Henri Bergson
1859-1941 · Process Philosophy · Prominent
Clock time is a line you can cut into equal parts. The time you live in swells and drags and has no such parts, and the French philosopher Bergson called it durée, the flowing time consciousness lives in. Life carries an impulse he named the élan vital, which no machine model captures. You reach what is real by intuition, feeling your way from inside it, rather than by taking it apart.
Signature
The position Bergson is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Purposeful
- Time
- Phenomenological Time / Process / Becoming
Positions on the 8 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Purposeful (100 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Beauty
- mildly leans Objective (63 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (75 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature of Reality
- mildly leans Unity (37 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Nature
- mildly leans Harmony (67 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
- Ethics
- mildly between Ends and Means (54 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
12 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Bergson refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Other / Process Theism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Representative Democracy
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Freedom
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Natural Emergence
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Embodied Perception / Predictive Perception
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Relational
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Libertarian Free Will
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Continuous Creation
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Phenomenological Time / Process / Becoming
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Expression
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Law
- Natural Law / Common Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Agnostic
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Humanity
What is your primary bond and loyalty?