The point of our argument in this place is that since the whole
purpose of philosophy is articulation or clarification and
since in this process of clarification the fewer "axiomatic
incomprehensibles" we start with the better; it is decidedly to the
advantage of any philosophy that it should require at the start
nothing more than the mystery of the individual soul confronting
the mystery of the world around it. And it is to the disadvantage of
Bergson's philosophy that it should require at the start, in addition
to "pure spirit" with its assumption of memory and will, and "pure
matter" with its assumption of ordinary space and ordinary time, a
still further axiomatic trump-card, in the theory of intuitive
"durational" time, in which the real process of the life-flow
transcends all reason and logic.
Putting aside however the cosmological aspect of our controversy
with the "radical empirical" school of thought, we still have left
unconsidered our most serious divergence from their position.
This consists in the fact that both Bergson and James have entirely
omitted from their original instrument of research that inalienable
aspect of the human soul which we call the aesthetic sense.
With only a few exceptions--notably that of Spinoza--all the great
European philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche have begun their
philosophizing from a starting-point which implied, as an essential
part of their "organum" of enquiry, the possession by the human
soul of some sort of aesthetic vision.
To these thinkers, whether rationalistic or mystic, no interpretation
of the world seemed possible that did not start with the aesthetic
sense, both as an instrument of research and as a test of what
research discovered.
The complete absence of any discussion of the aesthetic sense in
Bergson and James is probably an historic confession of the
tyranny of commercialism and physical science over the present
generation. It may also be a spiritual reflection, in the sphere of
philosophy, of the rise to political and social power of that
bourgeois class which, of all classes, is the least interested in
aesthetic speculation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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