RGOGNONE

le mouvant (1933). The B. has had and still has a worldwide influence.

I. INTUITIONISM AND SCIENTISM

From the same French thought of the 19th century, the B. drew motifs for his critique of scientism, specifically from Maine de Biran’s psychologism, Ravasson’s philosophy of freedom, Renouvier’s neocriticism, Boutroux’s contingentism, etc. The B. represents the resurgence of anti-rationalism, the revolt against the Cartesian tradition (of which the French philosophical environment was steeped), against the “raison raisonnante,” which in scientism had found its ultimate incarnation. His speculative effort has two converging directions toward a fundamental unity: to free biologism and evolutionism from the weight of intellectualist scientism and immerse them in the living and bubbling current of life, and, on the other hand, to give life itself not a mere biological and materialistic meaning, but a deeply spiritual sense. On one side, the B. makes use of French anti-intellectualism of Pascalian type to demolish scientific intellectualism; on the other, he draws on new biological and evolutionary theories to bring the former into contact with concrete reality, making it, through the principles of intuition, “duration,” and “élan vital,” the metaphysical expression of all reality. Therefore, the B.’s anti-intellectualism (and this is its polemical aspect) appears as a critique of a particular form of intellectualism (that of scientism) and not as a negation of all forms of intellectual and rational knowledge. On the basis of this critique, he constructs a philosophy (a metaphysics) which, while not rejecting the legitimate demands of positivism, vindicates against it precisely the concrete sense of life and the reality of its spiritual values. Positivism was above all a “method,” whose abstractness the B. seeks to demonstrate, while simultaneously indicating a new way of philosophizing. The B. (like Blondel in another sense and other contemporary French thinkers) is the resurgence of conscience against reason. Intuitions, yes, but not irrationalism: intuition does not exclude concrete rationality. One must distinguish between the B. and the “bergsonism” of some of his followers, who tend toward dilettantish anti-intellectualism.

INTUITION, REAL DURATION, AND ÉLAN VITAL.
To say what an object is, to describe it, to express it in symbols, is one thing; to penetrate it in its interior, to grasp its profound essence, which is not expressed in symbols, is another. The first is the method of knowledge by concepts (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction), proper to philosophical and scientific intellectualism—symbolic, extrinsic, abstract, relative; the other is the method of immediate intuition, intrinsic, concrete, absolute knowledge. Hitherto, says the B., science and philosophy have been like two bridges whose piers enclose the current of living reality; intuition, instead, stands in the midst of the river of life and grasps reality in immediate experience. “Reality is a process of perpetual creation without beginning or end, which never presents the same face twice, but assumes at every instant an original and unforeseeable aspect: it is an incessant flow, where nothing persists, a mobile and living continuity, without any division into parts.” Intuition means living from within a thing, and thus it is an absolute mode of knowledge, different from the relative mode of analysis; it is a kind of intellectual sympathy that enables us to grasp an object in its essence, beyond every symbolic expression, such as that of positive science, which limits itself to photographing objects externally. Therefore: 1) on the one hand, scientific theories, philosophical doctrines, religious dogmas are abstract, relative symbols (to which the profound, concrete, and true reality escapes), elaborated by intelligence for practical ends; 2) and, on the other, only intuition is the type of concrete and absolute knowledge, that is, metaphysical knowledge. Indeed, for the B., metaphysics is a special way of knowing, “of possessing a reality absolutely instead of knowing it relatively, of penetrating into it instead of adopting points of view about it, of having its intuition instead of analyzing it, with the aim of grasping it outside of every expression, translation, or symbolic representation” (Introduction à la métaphysique, in Revue de métaph. et de morale, I [1903]).

Through intuition we know at least the reality of our ego, whose essence, like that of the universe, is real duration, a perennial flow in which the various states interpenetrate in unity. Introspection shows us how our spiritual life is nothing but an intimately lived experience of something that endures, persists through change. The person is real duration. If we succeed in descending below the superficial ego, fragmented and divided into so many psychic acts, beneath the superficial freezing of the outer layers of consciousness, we grasp a continuity and a succession of movement and states solidly organized and animated by a common life, in which all our past swells with the present (consciousness is memory), we discover our deep ego, that is, our unitary, permanent life, yet ever new.

