Abstract
This chapter, describes more in depth the three interrelated motifs that were drawn from Bergson’s oeuvre to inform the further discussions in this study: immediate concreteness, vital impulse and duration. They all relate to a dynamic and fluid worldview, as opposed to a static and analytic one. The concepts are interwoven and reoccur throughout the writings of Bergson. The three motifs all treat the following question: how is ‘discrete individuality’ possible whilst direct experience is always in flux, indiscrete, and holistic? The main point of this reflective and reflexive exercise is to use them as notions for a concretisation of Bergson’s philosophy for contemporary science, first through science and subsequently through a discussion of technology, in relation to the self-creative, or autopoietic, nature of human evolution and its impact on global ecosystems.
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Notes
- 1.
The linguistic turn was spurred by the idea that our experience of the world is always mediated by the language we use, and thus our perception of the world is always determined by language. Such determination however, combined with the arbitrary shape signs have taken, also implies that we cannot look past the horizon of language, since our ways of thinking are restricted to its arbitrary shapes. Before the turn, language could still be regarded as an instrument of thought. This view exists throughout the philosophical world; it is also voiced by Confucius, who stated the desire to rectify names to make them correspond to reality (Confucius, Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3, verses 4–7, translated by James Legge (1893)).
- 2.
Plato: Phaedrus 265d-266a. For an English translation see Nehamas and Woodruff (1995).
- 3.
Whilst the term ‘postmodernism’ originated in architecture, to designate an ironic and pluralistic approach to style, it came to designate a series of movements, schools and ideas ranging from art to philosophy, from literature to sociology.
- 4.
Another process philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, coined this figure of speech in reference to his definition of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
- 5.
In an often quoted letter to Léon Brunschvicg: “Tout philosophe a deux philosophies: la sienne et celle de Spinoza.”
- 6.
The distinction between actual and virtual will be discussed in Chap. 5 but suffice to say that the virtual is related to memory, imagination, projection, possibility etc.
- 7.
As might be illustrated by the following quotation from Frantisek Kupka’s Creation in the Plastic Arts (1989): “Art expresses itself in composing its own organism. The work of art possesses a specific organic structure, entirely different from that which is found in nature.”
- 8.
E.g. Jöns Jakob Jansz Berzelius, Hans Driesch, Johannes Peter Müller but also Louis Pasteur, in specific in relation to his experiments on fermentation. Its primary view being that life is not fully determined by laws of chemistry and (ultimately) physics (for a more elaborate account, see Chap. 3).
- 9.
Elie Metchnikoff, a leading Russian immunologist and contemporary to Bergson, specified the intrinsic nature of this emergence in terms of the organisms ability to self-define (see Chap. 4).
- 10.
As time goes by, the cement factory has by now ceased its activities, delivering its surroundings of its ominous noise at night. The several square kilometer hollow in the hill is to become ‘planned nature’, whilst my grandmother’s demise will be 5 years ago in 8 days.
- 11.
Although he takes a different point of view towards the metaphor of film: Bergson considered cinema an illustration of the wrongful spatialisation of time whilst Deleuze considers cinema from a much more positive point of view and ultimately even interprets Bergson’s philosophy as cinematographic in nature.
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Landeweerd, L. (2021). An Attempt to an Applied Metaphysics. In: Time, Life & Memory. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 38. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56853-5_2
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