Getting Bergson Straight

This study concerns the ideas of one particular philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose views of time, intuition, and creativity have had a significant impact on art, literature, and the humanities, both in his time and in our own. Although it is generally recognized that Bergson’s ideas have significantly impacted the arts and the humanities, it has not been recognized how they have also had a creative influence on the sciences as well. Nor has it been realized that this was one of his most basic contentions. Bergson’s conception of intuition—his fundamental insight into reality—was not limited to fugitive insights into human existence. By realizing previously unsuspected possibilities for research and discovery, his endeavors were also meant to make possible new advances in the sciences. If it enabled his cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust, to explore human memory in depth, it also inspired psychologists like Daniel Schachter to use Bergson’s ideas to make real contributions to contemporary memory science. If his notion of creative evolution brought many thinkers to a belief in human creative freedom, it brought others (notably Alexis Carrel and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy) to a scientific study of biological time. Among his successful speculations was the theory of the Big Bang cosmology. 'Getting Bergson Straight' shows many points at which Bergson’s ideas anticipated future developments in the sciences. This was seen clearly by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis de Broglie who viewed Bergson’s physics as presaging quantum physics. Thus, the text is well situated for arts, humanities, social science, and natural science classrooms studying creative thinking and/or intellectual history.

This study concerns the ideas of one particular philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose views of time, intuition, and creativity have had a significant impact on art, literature, and the humanities, both in his time and in our own. Although it is generally recognized that Bergson's ideas have significantly impacted the arts and the humanities, it has not been recognized how they have also had a creative influence on the sciences as well. Nor has it been realized that this was one of his most basic contentions. Bergson's conception of intuition-his fundamental insight into reality-was not limited to fugitive insights into human existence. By realizing previously unsuspected possibilities for research and discovery, his endeavors were also meant to make possible new advances in the sciences. If it enabled his cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust, to explore human memory in depth, it also inspired psychologists like Daniel Schachter to use Bergson's ideas to make real contributions to contemporary memory science. If his notion of creative evolution brought many thinkers to a belief in human creative freedom, it brought others (notably Alexis Carrel and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy) to a scientific study of biological time. Among his successful speculations was the theory of the Big Bang cosmology. 'Getting Bergson Straight' shows many points at which Bergson's ideas anticipated future developments in the sciences. This was seen clearly by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis de Broglie who viewed Bergson's physics as presaging quantum physics. Thus, the text is well situated for arts, humanities, social science, and natural science classrooms studying creative thinking and/or intellectual history.

At the threshold of the twentieth century, Bergson reset the agenda for philosophy and its relationship with science, art and even life itself. Concerned with both examining and extolling the phenomena of time, change, and difference, he was at one point held as both "the greatest thinker in the world" and "the most dangerous man in the world." Yet the impact of his ideas was so all-pervasive among artists, philosophers and politicians alike, that by the end of the First World War it had become impossibly diffuse. In a manner imitating his own cult of change, the Bergsonian school departed from the scene almost as quickly as it had arrived. As part of a current resurgence of interest in Bergson, both in Europe and in North America, this collection of essays addresses the significance of his philosophical legacy for contemporary thought.

This volume explores the relations between the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson. It examines the articulation between their concepts, methods and modes of philosophy. Themes are examined in the context of the contrasts, differences and conjunctions - the rhizomatic connections - between their shared concepts.

Until now, Bergson's widely acknowledged impact on American literature has never been comprehensively mapped. Author Paul Douglass explains and evaluates Bergson's meaning for American writers, beginning with Eliot and moving through Ransom, Penn Warren, and Tate to Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams, and others. It will be a standard point of reference. Bergson was the continental philosopher of the early 1900s, a celebrity, as Sartre would later be. Profoundly influential throughout Europe, and widely discussed in England and America in the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties, Bergson is now rarely read. His current "obsolescence," Douglass argues, illuminates the Western shift from Modern to post- Modern. Ambitious in scope, this book remains admirably close to Bergson himself: what he said, where that fits in the historical context of philosophy, why his ideas moved across the Atlantic, and how he affected American writers. At the book's heart are readings of Eliot's criticism and poetry, analyses of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and evaluations of Ransom's, Tate's and Penn Warren's criticism. This impressively researched and beautifully written study will remain of lasting value to students of American literature.

In a critical, comparative study of the sociological literature, this book explores the term “time,” and the various interconnections between time and a broad cluster of topics that create a conceptual labyrinth. Various understandings of time manifest themselves in the context of many individual social problems—there is no single vision in sociology of how to grasp time and address within social theory. This book, therefore, attempts to define an approach to the concept of time and its associated terms (duration, temporality, acceleration, compression, temporal structures, change, historical consciousness, and others). The volume is guided by a critical engagement with three main questions: a) the formation of human understanding of time; b) the functioning of temporal structures at different levels of social reality; c) the role and place of time in general sociological theory.

Questioning the implicit assumptions that we make about space, this text considers conventional notions of social science, as well as demonstrating how a vigorous understanding of space can impact on political consequences.

Through a close examination of Nabokov's father's political, moral, and aesthetic values and, more generally, Russian liberalism as it existed in the first few decades of the 20th century, the author provides persuasive answers to many long-standing questions in this deeply researched, innovative study.