Bergson quoting Claude Bernard, pg. 176.

Bergson embraces a casual anarchy in metaphysics. Having benefitted from the systems laid out before, from Aristotle to Descartes to Kant, he finds them stifling and artificial. They do not bring knowledge and they seek to place the world into a system that can be framed by our minds. And static.

Instead, he moves into the spaces between the ideas that have defined our thought. He dances between the raindrops. His opening essays focus on time and duration. Maybe others have thought of Time in the manner Bergson had, but it was new to me. He does not see Time as a collection of moments intertwined to create a thread between cause and effect. No, instead, the duration of the moment is the creative process. Ideas and art and science are not uncovering a truth that can be traced back in a causal process. It is an intuitive process; one of eurekas and continuous fusion of ever evolving thought. Bergson sees the retroactive application in looking at how ideas are formed as an artificial construct imposed on the past. Something that helps us put order on disorder. It is a shackling habit. For Bergson, our tendency to break the past into static moments that we can chart paths to is simply a way for us to understand the world in the Platonic terms the West has built its thought upon:

In short, the whole Critique of Pure Reason leads to establishing the fact that Platonism, illegitimate if Ideas are things, becomes legitimate if ideas are relations, and that ready-made idea, once thus brought down from heaven to earth, is indeed as Plato wished, the common basis of thought and nature. But the whole Critique of Pure Reason rests also upon the postulate that our thought is incapable of anything but Platonizing, that is, of pouring the whole of possible experience into pre-existing moulds. Pgs. 116-167.

I’d be lying if I said I fully appreciated the depths that Bergson dove to. This is a slim read and deceptively shallow. However, that may be why I was so comfortable taking my time with this book. Some philosophical works are tomes that seemingly say in 300 pages what can be said in 100. Here, knowing that Bergson is weighing each word with such weight, and such sincere hope that the reader acknowledges the import of these words, that it is a perfect book for winter evenings with a glass of scotch. I’d read a few pages, put it down, and try to embrace the thinking rather than the moment.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something of a sequel to Mind Energy, his other collection of essays, The Creative Mind is a skeleton key to his philosophy. Have gone through this one three times.

His philosophy is not a comprehensive system but more of an argument for a way of philosophizing. Mind energy details some of his experiments, and the creative mind walks us through their implications.

The central elements of Bergsonism: duration, intuition and the absolute. In science, you can only attain the relative. In other words you have a system of symbols, think math, which you use as a way of capturing / photographing a thing in question, think biology, physics or psychology. By virtue of using symbols you can only operate on a series of snapshots. You always remain outside what you are investigating. You are using what Bergson would call a cinematographic approach. By virtue of using symbols (i.e. science) you will only attain the relative.

For Bergson we can only attain the absolute by intuition. It starts with duration, which operates via the notion that what I am at this very moment grew out of what I was a moment ago. And there is no way of definitively dividing the two. if you’re measuring time, there isn’t a way of clearly saying when a moment is no longer one and has become two. Two grows out of one. And one has the seeds of two. It is all duration. Which has implications, central ones, for how we think and exist.

His method goes beyond snapshots. It uses intuition to inhabit the thing in question. It uses intuition, founded on duration, to attain the absolute.

We are always seeking, he shows, the absolute.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an unfortunate collection. Everything in it is essentially a restatement of the premises of the first introduction. In fact, it is nothing more than a compilation of various introductory essays written by Bergson. But, by providing a thorough overhead view of his thought and his concept of duration, it has made me feel as though I no longer have to bother with reading anything else by him. Taken by themselves (and only one!) the first introduction or the centerpiece of the book, "An Introduction to Metaphysics," would suffice. Everything else simply takes his formulations and moves them around. Which is ironic considering this is exactly what he complains about in philosophy - a sort of recomposition of dead concepts rather than an attainment of the plain of duration and artistic intuition. That Hegel is not mentioned once concerning some of the "brand new" ideas he has and that Plato's many discussions of the intuitive sight given Socrates by his "demon" are never acknowledged is really strange (omissions required if one is dedicated to denying the dialectical nature of philosophy - but of course, the dialectic cannot be suppressed and Bergson is repeatedly driven to use it). I'll skip anything else written by Bergson and read Deleuze's undoubtedly more interesting and idiosyncratic read of Bergson's thought. I would advise not reading this book through. Pick it up, read one of the two essays mentioned above, and move on.

