"In this highly original study Messay Kebede shows himself to be an incisive and instructive reader of Bergson. He ably shows the enduring philosophical value of Bergson's philosophy and its pertinence to core philosophical problems. Especially impressive is the way he brings Bergson into rapport with thinkers and practices of philosophy from Nietzsche to phenomenology. The book is a most welcome contribution to the ongoing renaissance of interest in Bergson." - Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick, UK

"With a new wave of Bergson scholarship emerging, Kebede's timely book will be both welcomed by and challenging to Bergson scholars. Rigorously navigating Bergson's major concepts, Kebede uses the notion of self-overcoming to open up new ways of understanding Bergson and resolving many of the tensions within the receptions of Bergson's philosophy. This is necessary reading for Bergson scholars." -Mark William Westmoreland, Villanova University, USA

This book proposes a new reading of Bergsonism based on the admission that time, conceived as duration, stretches instead of passes. This swelling time is full and so excludes the negative. Yet, swelling requires some resistance, but such that it is more of a stimulant than a contrariety. The notion of élan vital fulfills this requirement: it states the immanence of life to matter, thereby deriving the swelling from an internal effort and allowing its conceptualization as self-overcoming. With self-overcoming as the inner dynamics of reality, Bergson dismisses all forms of dualism and reductionist monism because both the absence of negativity and the swelling nature of time posit a creative process yielding a qualitatively diverse world. This graded oneness is how the lower level activates intensification by turning into limitation, making possible higher levels of achievement, in particular through the union of mind and body and theintegration of openness and closed sociability.

Autorentext

Messay Kebede is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton, Ohio. He has published five books and various articles dealing with African philosophy, philosophical issues of modernization, Ethiopia's experience with social radicalism, and the philosophy of Bergson.

Zusammenfassung

This book proposes a new reading of Bergsonism based on the admission that time, conceived as duration, stretches instead of passes. This swelling time is full and so excludes the negative. Yet, swelling requires some resistance, but such that it is more of a stimulant than a contrariety. The notion of élan vital fulfills this requirement: it states the immanence of life to matter, thereby deriving the swelling from an internal effort and allowing its conceptualization as self-overcoming. With self-overcoming as the inner dynamics of reality, Bergson dismisses all forms of dualism and reductionist monism because both the absence of negativity and the swelling nature of time posit a creative process yielding a qualitatively diverse world. This graded oneness is how the lower level activates intensification by turning into limitation, making possible higher levels of achievement, in particular through the union of mind and body and the integration of openness and closed sociability.

Inhalt

1    Introduction

2    Intuitive Knowledge via the Inversion of Intelligence

Action and Intuition

Bergsonism and Theories of Knowledge

Epistemological Divergence

Intuitive Knowledge as Ideal Genesis Inversion and False Problems

Crossing Limitations

3    Duration and Self-Striving

In Search of True Time

Towards a Dynamic Conception of Time

Continuity versus Discontinuity

Duration and Consciousness

Duration as the Stuff of Reality

Duration as Effort

Beyond Free Will and Determinism

4    Life as the Inversion of Materiality

Being and Nothingness

The Negativity of Action

Controversy over Negativity

Negation without Nothingness

The Striving of Self-Limitation

Unity versus Analysis

Transcending Finalism and Mechanism

The Oneness of Life

Enduring Striving in lieu of the Eternal

5    Perception and the Genesis of the Subject

The Contradictions of Representational Theories of Perception

From the Material to the Psychic

Perception: Pure and Concrete

Materiality and the Notion of Image

Bergson and Phenomenology: The Issue of the Subject

The Mechanism of Perception

Limitation and Perception

6    Memory and the Being of the Subject

Memory and Action

On the Conservation and Nature of Memory

Deleuze and Bergson

Intentionality and the Continuity of Consciousness

The Actualization of Memory On the Unity of Mind and Body

7    Mysticism or the Overstepping of Nature

Halt versus Stage

Duality of Source and Self-Overcoming

Moral Obligation and Social Conservativism

The Natural Society

Opening the Natural

Overdetermination and Progress

Problems of Modernity and the Revaluation of Values