Morality in Evolution: The Moral Philosophy of Henri Bergson

by Idella J. Gallagher

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

140418: this is a later note: if we take evolution in biology seriously we are required to pattern how such and such human trait, however primitive, has evolved from primate ancestry, though i do not mean to promote ideological notions of this or that social behaviors as ‘justified’ by evolutionary arguments, for there is great difference between ‘natural’ selection and ‘unnatural’ selection. former is material in biology over great eons, latter is creative by humans and so ‘evolution’ without teleology, or rather only to human ends, such as breeding for size of cattle...

first review: i have not read much moral philosophy- perhaps finding it too intellectual, let alone bergson as moralist, but this book insists on empirical beginning, inside and outside, creative and emotional. b has no set theories, no architecture, no arguments, but works sort of inside out, social and biological, determining the moral good in contingent, historical, novel, tendency...

there is argument that there is no definite, certain, moral response to human life, but that whatever argument it must be there, that it is vital for our societies and selves, a reflection of our biological need to coordinate and share as people, that such grows out of our helplessness as infants, and society is an extension of this way of thought and language...

there is argument that any moral certainty must confront b's 'duration' and because it can never be 'quantified' there is no way to devise ahead of time, no way to calculate, as from instinct we grow to intuition and intellect, and the neglected force of 'novelty' that we must see it as 'aspiration' rather than historical recapitulation, and here we see the uniqueness of b. this text is actually sort of 'application' of the way of b, of duration, novelty, openness...

there is argument of social 'world’ that is common 'social' world that tends to nostalgia, that regulates, determines who counts as humans- and how this must be transcended by 'mystic' sense of how all humans are counted, that manifests itself as 'love' for all... this is the difference from 'closed' to 'open' societies...

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Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Matter and Memory
Creative Evolution
Henri Bergson: Key Writings
Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life
Bergsonism
Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition
Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception
Henri Bergson
Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson
The Bergsonian Philosophy of Intelligence
Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel
The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy
The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick