Bergson and the spiritualist origins of the ideology of creativity in philosophy

ABSTRACT

Henri Bergson (1859–1940), the most prominent member of nineteenth-century French spiritualism, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as a practice which consists in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In this article, I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative intellectual practice was the result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existent spiritualist framework, between, on the one hand, neo-Kantianism and, on the other hand, evolutionism which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging social sciences. Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy.

KEYWORDS:

• Spiritualism
• Bergson
• creation
• lexicography
• interiority

Notes

1 On the broader history of these two terms, see Sophie Roux’s “Notion/concept/idée” and Giuseppe Bianco, “The Misadventures of the ‘Problem’ in ‘Philosophy.’”

2 This is the reason why, in 1842, Cousin’s pupil Émile Saisset (1814–1863) both translated Spinoza’s work into French and warned against its perilousness.

3 Espinas, “L’agrégation de philosophie.” This essay was part of a discussion started after the establishement of the new curriculum in philosophy (1880), in the pages of the Revue internationale de l'enseignement.

4 For an assessment, see Stancati, “Une page d’histoire de la lexicographie en France et en Italie.”

5 Letter of Louis Couturat to Xavier Léon from the 20th of July 1900, quoted in Soulié Les philosophes en République. L’aventure intellectuelle de la Revue de métaphysique et de morale et de la Société française de philosophie (1891-1914), Rennes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo [Grant Number 2015/04381-4].