HENRI BERGSON

He was born in Paris in the family of a Polish musician and mother Irish, and became one of the most famous philosophers of his time. The views of Bergson at the time, evolution, memory, freedom, perception, mind and body, intuition, intellect, mysticism and society have influenced the thinking and writings of European politicians and writers of the twentieth century. Jewish novelist Marcel Proust, Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw, the American philosopher William James and the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged the great influence of Bergson. Together with Jean-Paul Sartre Bergson was recognized as one of the leading French philosophers of our time.

Bergson′s philosophy was very attractive and popular due to its amazing style and ability to construct analogies that are easy to understand. Despite the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, some criticized the excessive enthusiasm in his books and the lack of precise evidence or scientific proof of his philosophy.

Bergson did not pay attention to this criticism, because he believed that the expression of his ideas require a new approach. No good mechanistic or materialist worldview. Time, for example, is not only a scientific concept, which can be measured, like the sand in the hourglass. Theories of science could not explain how people feel directly the time. Measured at the standard clock time units are perfect for expressing seconds, minutes, hours and years. Much of what we are doing, pointed to what time, what time has passed and what time will come.

For Bergson, it was not just a unit, measured at the machine, and the life course, the fact that he called a pure real-time or duration. Time, there is not space, as well as a permanent vortex of flowing with the inevitable.

Photo — «Henri Bergson»

Attempts to portray the time the abstract or spatial way reduces our understanding of what we are all about. In contrast to the great Descartes, who declared: "Think, Therefore, Bergson called:" I am what′s going on. "

Bergson put forward the concept of duration was revolutionary. Many philosophers, beginning with the ancient Greek Plato, admitted that time is an illusion. Spinoza, for example, represented the reality as a side of eternity. Bergson saw time in the aspect of its duration. When people consider time in its real length, and thus flows freely, and not as an automaton, then achieved personal freedom. A man′s actions will never be free until they become spontaneous, arising from a person′s identity at the moment.

Bergson did not follow the path trodden by many other great philosophers, setting out at a young age a major philosophical system. Rather, he patiently turned into a series of books for selected topics, confiding to them all their concept of time.

To understand the connection between spiritual and material, how our minds and bodies work together, Bergson tried to comprehend the work of memory. The brain, he assured, is not mine of information, but rather a filter that retains only what we practically need to continue the path. In fact, the brain tries to forget more than remember. Only man has the consciousness or pure memory - the ability to remember only what is necessary. Net human memory is combined with the general, the quality of all living beings - the instinct or "memory usage" in a unique synthesis of human memories.

Bergson also investigated the work of intelligence. Comparing the intellect with its concept of time, he noted "cinematic" method of intelligence, lively and long movie, worth of the individual static frames, understood by one in a large, constantly and rapidly changing wave.

Photo — «Henri Bergson»

Intel cuts all at easily recognizable pieces of remains out of what he knows, and intuition can enter the brain in a sea of consciousness, the current is infinite, whose never-ending length of which becomes part of what she knows, which gives absolute knowledge. Bergson acknowledged that the intuition does not necessarily arise from outbreaks of inspiration, but rather from enhanced forms of meditation.

Expanding our concepts of time, mind and matter, of intuition and intellect, Bergson examines the evolution. He felt that philosophy should be added to the biological history. Bergson believed that the original impulse of life, "elan vital" gives strength to all living beings. Such an outburst stemmed from human creativity.

Professional life Bergson was mainly in the teaching of metaphysics in the French higher education institutions, and its membership was the culmination of the French Academy. During the First World War he was in the diplomatic service and later was an official of the League of Nations.

By the end of life Bergson drew the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. Unity with God is possible only with the help of a special intuition, a related so-called mysticism. To achieve this special status of the blessed consciousness of the people prevented the daily routine of the competition, the need to earn a living, struggle for survival. Even as an enthusiastic Christian mystical thought, Bergson, as a prominent figure on the international arena, could not in the Nazi era to make the conversion to Christianity and publicly remained a Jew until the end of life.