Anyone ever read Henri Bergson? What do ya'll guys think of him?

>>9675947
MY diary desu

He's great if you're into vitalism, phenomenology, or mysticism/esotericism. Especially if you're into all three.

>>9676024
curiosity piqued

>>9675947
vitalism became obsolete archaism once we discovered the biochemical mechanisms of the organism
people don't read him for a reason

>>9676059
Nope

>>9676059
Bergson had plenty of useful ideas, even if they're weird ones. Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty certainly found them useful. Besides, vitalism doesn't have to mean life of the organism as opposed to anorganic matter or whatever, it can also work with patterns that go beyond organic and anorganic. So a computer is in some sense alive.

>>9675947

this nigga gonna take over the world with his robot army lol

File: 6phRE10n.jpg (143KB, 1300x957px) Image search: [Google]

143KB, 1300x957px

>When isolated from one another and regarded as so many distinct units, psychic states seem to be more or less intense. Next, looked at in their multiplicity, they unfold in time and constitute duration. Finally, in their relations to one another, and in so far as a certain unity is preserved throughout their multiplicity, they seem to determine one another. Intensity, duration, voluntary determination, these are the three ideas which had to be clarified by ridding them of all that they owe to the intrusion of the sensible world and, in a word, to the obsession of the idea of space.
>Examining the first of these ideas, we found, that psychic phenomena were in themselves pure quality or qualitative multiplicity, and that, on the other hand, their cause situated in space was quantity. In so far as this quality becomes the sign of the quantity and we suspect the presence of the latter behind the former, we call it intensity. The intensity of a simple state, therefore, is not quantity but its qualitative sign. You will find that it arises from a compromise between pure quality, which is the state of consciousness, and pure quantity, which is necessarily space. Now you give up this compromise without the least scruple when you study external things, since you then leave aside the forces themselves, assuming that they exist, and consider only their measurable and extended effects. Why, then, do you keep to this hybrid concept when you analyse in its turn the state of consciousness ? If magnitude, outside you, is never intensive, intensity, within you, is never magnitude. It is through having overlooked this that philosophers have been compelled to distinguish two kinds of quantity, the one extensive, the other intensive, without ever succeeding in explaining what they had in common or how the same words " increase " and " decrease " could be used for things so unlike. In the same way they are responsible for the exaggerations of psychophysics, for as soon as the power of increasing in magnitude is attributed to sensation in any other than a metaphorical sense, we are invited to find out by how much it increases. And, although consciousness does not measure intensive quantity, it does not follow that science may not succeed indirectly in doing so, if it be a magnitude. Hence, either a psychophysical formula is possible or the intensity of a simple psychic state is pure quality.

I haven't read him but I think he's a load of horse shit, and my opinions are facts.

>>9675947
Fwiw, Jacques Maritain and his fiancee, in despair over the meaningless of existence, had been contemplating a suicide pact, but hearing Bergson lecture revived their hope.

>>9675947
If u read him u will become immortal

Plagiarist

>>9675947
Best Philosopher to read. He's one of the only philosophers who hasn't given me a headache. Profoundly elegant speaking style. Also, countered Einstein's theory of time, which was pretty much heresy. That's probably the reason he's blacklisted in academia.

TL;DR: Great dude to study in your free time, just don't mention him to your professors.


>>9676043
Just read it. You won't regret it. Start with "Time and Free Will" or "Creative Evolution.

>>9676394
So much this. Einstein BTFO