Blackwell Reference Online

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(1859–1941) French philosopher. Bergson formulated a new and impressive conception of metaphysics early in the twentieth century. It attracted wide attention not only for its content but also because of its opposition to the prevailing classical view that metaphysics is the inquiry into the universe as a whole. This inquiry was taken to be a purely intellectual one, aimed at embodying its results in a coherent system of ideas or basic truths about reality. Bergson rejected this view of metaphysics, because it mistakenly assumed that the human intellect is a truth-finding capacity, whereas it is in fact a capacity which has evolved to promote man' spractical action in the world. Because of its role the intellect treats what it deals with as individual entities in space, and seeks to understand them in mathematical terms. Hence the entities are regarded as static and immobile. But this is not the way the world is presented to us in immediate experience. Here we are aware of a continuous flowing of things and events in time. This time, however, is not the mathematical time of the physical sciences, but is what Bergson calls ‘duration’ or real time. Scientific time is a fiction, albeita useful one. Metaphysical time can only be obtained by having recourse to ‘intuition’ or introspection of our immediate experience, not by the employment of the intellect in using abstract concepts. Hence ... log in or subscribe to read full text