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Introduction: 75 Years Later
Full text linkIntroduction to the volume commemorating 75 years since the death of Henri Bergso
Bergson and the Morality of Uncertainty
Full text linkMoral and political theories, insofar as they are based on the fragile life of human beings, usually incorporate a reflection on the role of uncertainty or contingency. The question remains however, how exactly do we experience ‘uncertainty’? Can it show us different faces, to which we then react in different ways? If so, what is the meaning of such multiplicity for the exercise of agency? Comparing Bergson’s inquiry into the modern belief in chance with Jean-Marie Guyau’s reflections on the love of risk, I examine the moral significance of different ways of relating to uncertainty, and analyze their respective pedagogical purchase regarding the constitution of human freedom. When confronted with the unknown future, human agency gets easily trapped in the vicious and vertiginous circle of impotence and omnipotence. The contrast between Bergson and Guyau illuminates this problem, showing how our relation to uncertainty informs our identity, our capacity for action, and our sense of obligatio
Bergson before Bergsonism: Traversing “Bergson’s Failing” in Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy of Art
Full text linkHow did the philosophy of Henri Bergson look before Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism? This article provides a situated answer to that question by performing a close reading of Susanne K. Langer’s early engagement with Bergson in her monograph Feeling and Form from 1953. Both Bergson and Langer argue against polemical philosophizing. Such polemical modes of doing philosophy distort insight into the thought of the philosophers in question and in philosophical questions per se (such as questions about artistic creation). My reading of Langer’s Bergson is therefore infused with what is nowadays called a new materialist impetus of non-linearity, a non-oppositional philosophizing, and the reading follows the methodology of diffractive reading, a thinking outside fixed and fixating schools of thought. I argue that in spite of Langer’s explicit, i.e., polemical objection to Bergson’s work and to its use by artists, it is a Bergsonism with which Langer’s work is infused
Politeness
Full text linkThis is the English translation of a speech Bergson made at Lycée Henri-IV on July 30, 1892. This is an interesting text because it anticipates Bergson’s last book, his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Like the distinction in The Two Sources between the open and the closed, “Politeness” defines its subject matter in two ways. There is what Bergson calls “manners” and there is true politeness. For Bergson, both kinds of politeness concern equality. Manners or material politeness amount to the ritualized greetings and formalities by means of which we usually define politeness. Unfortunately and like The Two Sources, Bergson attributes this formalized relation to other human beings with primitive and “inferior races.” Nevertheless, Bergson sees in these formalities an attempt, in the name of equality, to ignore other people’s talents and merits so that one can dominate morally superior people. In contrast, true politeness or “spiritual politeness” consists in “intellectual flexibility.” When one meets a person of superior morality, one is flexible in one’s relation to him or her; one abandons the formalities in order to really live her life and think her thoughts. Here we find equality too: “what defines this very polite person is to prefer each of his friends over the others, and to succeed in this way in loving them equally.” After making a comparison to dance, Bergson defines spiritual politeness as “a grace of the mind.” Since both kinds of politeness concern equality, Bergson associates both with justice. However, beyond these two kinds of politeness and justice there is “politeness of the heart,” which concerns charity. In order to indicate politeness of the heart, Bergson describes the kind of person, a sensitive person, who anxiously awaits a word of praise in order to feel good about herself but who also, when she hears a word of reproach, is thrown into sadness. Although Bergson calls the sensibility of this person “a bit sickly,” he also claims that the sensibility is found in the heart of each of us. It indicates a fundamental sympathy with others. For this person such a word from another makes every power of one’s being vibrate in unison. So in this short speech, one will find Bergson distinguishing between material politeness, mental or spiritual politeness, and politeness of the heart. Politeness of the heart is true openness to others. And, for Bergson, it opens up to a society exemplified by ancient philosophy: true friends of each other and of ideas
Senghor\u27s Anxiety of Influence
Full text linkAn examination of the question of influence in Senghor\u27s work, with particular attention to the concept of assimilation - which I argue allows Senghor to responsibly adopt notions from French vitalist and life-philosophy traditions, despite their close ties to colonial and imperial histories
Introduction: The Responsibility of Awkwardness
Full text linkThe thought of the limit has in its genetics the questioning of time and place. The essays in this collection, African Thinking and/at Its Limits, demonstrate this essential interrogation (how time and space both belong to a certain critical modality); their address of (and at) the limits of African thinking is inevitably also one that presents us with the limitedness of temporal and spatial understandings. For the limit signals the very reach(es) of time and place, and enables the possibility of territory, control, management, and measure – possibilities that can seem at once infinite and inordinately restricted. Possibility, the very provocation of the limit, can itself be formulated in terms of time and place—What can (yet) be done? Where is it possible to go? Where do we from here? The limit signifies both expiration, the farthest point a thinking can take one, and consolidation, the demarcation and establishment of a territory. These questions of time and place are, as such and for these very reasons, bound up in any thinking of Africa. This, too, is clear from the issues addressed by the contributions to this collection, not the least of which are the very historicity of the concepts commonly used to assess or explain state crisis, the hangovers of colonial paradigms, and how to think, address, and analyze the crisis of the postcolony.
