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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Bergson: philosophy contra science « Previous | |Next »
August 4, 2005

I don't know that much about Henri Bergson. I understood him as a dead philosophical figure who opposed science in the name of metaphysics. Then I came across this review and this passage caught my eye:

From the time of Descartes, philosophy has been forced to cast a critical eye on science. Once it became obvious that science and the empirical method delivers superior knowledge of the material world, philosophy had to stake out its territory over and against science's expansive and increasingly imperial claims. Descartes' dualism was an early and influential response to the problem, but as Gary Gutting writes in French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, "one of the most persistently attractive has been the claim that philosophy can and should root itself in an experience with an immediacy or concreteness that escapes the abstractions required for successful empirical science". This was of course Bergson's path. While science could provide us with utterly convincing snapshots of reality, and utterly practical analyses of isolate phenomena, it could teach us nothing about continuity and duration---nothing, that is, about the essential nature of lived experience. And while modern science has progressed far beyond classical atomic theory, it nevertheless continues to understand the world in terms of the discrete. Such emphasis on the discrete and the isolate continues to inform our understanding of virtually all phenomena and their transformations, up to and including mental phenomena."

Ah Bergson is doing a critique of the modern metaphysics of natural science. And he has a sharp eye:
"Bergson was perhaps the greatest philosopher of time in the Western tradition (though he is still marginalized within it), and his insistence that science knows only time without change, or rather, time as space, was fundamental to his entire philosophical project. But why does science spatialize time? Why does it reject that the continuity of lived time has any relevance for its own methods and procedures? For Bergson, it is because the scientific pursuit is based on the principle of mechanism. From the scientific perspective the universe is a machine whose operations can be defined, quantified, and predicted. Thus science provides human beings a degree of control over the material world that pre-scientific societies could only dream of. However, for Bergson this doesn't change the fact that the universe is not a mechanism, and that time is not space."

Suddenly Bergson becomes very interesting, does he not? He breaks with mechanism and its conception of nature as a machine.

Just like Hegel before him.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:46 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

Cartesian dualism is refuted in any number of ways, as is the bergsonian phenomenology. No one, except some foolish postmodernists grasping for some shreds of idealism, asserts that perception and sensation--including time perception--are independent of the brain's biochemistry. YOu could point to lobotomies or drugs, but what about say a six pack of beer; isn't perception including that of time affected by consumption of alcohol? Yes. What people are saying when they claim science doesn't provide an adequate explanation for perception is that we still can't "log on" or jack into someone's mind and partake in their mental activities, as of yet.

But that does not mean that will not be feasible at some future point: however "cybery" that sounds, eventually some sort of empirical, electronic interface with other minds (or being able to access one's own mind with some sort of bio-mechanical circuitry) should be possible, as would a "construct" made from our perceptions, personality, memories etc.