Bruno Rates

Since the beginning of his intellectual journey, Bergson has always shown an enormous distrust of language. Allied to space, communication, social life and conceptual thinking, it was considered, except in its artistic dimension, as an obstacle, not a vehicle, to the expression of duration. However, despite the verisimilitude of this general view, if we compare the assertions about language made in 1889, in Time and Free Will, to those made in Creative Evolution, eighteen years later, we will notice a significant change in position that goes from considering it as an element of “dissimulation” to an “instrument of liberation.” Based on the recently published course “L’idée de temps” given at the Collège de France in the years of 1901-1902, and having as a common thread the relationship between language, society and life, I intend to demonstrate that the causes that motivated this adjustment of position occur from the abandonment, by Bergson, of a certain anti-naturalist conception of language and, consequently, from the philosopher's gradual assimilation (and formulation) of what we could call linguistic naturalism.

When we think of Bergson’s relation to American thought, the first name that naturally comes to mind is William James. However, if we look closer and, more specifically, if we analyze the impact of American thinkers on Bergson’s philosophy, we will find two scientists whose preoccupations were distant from those cultivated by the forerunner of pragmatism, the paleontologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) and the evolutionary psychologist James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934). In this article I will investigate how their thesis about the potentialities of the human hand (Shaler) and the social aspects of the “struggle for life” (Baldwin) have shaped Bergson’s views on life and technology. As a consequence, I hope to show two things. First, that without the understanding of the key role played by paleontology in Creative Evolution, we cannot fully grasp the meaning of one of its central ideas, that man is the “term” and the “end” or, in other words, the raison d’être of evolution. Finally, I would like to suggest that after 1907 the emergence of a moral/ethical aspect of technical inventions will balance Bergson’s previous enthusiasm for scientific approaches on the subject. This position will suffer several transformations during the First World War and some years later, with the publication of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where tools and machines are interpreted not only as mediums of liberty — as they were in Creative Evolution —, but also as “property”, which will link them to war and “luxury.”

O artigo oferece um panorama geral do projeto teórico de Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757-1808) a partir de dois eixos: a medicina e a filosofia. Tendo como fio condutor a influência do entorno intelectual de salão de Auteuil e do neo-hipocratismo, pretendo mostrar que uma reforma do sensualismo de Condillac e o avanço de certos procedimentos médicos são inseparáveis para que se compreenda adequadamente o modo pelo qual Cabanis entende a unidade físico-moral do homem. É através desse tortuoso caminho teórico que o médico-filósofo poderá afirmar o primado da sensibilidade sem, no entanto, prescindir da ideia de uma certa espontaneidade e dinamismo do organismo, atributos que caracterizam a descoberta do que denomino de “interioridade vital”.