The Concept in Life and the Life of the Concept: Canguilhem’s Final Reckoning with Bergson
Full text linkFoucault famously divided the history of twentieth-century French philosophy between a “philosophy of experience” and a “philosophy of the concept,” placing Bergson in the former camp and his teacher Canguilhem in the latter. This division has shaped the Anglophone reception of Canguilhem as primarily a historian and philosopher of biology. Canguilhem, however, was also a philosopher of life and a careful reader of Bergson. The recently-begun publication of Canguilhem’s Œuvres complètes has revealed the depth of this engagement, and a re-reading of Canguilhem’s final major statement on Bergson, the 1966 essay “The Concept and Life,” has thus become necessary. The basic problem of that essay is the relationship between knowledge and life in the history of biology and philosophy, with a special place for Bergson. Canguilhem’s strong criticism of him turns, however, on a misquotation. In claiming that Bergson fails to account for the struggle of the living being to maintain a species form, Canguilhem misconstrues the crucial Bergsonian distinction between vital order and geometrical identity; he thus misses the importance that Bergson accords to general biological tendencies, rather than to the generality of the species. Despite the differences on display in the 1966 essay, it will be argued that Canguilhem’s earlier remarks on Bergson show a surprising convergence in the underlying aim of each thinker’s biological philosophy: the call for a new ontology that grasps the ordered and intelligible character of life without relying on a principle of identity
Statues Also Die
Full text link“African thinking,” “African thought,” and “African philosophy.” These phrases are often used indiscriminately to refer to intellectual activities in and/or about Africa. This large field, which sits at the crossroads between analytic philosophy, continental thought, political philosophy and even linguistics is apparently limitless in its ability to submit the object “Africa” to a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches. This absence of limits has far-reaching historical origins. Indeed it needs to be understood as a legacy of the period leading to African independence and to the context in which African philosophy emerged not so much as a discipline as a point of departure to think colonial strictures and the constraints of colonial modes of thinking. That the first (self-appointed) exponents of African philosophy were Westerners speaks volumes. Placide Tempels but also some of his predecessors such as Paul Radin (Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927) and Vernon Brelsford (Primitive Philosophy, 1935) were the first scholars to envisage this extension of philosophy into the realm of the African “primitive.” The material explored in this article – Statues Also Die (Marker, Resnais, and Cloquet), Bantu Philosophy (Tempels), The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Cheikh Anta Diop), and It For Others (Duncan Campbell) - resonates with this initial gesture but also with the ambition on part of African philosophers such as VY Mudimbe to challenge the limits of a discipline shaped by late colonialism and then subsequently recaptured by ethnophilosophers. Statues Also Die is thus used here as a text to appraise the limitations of African philosophy at an early stage. The term “stage,” however, is purely arbitrary and the work of African philosophers has since the 1950s often been absorbed by an effort to retrieve African philosophizing practices before, or away from, the colonial matrix. This activity has gained momentum and has been characterized by an ambition to excavate and identify figures and traditions that had hitherto remained unacknowledged: from Ptah-hotep in ancient Egypt (Obenga 1973, 1990) and North-African Church fathers such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian and Arnobius of Sicca (Mudimbe and Nkashama 1977), to “falsafa”-practising Islamic thinkers (Diagne 2008; Jeppie and Diagne 2008), from the Ethiopian tradition of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat (Sumner 1976), to Anton-Wilhelm Arno, the Germany-trained but Ghana-born Enlightenment philosopher (Hountondji [1983] 1996).
Beyond Dualism and Monism: Bergson\u27s Slanted Being
Full text linkThere 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
Human Rights and the Leap of Love
Full text linkTo commemorate the 75th anniversary of Henri Bergson’s death I present what I believe is his most vital and lasting contribution to political philosophy: his conception of human rights. This article has two goals. The first is to present Bergson’s writings on human rights as clearly and simply as possible, so as to reach the wide audience it deserves. The second is to demonstrate his relevance for contemporary human rights scholarship. To do so, I connect him to recent debates in the history and historiography of human rights. I also highlight his distinctive approach to human rights as furnishing a tool for individuals to work upon and improve themselves. For Bergson, the great promise of human rights is that they simultaneously open new possibilities to care for others and also to care for oneself.