[Karl Hallbjörnsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully clear and concise. Bergson was a great writer, no doubt about it. I'm not certain I buy into the arguments, though—while they do feel compelling most of the time, there's something about them that irks me. What precisely that is I can't say, simply because I think I don't understand him well enough. Especially recommended are the essays on Philosophical Intuition and the Introduction to Metaphysics. I'd like to come back to the Ravaisson piece later after I actually read some of that guy—which I've been meaning to do for a while.

[Alex Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Bergson outlines the aesthetic intuition that characterizes his philosophy. Here Bergson grounds change as central to metaphysics, rather than some kind of ontological substance. It's not what he hasn't already said in other books, but this is his directed attempt to define exactly the role between intuition, change and concepts. Worth a look at, since this a directed refocusing of philosophy, memory and change.

What I do not get are some of the examples in the back of philosophers that Bergson admires. At the time of his writing perhaps this was relevant, but these examples are dated, and somewhat uninteresting to me. Oh well.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Metaphysics is intuition

[Socrate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creştere a adevărului. Mişcare retrogradă a adevărului. ▫
Despre precizie în filosofie. ▫
— Sistemele.
— De ce au neglijat ele problema Timpului.
— Ce devine cunoaşterea când i se reintegrează consideraţiile asupra duratei.
— Efecte retroactive ale judecăţii adevărate.
— Iluzia prezentului în trecut.
— Despre istorie şi explicaţiile istorice.
— Logica retrospecţiei.
Ceea ce îi lipseşte filosofiei în special este precizia. Sistemele filosofice nu sunt croite pe măsura realităţii în care trăim. Sunt prea largi pentru ea. Examinaţi un astfel de sistem ales cu grijă: veţi vedea că s-ar aplica foarte bine unei lumi unde n-ar mai exista nici plante, nici animale, nimic altceva decât oameni; unde oamenii n-ar mai avea nevoie să bea şi să mănânce; unde ei n-ar dormi, n-ar visa şi nici n-ar bate câmpii; unde s-ar naşte bătrâni şi ar sfârşi copii; unde energia ar urca panta degradării; unde toate ar merge de-a-ndoaselea şi ar fi cu susul în jos. Un sistem adevărat este un ansamblu de concepţii atât de abstracte şi, în consecinţă, atât de vaste, încât ar cuprinde tot ce este posibil, chiar imposibil, în marginea realului. O explicaţie considerată satisfăcătoare trebuie să se muleze perfect după obiectul sistemului: fără goluri, fără interstiţii unde să-şi facă loc vreo altă explicaţie. Numai ea i se potriveşte acestui obiect, numai obiectul în cauză îi corespunde. Astfel ar putea fi explicaţia ştiinţifică. Ea presupune precizia absolută şi evidenţa completă sau progresivă. Oare am putea spune acelaşi lucru despre teoriile filosofice?

[Tobias Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

creativity is boundless, open, spacious.

to sit down with a "goal" of being creative, to pursue knowledge for some concrete benefit for example, will stifle creativity.

bergson argues that creativity is a product of the willingness to explore all paths. without thinking of the benefit of each path, just exploring.

by having a goal in mind, you necessarily chop reality up into "goal-related" bits that you focus on vs "unrelated" bits that are discarded by your attention.

this selection process stifles creativity because it stops us from seeing reality for what it is.

instead, when we fall into the nongoal state, we stop seeing things in terms of their practical use and instead see things as they really are.

people who can do this "they look at a thing, they see it for ITself, and not for THEMselves.".

detach from conceptual labelling

detach from the narrow mode of perception of a hyperverbal western culture

detachment leads to creativity

funny ebcause this lines up with the psychological evidence linking creativity and meditative progress. it also helps explain why scholars like yuval noah harari and donald hoffman can spend hours a day in meditation and still be productive.

[Agnes Fontana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ce dernier Bergson est une collection d'articles et de conférences, mais introduits par un propos liminaire qui en dégage l'idée générale et fait donc apparaître chaque texte comme une variation sur le thème. C'est toujours aussi transportant. La vie est mouvement, changement, or l'approche scientifique ne retient que la dimension constante, figée ; l'intuition est à même de nous faire pénétrer la nature véritable des choses, que la science ne saisit pas. Il faut pour cela élargir notre perception, et les artistes nous en montrent le chemin. Le temps humain, qui est la perception enrichie du passé, de la mémoire et du sentiment, n'est pas le temps mathématique, c'est la durée, c'est à dire le temps en tant que vécu. Ainsi repensée, faisant apparaître le mouvement, l'élan créatif de la vie, la philosophie peut nous apporter la joie. Les textes "le réel et le possible" (où Bergson montre brillamment que le réel précède le possible, en fait) et "la perception du changement" son spécialement brillants. Une pensée extrêmement complexe, portée par un souffle enthousiaste et un souci constant de clarté qui est l'intelligence véritable.

