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Henri Bergson is a major figure in a minor strand of philosophy, process philosophy, includes Whitehead , Heraclitus , and more recently Deleuze who is mostly responsible for revived interest in Bergson.
Big debate with Einstein; over Einstein's physical ideas about time, and Bergson's durée, which is fundamental to his thing and I guess denotes something like experiential time, although I don't fully understand it. (see Duration (philosophy) - Wikipedia))
PF: interested in relationship to Zen. He sees Bergson as very related, pointing to the same thing.
2 forms of knowledge: analytical and intuitive? Move round the object / enter into it. Analytical knowledge is relative, the intuitive is a path to the absolute.
The key dichotomy in Bergson is is what he calls intuitive knowledge vs analytical knowledge, and it seems to be exactly the same thing referred to as embodiment these days.
Very interesting riff on boxing and piano and how they are taught, how they are experienced, how they are practiced. Analytical vs intuitive flow states. OK, yeah. Zen as a striving for flow states (really?). I want him to read Talk's Body
I'm starting to wonder about this debate with Einstein; Bergson appears to be talking about subjective experienced time, and Einsteinian physics has approximately nothing to say about that.
Oh she also wrote that book about demons in science! Bedeviled
Stuff about being vs becoming, process philosophies can't explain any kind of stability in the universe.
This struck me as dumb (But I don't know whether dumb is in Bergson, WS guys, or me) because obviously there is structure in the universe and if process philosophy denies these can exist, then it's just stupid and we shouldn't waste time on it. I suspect that is not what it says, but I'd have to actually read more Bergson to figure this out.
Hyperchaos as sort of a pre-instantiated universe from which the actual emerges out of some kind of fluctuation? I don't know, sounded a lot like Boltzmann Brains or Mathematical Universe theorizing, but with a more dramatic philosophical presentation. Add it to list of things I need to read up on.
Scientists are not modern enough, still thinking in terms of classical categories. Bergson trying to give science the metaphysics it deserves. Huh interesting.
JFM: doesn't understand how there can be anything at all without some pre-existent Platonic form. Argh. Oh well I actually can't dismiss this view with a computational sneer like I used to be able to do. But it seems to confuse pure flux with pure chaos, or the impossibility of any regularity or structure, which is dumb.
Can Bergson account for "terror" as a stable feeling across different situations?
25:00 Bergson as solution to the old ideal/material philosophical dichotomy. Which is a reasonable goal/problem. Both sides are wrong, I can get behind that kind of thinking.
Reality escapes all categorizations, its an indescribable flux.
Bergson all about the principle of sufficient reason (aka causality?), Meillassoux the opposite.
JFM: Everybody hates Plato, Plato is the ultimate anthropocentric thinker, moderns are trying to embrace the inhuman, JFM against that, feels like Platonic forms must pre-exist to organize the flux.