About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full

Weird Studies/Courses/Bergson redux

11 Apr 2026 - 11 Apr 2026
Open in Logseq
    • Noticed on the mutations platform a lot of talk about building a new relationship with time, which made me thing, but Long Now already doing that. And me, outside both of them.

    • Part 1

      • Late work, takes time for granted. More about future than past. Book is extremely timely given current events. Bergson's optimism. Unique, important, alternative.
      • "Humanity groans, crushed between the weight of its own..." A machine for making gods.
      • Space is not time. Time is immeasurable. Can't get to duree through science because that is precisely the use of the intellect... however there is the possibility of a science of time, if science serves intuition rather than reason.
      • Time and free will.
      • Radical realism. Our perceptions are the world. Anti-Kant. We have direct access. We have direct intuitive access
        • He keeps fudging the body
      • Mind and matter resulved through time
      • Creative Evolution. Evolution vs, Evolution is creative (ok, but not very radical). Anthill vs human socieities (instict vs )
      • Fascists appropriated Bergson (elan vital), Bergson fell into nationalism, he regretted it.
      • Bergson's method. Finding a fissure, a "bad composite" and disentangling them. Splittting time from space and following their logic. Free will as a badly posed problem (with him there)
      • 2 sources of morality and religion. Disentangle them. Open/closed moraliuty static/dynamic religion. Mechanics and mysticism. Not saying mechanics bad (so different from heidegger etc). Technology is religious and on the side of dynamism (more or less).
      • Closed morality. Start with fact of life (good). The fact takes the form of obligation (this sunds very Critchley). Forbidden fruit earliest memory (very Freudian actually).
      • Drive to servitude and mastery. Similar to wolves and apes.
      • Closed societies. When they collide, war.
      • Pathologization of rival political parties. They don't have the same interests.
      • open morality needs special persons? Needs emotion vs intellect? (not so sure about that)
      • closed morality (justice) is matthematical (justice, quantified). Open morality flips it, there is something beyond...brothers karamzov (omelas).
      • Jung, archetype is intstincts image of itself (? might be misremembeing)
      • the agents of dynamic religion are the same – saints, etc. dynamic religion does not rely on fabulation although involved with it (?). Walter Benjamin, fairy tales vs myths. Myths shot through with necessiuty, fairy tales have radical freedom, arbitrariness. No code, one must attend to situation. Static religions provide security, dynamic serenetiy (acceptance). Gospel of Adam: you will be freed from the authority of death. Via immortality or just being ok.
      • Open morality ≡ mysticism (For some reason. Buddha etc tuned into earliest sources of all life). 2 forms of mysticism – inaction, extinguishing, apophatic, withdrawal. Another type, "mysticism of action" transformative of the world.
      • not(e) Buddhism has an active side, indicated by the term upaya, skillful means.
      • christs replacement of law with faith and "all one in christ"). Bergson surprised to find himself with Chtistianity.

    • Part 2

      • Conclusion, mechanics and mysticism. He doesn't (surprisingly) oppose them. He was seen as anti-science, but –
      • No: science on side of open, of dynamic. But incomplete. Art has it, and philosophy needs to be more art-like. (OK 100% with him). Art is a fundamental mode of knowing. Open is associated with the creative, always good for Bergson (100%)
      • Last chapter Bergon's political treatise. (OK should read). The kind of world he wants to create. He has sense of emergent collapse (before his time). He makes predictions (1932 before nuclear fission)
      • Technology extends body (OK). Life working through the human. (He's sort of going KK here). Origins of private property in tech (think this isn't quite right and runs into Marx, but...)
      • Marx believed in collective ownereship but also in the reality of the collective.
      • Planetary bodies (this is so SB).
      • Middle ages ascetiism vs modern materialism.
      • Not a Hegelian but thinks just like one? Need to return to ascetiism (so hippie)
      • in touch with the impetus of life (creative etc)
      • Bergson's affirmitive philosophy (he had no negations (is that right?))
      • love: drive towards. unity (ok here I am having doubts)
      • life wants to evolve, matter resists (just wrong)
      • building tools is a mystical practice (or should be) and lead to open culture
      • Citew David Noble Religion of Technology