[LuinGor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une lecture marquante bien qu'assez ardue. Certains passages étaient probablement tout à fait compréhensibles il y a un siècle mais sont plus obscurs aujourd'hui, ou réservés à de fins connaisseurs des grands philosophes du XIXeme siècle.

Deux idées phares ressortent en tout cas :
- nous devons voir le mouvement comme une continuité fluide et non comme une succession de positions immobiles (chacune infiniment proche de la précédente)
- le réel de demain n'est pas contenu dans le champ des possibles d'aujourd'hui, mais c'est à partir du réel de demain (lorsqu'il sera avéré) que nous pourrons déduire le champ des possibles qui a permis ce réel => le réel crée le possible et pas le contraire

Évidemment il y a des répétitions et l'auteur tourne parfois longuement autour du pot, mais Bergson reste tout à fait actuel.

[PERMADREAM. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! I really enjoyed this fine text of Bergson’s, a mixture of lectures of his throughout his days as a philosopher. He touches on metaphysics, a philosophy of time as well as spiritualism (the concept of bringing the lower nature to a higher nature), which i viewed fundamentally as a concept of optimism.

Will definitely look to interact with more of his work!

Some French I learned from Bergson was “A Le Recherche du temps perdu.” Which translates to “in search of time gone by” a wonderful statement that is due for contemplation & reflection.

Definitely worth your time!

[Nate Bohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clear discussion of metaphysics and the problems surrounding the prevailing understanding of time. Bergson has a mastery of the subject. Also highly recommended to anyone interested in the reading Deleuze.

[clarachen]

interesting to read the philosophy which inspired the stream of consciousness in English literature

on another note: esse cara devia fumar maconha porque não é possível alguém ser tão hakuna matata vibes

[Marco Sán Sán]

Lo intenté tres veces, lo acabé dos. No logre entender nada, no sé si soy yo o es la traducción, sé que no es bergson por que he leído obra de él y siempre me ha parecido profunda y nutritiva pero en este ensayo nunca logré entrar. Por necio buscaré otra traducción esperando que sea eso.

[حمده الشامسية · Rating 2 out of 5]

Difficult to read

[Natalie]

"The brain's function is to choose from the past, to diminish it, to simplify it, but not to preserve it."

Quote in Waking the Tiger.

[Noah Christiansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read:
- Preface
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two

[Elibardo Villegas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful reading and an introduction to Metaphysics.

[Xiiz Iikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

In The Creative Mind, Bergson opens with a distinction between two kinds of knowledge: scientific and intuitive. Scientific understanding is rooted in empirical observations and measurements while the latter relies on our direct experience of life around us. Moreover, he asserts that science works best when studying material things but falls short when investigating living organisms due to their ever-evolving nature; this is where an intuitive approach comes in handy as it enables one to comprehend reality's evolving characteristics.

He goes on to analyze the mind's relation to matter, contending that it is not merely a vessel for sensory data but rather an active entity which has influence over material. He then proceeds with his examination of time, demonstrating that instead of functioning as linear advancement, there are qualitative moments embedded within its progression. This further influences Bergson's opinion regarding memory: recollections aren't just simple recordings or replays from past events; they're actually creative processes dependent upon present insight and experience - meaning memories can be modified and new ideas may emerge due to this flexibility.

In conclusion, this book can be beneficial in grasping the fundamentals of Bergsonian theories including duration, movement, alteration and recollections. The writing style is lucid and his conceptions are presented methodically which makes it attractive for anyone interested in exploring the workings of the human mind.

[Leonardo]

Ver Henry Bergson, “The Posible and the Real”, en The Creative Mind, trad. Mabelle Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 91-106. Ciertamente reconocemos la necesidad de insistir sobre los poderes creativos de la virtualidad, pero este discurso Bergsoniano nos resulta insuficiente en tanto también necesitamos insistir sobre la realidad del ser creado, su peso ontológico y las instituciones que estructuran al mundo, creando necesidad de la contingencia.

Imperio Pág.266

[Jacob Israel Chilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

great intro to a brilliant philosopher.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I still shudder when I see this book on my bookshelf. Great ideas, if you are willing to sacrifice a lot of time rereading pages because you have no idea what you just read. A most unenjoyable read.

[nybink · Rating 1 out of 5]

i’m glad Henri Bergson died.