A New Philosophy : $b Henri BergsonLe Roy, Edouard
Philosophy
A New Philosophy : $b Henri Bergson
Le Roy, Edouard
Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941
Do you want an example? I will take that of human personality. The
ego is one; the ego is many: no one contests this double formula. But
everything admits of it; and what is its lesson to us? Observe what is
bound to happen to the two concepts of unity and multiplicity, by
the mere fact that we take them for general frames independent of the
reality contained, for detached language admitting empty and blank
definition, always representable by the same word, no matter what
the circumstances: they are no longer living and coloured ideas, but
abstract, motionless, and neutral forms, without shades or gradations,
without distinction of case, characterising two points of view from
which you can observe anything and everything. This being so, how
could the application of these forms help us to grasp the original and
peculiar nature of the unity and multiplicity of the ego? Still further,
how could we, between two such entities, statically defined by
their opposition, ever imagine a synthesis? Correctly speaking, the
interesting question is not whether there is unity, multiplicity,
combination, one with the other, but to see what sort of unity,
multiplicity, or combination realises the case in point; above all,
to understand how the living person is at once multiple unity and
one multiplicity, how these two poles of conceptual dissociation are
connected, how these two diverging branches of abstraction join at
the roots. The interesting point, in a word, is not the two symbolical
colourless marks indicating the two ends of the spectrum; it is the
continuity between, with its changing wealth of colouring, and the
double progress of shades which resolve it into red and violet.
But it is impossible to arrive at this concrete transition unless we
begin from direct intuition and descend to the analysing concepts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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