Search Results (12)

This article discusses the dominant understanding of the concept of repentance in the thought of the Jewish philosopher Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and the original interpretation he offers of this religious idea. It explores how his interpretation of the way repentance operates upon the human soul is based on Max Scheler’s thought regarding remorse, while adding another layer of meaning grounded in Henri Bergson’s philosophical conception of time as “durée”. Against this background, the article argues that Soloveitchik’s identification with the notion of time as “durée” stems both from a philosophical perspective that runs through significant parts of his thought, and from a personal biographical stance and his understanding of the religious experience of the talmid chacham (Torah scholar)—one who internalizes Torah study and dialectical reasoning in essential life concerns. This stance structures both the mental experience that enables repentance, contingency, and reversibility in time, and the homiletical–intellectual performance that affirms and constructs a Hegelian dialectic between past and present, ultimately forming a synthesis that is repentance. Full article

Modern society, dominated by rationalism, has led to the hollowing out of life’s meaning. In response to this predicament, the question of how to transcend instrumental rationality and reconstruct an understanding of human conditions becomes crucial. Among pre-Qin thinkers, Zhuangzi offers the most profound exploration of life-related issues. His “death-life” thought embodies unique philosophical implications, revealing the fluidity, wholeness, and infinity of life. The word order of “death-life” underscores the idea of the transformation of things (wuhua, 物化), illuminating two practical pathways toward the infinite circulation of life. This understanding of life resonates with Henri Bergson’s life philosophy in their shared reverence for life’s infinite flow through intuition. However, they diverge in their views on time and subjectivity. Despite their differences, their ideas can complement each other. Integrating Bergson’s spirit of creative evolution with Zhuangzi’s carefree and detached mindset may help dissolve modern society’s obsession with utilitarian goals, allowing individuals to engage in active creation while simultaneously embracing the spontaneity and boundless possibilities of each present moment. This synthesis provides valuable insights for reconstructing life’s meaning in contemporary society. Full article

By all accounts, Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) is virtually synonymous with process thought, including its more specific expressions as process philosophy and theology. This is most often assumed with little regard for the origins of modern process thought itself. Nicholas Rescher, reflecting on this fact, has called the pluralization of the field the “cardinal task” of all process proponents. This charge, given nearly thirty years ago, remains unfulfilled. Despite the fact that other candidates are available, the preeminence of this singular figure, and subordinately his later interpreter Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), has led to what may be called “The Whitehead/Hartshorne Factor” in virtually all aspects of process thought. This has functioned as a limiting factor in the promotion of processual ideas, a phenomenon noted during the earliest years of modern process history. This historiographical review will outline the features of these limitations and suggest a broader process approach that works to the benefit of its theological branch in particular. This paper dares to ask the “heretical” question, what would process philosophy and theology look like without Whitehead? Ironically, with the most recent analysis of Whitehead scholarship, the answer is hidden in plain sight. Full article

This article reexamines Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook’s (1865–1935) approach to Zionism, by proposing a reading of Kook’s Zionism through the lens of the Lebensphilosophie (The Philosophy of Life) of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). I show that we can clarify Kook’s view of freedom, the self and creativity and its essential connection to Zionism, therefore, proposing a new understanding of the meaning that Jewish nationalism assumes in Kook’s thought, thanks to the application of the model of freedom and creativity developed by Bergson to Kook’s writings. Especially for Kook, I show that Jewish nationalism is seen as a means for the Jewish People to return to their true self and through this connection attain true freedom. Only when a nation realizes its freedom by a return to its own original self, it can be creative. This is how I explain the connection that Kook draws between a return to the Land of Israel and the ability of Israel as a people to finally be able to be creative. Finally, I argue that this understanding of nationalism adds a new layer to the essential place that the territory assumes in Kook’s thought. A State of Israel outside its original land can attain the goal of autonomous self-governance but lacks the ability to inspire the reconnection of the nation to its own original self. The Jewish People as a collective cannot connect to their authentic self away from the Land of Israel, consequently, the Land of Israel is the only place in which they can be truly free. Full article

