Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: A remarkable resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson has developed-in France certainly, but also in the Anglophone world-over the last few decades.A principal reason why the influence of his philosophy had previously declined, however, concerns his position regarding the Great War of 1914-18. 1 Bergson played a leading role in diplomatic missions that helped to bring the US into the war on the Allied side, 2 but he also characterized the conflict in a series of discourses that posterity often judged severely, and that still have the power to shock.In the first, presented shortly after the outbreak of hostilities-and Germany's invasion of Belgium 1 On this point, see Vincent Peillon's preface to Annales bergsoniennes: Tome 5, Bergson et la politique, ed.Fre ´de ´ric Worms (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012) and the introduction to Philippe Soulez, Bergson politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).The point remains largely unrecognized in English-language studies of Bergson, and Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White's Bergson, Politics, and Religion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), "the first volume in English dedicated to the political and religious aspects of his thought" (1), contains no essay directly on Bergson's discourses in 1914-18.For an account of the decline of Bergson's influence after 1918, see the final chapter of Franc ¸ois Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), and for general studies of the fate of Bergsonism in the twentieth century, see Giuseppe Bianco, Apre `s Bergson: Portrait de group avec philosophe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2015) and Heike Delitz, Bergson Effekte: Aversionen und Attraktionen im franzo ¨sischen soziologischen Denken (Weilerswist: Velbru ¨ck, 2015). 2 See Philippe Soulez, "Les missions de Bergson: Les paradoxes du philosophe ve ´ridique et trompeur" in Soulez, ed., Les philosophes et la guerre de 14 (Saint Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1988), 65-81.
Source: Journal of the History of Ideas
Author: Mark Sinclair
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2503133806