Henri Bergson has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Creative Evolution.
An Introduction to Metaphysics
Summary
The basic principles that Bergson articulates, especially his way of thinking about reality as a dynamic process and his view of human beings as creative and evolving, should be helpful to anyone who seeks to go beyond simply dealing with the practical demands of daily life and consider the nature of things. Of special importance is Bergson’s claim that it is both possible and necessary to know from the inside rather than confining our attention to external perspectives and points of view. Intuition is able to get beyond what is relative and place us inside reality. This essay is, as the title says, an introduction. But if we think there is more to a human being - and even to nature itself - than material structures alone, perhaps the time has come to take a fresh look at Bergson’s essay. In "An Introduction to Metaphysics," Bergson traces the demise of metaphysics to the failure of both scientific materialism and dogmatism and to the immense success of a kind of pragmatism that promised liberation from the fruitless battles among various schools of philosophy. He also rejects relativism and criticizes the vacuum that is created when philosophers refuse to inquire about the nature of reality. To avoid metaphysics easily leads to a worldview shaped by unexamined ideas and hidden presuppositions. Henri Bergson was born in the year that Darwin published the Origin of the Species. He could not have imagined the philosophical impact of evolutionary theory, which is now so great that Bergson’s philosophy, which emphasizes "creative evolution," is experiencing a significant revival. The basic principles that Bergson articulates, especially his way of thinking about reality as a dynamic process and his view of human beings as creative and evolving, should be helpful to anyone who seeks to go beyond simply dealing with the practical demands of daily life and consider the nature of things.
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Time and Free Will
Summary
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the leading French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Near the end of his life when he was forced to register with the police in Nazi-occupied France he wrote: ‘Academic. Philosopher. Nobel prize winner. Jew.’ He was indeed all these things and many more, being as famous in his lifetime for his political activities, working with US President Woodrow Wilson to found the League of Nations, as for being a member of the Académie française and president of the Society for Psychic Research. Time and Free Will, his doctoral thesis, was published as a book in 1889 and attacks and rejects the mechanistic view of causality described in Kant’s version of space and time and proceeds to attempt to define free-will and consciousness by separating space and time. In the process he ascribes temporality to the immediate data of consciousness, or lived time, calling it ‘the duration’, la durée. This duration is a key concept in his philosophy. He defines this state as the precondition for the possibility of free will and declares that freedom is mobility. He argues that science cannot measure changes in consciousness qualitatively, only quantitively. His approach is dualistic, expressing a preference for instinct, or intuition, to intellect and characterises intuition as memory rather than perception. In effect he asserts that free will is a fact. For Bergson intuition is experience in action and entering into the thing or state, empathy, is the way to absolute, rather than relative knowledge. His writing is remarkable for his use of striking imagery - his Nobel prize in 1927 was for literature - but in spite of this imagery which he relies on to illuminate his meaning, he was adamant that no fixed image can adequately represent the mobility he refers to, the unending ‘becomings’ of life. His influence seemed to fade after World War II with the coming of a new generation of continental philosophers including Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - existentialists, whose interests lay in responding to Husserlian phenomenology and the thinking of Heidegger. However, there has a been a growing resurgence of interest in his writings because of the acknowledged importance of his ideas to the work of Gilles Deleuze, who found in Bergson’s notion of an open society a response to the dominant arguments of phenomenology. Hindu writers have also noted similarities between Bergson’s ideas on matter, consciousness, intuition and evolution with Hindu thinking and perspectives. Time and Free Will, translated by F.L. Pogson, is read with customary clarity by Michael Lunts for Ukemi audiobooks. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Public Domain (P)2020 Ukemi Productions Ltd
Creative Evolution
Summary
Creative Evolution is a 1907 book by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. The work proposes a version of orthogenesis in place of Darwin's mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by the “élan vital”, a vital impetus that may also be understood as a natural creative impulse. The book also developed concepts of time which influenced writers like Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. Bergson's term "duration", for example, refers to an individual, subjective experience of time, as opposed to the mathematical, objectively measurable clock time. Bergson suggests that the experience of time as "duration" can best be understood through intuition. This theory of evolution makes possible the free emergence of individual intelligence. It is totally distinct from the deterministic hypotheses that are either mechanistic or teleological. Bergson argues by means of striking metaphor and analogy. He compares life to a wave spreading outward toward a circumference that is broken down at one point only and to an artillery shell from which new shells emerge when it bursts.
Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks
Matter and Memory
Summary
Matter and Memory, (Matière et Mémoire), published in 1896, was the second book written by Henri Bergson (1859-1941), one of the leading French philosophers of his age. It followed Time and Free Will (1889) and helped to establish him as a major force in anti-mechanistic thought, opposing the trend towards uncompromisingly secular and scientific views. However, when Matter and Memory appeared, Bergson was 39 and had yet to become the hugely influential figure he became in the first decades of the 20th century. The first edition carried the subtitle An Essay on the Relationship of Body to Spirit and although this was dropped by the author when revising the text in later editions, it remains a useful introductory statement. For in Matter and Memory, Bergson set out to consider the classic problem of the union of ‘soul and body’ by the analysis of memory. He sought to refute the proposition, then very current, that memory, being ‘lodged’ in the nervous system, localised in the brain, was therefore material. Bergson rejected this reduction of mind to matter. He considered memory to be deeply spiritual. The first edition explained his approach thus: ‘The brain merely guides memory towards actions in the present. The brain inserts memories into the present, with a view to action. The brain has a practical function. The body is the centre of action. Cerebral lesions do not damage memories or the memory. Such lesions disrupt the practical operations of the brain. Memories cannot become incarnate. They always exist, but they are powerless. In fact, the brain no longer functions as intended, and consequently these memories cannot be used.’ In his introduction to the fifth edition of Matter and Memory (1908), used in this recording, Bergson writes, ‘This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory. It is, then, frankly dualistic. But, on the other hand, it deals with body and mind in such a way as, we hope, to lessen greatly, if not to overcome, the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism, and which cause it, though suggested by the immediate verdict of consciousness and adopted by common sense, to be held in small honour among philosophers.’ Though the next generation of French philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre acknowledged the influence of Bergson, his reputation declined after World War II. It was revived in the mid-1960s following the championing of his work by Gilles Deleuze. Bergson’s place in 20th century philosophy, and the relevance of his views today, are secure. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Public Domain (P)2021 Ukemi Productions Ltd