12. Exkurs: Die Frankfurter Schule - Zentral- und Landesbibliothek ...

Husserl, Heidegger, Funke und die deutsche Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert
stitute” while the philosopher served on French diplomatic missions. Bergson resigned
in 1921 in order to dedicate himself to his writing and to his work on behalf
of the League of Nations. From 1921 to 1926 he acted as president of the committee
on international cooperation of the League of Nations.
Bergson enjoyed the status of a cult figure in the years between World Wars.
Although not a practicing Jew, Bergson refused the Vichy government’s offers to
excuse him from the scope of their anti-Semitic laws. He decided to join the persecuted
and registered himself at the end of 1940 as a Jew, although his religious
thinking had brought him closer to Catholicism. Bergson died of bronchitis on
January 3, 1941. For his last seventeen years he had suffered from crippling arthritis.
“There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language”,
Bergson told once in an interview. As a stylist he could be compared to Russell or
Berkley, but his ideas were often high-flown and difficult to follow. In his first major
work, Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson aimed to show how pseudoproblems
about the will and its freedom have arisen from a false phenomenology of mental
states - essentially, a tendency to conceive and describe them in spatial terms. Human
experience does not perceive real life as a succession of demarcated conscious
states, progressing along some imaginary line, but rather a continuous flow. Bergson
made the distinction between the concept and experience of time. While the
physicist observes objects and events in succession, time is presented to consciousness
as duration - an endlessly flowing process. Bergson argued that the ‘real time’ is
experienced as duration and apprehended by intuition, not through separate operations
of instinct and the intellect.
In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) Bergson saw that the intuition, the direct
apprehension of process, as the discoverer of truth - intuition, not analysis, reveals
the real world. Bergson’s treatment of intuition was not coherent - sometimes it
referred to getting bright ideas, which presupposes intellectual hard work. Sometimes
intuition is the method of philosophy like intellect is of mathematics. His
concept of élan vital, “creative impulse” or “living energy”, was developed in Creative
Evolution, his most famous book. In 1914 all of Bergson’s writings, but most especially
Creative Evolution, were placed upon the list of books devout Catholics were
forbidden to read. After its appearance twenty-five years elapsed before Bergson
published another major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). The Creative
Mind, published two years later, was a collection of essays and other writings.
Although Laughter (1900) is not among Bergson’s best-known studies, Arthur
Kloestler considered it as important for his book The Act of Creation as (1964)
Freud’s classic Wit and its Relations to the Unconscious. Bergson defined the comic as
the result of the sense of relief we feel when we feel ourselves from the mechanistic
and materialistic - his examples were the man-automaton, the puppet on
strings, Jack-in-the Box, etc. “A situation is always comic”, he wrote, “if it participates
simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of
each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.” He saw
laughter as the corrective punishment inflicted by society upon the unsocial individual.
“It seems that laughter needs an echo. Our laughter is always the laughter
of a group.”
Bergson had been interested in Spencerian evolutionism in his youth, but he
later abandoned Spencer’s view placing intuition as the highest human faculty. In
Creative Evolution Bergson argued that the creative urge, not the Darwinian concept
of natural selection, is at the heart of evolution. Man’s intellect has developed in the
course of evolution as an instrument of survival. It comes to think inevitably in ge-
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