The inexhaustible source from which all things flow in their perpetual flux, both spiritual and material, is the vital impulse (*élan vital*), a drive (distinct from mechanistic evolutionism) that is not a substance but a productive force generating ever new and improved forms through evolution. The original vital impulse first unfolds in vegetative and animal life, where instinct and intelligence remain undifferentiated and almost dormant. Subsequently, in animals only instinct develops, while in man intelligence emerges. In man, the vital impulse rises to consciousness and freedom but loses instinct—the faculty that knows real things (intelligence, by contrast, knows only conceptual relations, not real objects). Instinct and intelligence unite in intuition, the sole cognitive and metaphysical faculty, which therefore does not exclude but includes reflective activity. When we free ourselves from the habit—requiring an “act of violence” and laborious effort—of applying to living, concrete reality the conceptual categories, crystallized like inorganic matter upon which they are modeled and incapable of grasping the manifold forms of organic organization and evolution; when we recognize the error of both mechanistic and finalist hypotheses (both of which abolish evolution, the former by denying enrichment and originality from cause to effect, the latter by inverting the causal process by conceiving the end as the ultimate cause), both born of classificatory schemes that assimilate the profound nature of life to matter and confuse organic with material processes, then we grasp the real characteristics of life: namely, the qualitative difference between matter, which is inertia, dispersion, diminished and solidified energy, and life, which is evolution, unity, energetic integration, dynamic rhythm, unceasing creative potential, upward movement, and inexhaustible becoming.

**MORALITY AND RELIGION**
Bergson sometimes names the primitive vital impulse “God” (*L’évolution créatrice*, 6th ed., Paris 1910, p. 270), but he specifically addresses the moral and religious problems in his final work, *Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion*. Following the schema of the antithesis between mechanical matter and vital impulse, he distinguishes between static and dynamic morality. The former is characterized by obligation: it is the morality imposed by society, a life conforming to rule without initiative or effort. The latter is the morality of the “ethical genius,” free of obligations and restrictions, the morality of sacrifice and charity, of mystical souls who guide the movement of civilized societies. When these two moralities meet, they form that synthesis proper to humanity, which stands at a level “higher than an animal society, where obligation would be nothing but the force of instinct, but lower than a consensus of gods, where everything would be creative impulse.” Examining the manifestations of organized moral life, one finds them perfectly coherent and capable of being traced back to determinate principles. Moral life will thus be a rational life.

Similarly, Bergson distinguishes between static or crystallized religion and dynamic or creative religion. Man, besides intelligence, is endowed with the faculty of *fabulatio*, which counterbalances the dangers to which his intelligence exposes him. From *fabulatio* arises static religion, social or “Gregorian,” which is therefore “a defensive reaction of nature against what might be depressing (the inevitability of death, discouragement at the unforeseen) for the individual and dissolving (selfish ends) for society in the exercise of intelligence.”

Yet beyond the mythology of gods, there is the religion of God, of the creating God, dynamic and interior religion, by which man re-enters the current of the vital impulse. Dynamic religion is supra-intellectual, mystical experience, “singular or privileged,” of the very few (saints and heroes). The great mystics, expressions of dynamic religion, are souls who cease to revolve around themselves, who listen to themselves and feel within themselves the indefinable force that moves them forward, God and themselves in God. The soul is at once agent and acted upon. In mystical action it unites with God: life overflows, so do impulse, freedom; great is the power of expansion and apostolate, the desire to transform humanity, to triumph over materiality. Through God and for God, the mystic loves all humanity with a divine love. Above natural societies, products of racial egoism, arises the concept of the total human society.

It is evident that, for dynamic or mystical religion, the content of faith (positive religions) is something accidental, to be surpassed like scaffolding in love. Likewise, for Bergson, dogma is the symbolic transcription of mystical experience. As mysticism penetrates beneath the inert envelope, it vivifies the experience enclosed in dogmatic forms and renews II. In this way, however, Bergson denies any real importance to the content of faith and to dogma, reducing them to crystallized, relative, superficial, and symbolic knowledge. This is a consequence of his anti-intellectualism, which fails to recognize that even the intellect is life, profound and metaphysical knowledge. Bergson’s doctrine of religious faith and dogma stands in clear contrast to the teaching of the Catholic Church (v. IMMANENTISM). Some of the philosopher’s principal works (*Essai... L’évolution créatrice, Matière et mémoire*) were placed on the Index. Toward the end of his life, however, Bergson gave his moral adherence to Catholicism, though for what appear to be contingent reasons, he did not receive baptism.