Despite his impeccable academic pedigree, a protégé of Josiah Royce and a friend and student of William James, John Elof Boodin is nearly forgotten today among American philosophers; hence, an essential aspect of his thought lost to history is his contribution to process theology. The leading features of process thought demonstrate Boodin’s connections to this unique theology and show it to have been established early on, as early as 1900 and 1904. This places Boodin’s writing on process philosophy/theology well before Alfred North Whitehead, the putative pioneer in modern process metaphysics, by more than twenty years, and co-extensive with Henri Bergson, who influenced Whitehead. Nevertheless, when Boodin is discussed today, it is usually as an early pragmatist rather than as a process philosopher. The central claim of this essay argues that Boodin is best understood as a pragmatically influenced process theist, one of the first in a modern context. This historiographical revision will permit a better portrayal of process thought by revealing a more nuanced and pluralistic theological landscape beyond the standard Bergsonian/Whiteheadian/Hartshornian triumvirate. Full article

In his main work, Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson presents a panpsychist ontology which cuts through the Gordian knot of the mind vs. matter problem. Taking this age-old philosophical topic, Bergson pushes the dualism of mind and matter beyond breaking point. Matter is reconceived as the sum of all images. Bergson introduces the dual concepts of cosmic “perception” and cosmic “memory”. Matter itself is reinterpreted as a continuum of all possible intensities of perception and memory. Bergson’s ontology has important epistemological ramifications. There is no sharp dividing line between consciousness and matter. In light of these insights, I propose a reading of Bergson’s relatively lesser-known lecture, “‘Phantasms of the Living’ and Psychical Research”, presented at the Society for Psychical Research in 1913. Here, Bergson elaborates upon the implications of his image-ontology for the possible post mortem fate of consciousness. In my concluding remarks, I suggest that Bergson’s observations may be of help in constructing an anti-reductionist and indeterministic epistemology. Full article

This article examines Le Corbusier’s architectural design processes, paying special attention to his concept of “ineffable space”. Le Corbusier related “ineffable space” to mathematics, arguing that both mathematics and the phenomenon of “ineffable space” provoke an effect of “concordance”. He also argued that when the establishment of relations is “precise” and “overwhelming”, architectural artefacts are capable of “provoking physiological sensations”. For Le Corbusier, the sentiment of satisfaction and enjoyment that an architectural artefact can provoke is related to a perception of harmony. This article analyzes the reasons for which Le Corbusier insisted on the necessity to discover or invent “clear syntax” through architectural composition. He believed that the power of architectural artefacts lies in their “clear syntax”. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship of Le Corbusier’s theories of space with those of Henri Bergson and the De Stijl movement. At the core of the reflections that are developed here are Le Corbusier’s “patient search” (“recherche patiente”) and the vital role of the act of drawing for the process of inscribing images in memory. For Le Corbusier, drawing embodied the acts of observing, discovering, inventing and creating. This article also relates Le Corbusier’s interest in proportions and his conception of the Modulor to post-war Italian neo-humanistic approaches in architecture. It intends to render explicit how Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture was reshaped, shedding light on the shift from defining architecture as clear syntax to defining architecture as the succession of events. Full article

Times of crisis push human beings, a clannish creature, to retreat into closed societies. Anthropologically, this can be explained with concepts such as pseudospeciation, group narcissism, or parochial altruism. Politically, the preference for closed societies results in our modern world in nationalism or imperialism. Henri Bergson’s distinction between static and dynamic religion shows which type of religion promotes such tendencies of closure and which type can facilitate the path toward open society. Bergson rejected nationalism and imperialism and opted for an open patriotism with its special relation to dynamic religion. Dynamic religion relativizes political institutions such as the state and results today in an option for civil society as the proper space where religions can and must contribute to its ethical development. It aligns more easily with a counter-state nationhood than with a state-framed nationalism. Whereas Bergson saw in Christianity the culmination of dynamic religion, a closer look shows that it can be found in all post-Axial religions. Martin Buber, Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Abul Kalam Azad, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan exemplify this claim. After World War II, Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain or Robert Schuman by partly following Bergson chose patriotism over nationalism and helped to create the European Union. Today, however, a growing nationalism in Europe forces religious communities to strengthen dynamic religion in their own traditions to contribute to a social culture that helps to overcome nationalist closures. The final part provides a positive example by referring to the fraternal Catholic modernity as it culminates today in Pope Francis’ call for fraternity and his polyhedric model of globalization that connects local identity with universal concerns. Full article

The relationship between populism and religion is complex because populists hijack religion but are often more interested in belonging than believing. This is one reason why there is a growing distance between populists and many leaders of mainline churches. To understand this complex field, we have to take social crises seriously and see how a static religion is, according to Henri Bergson, the first response to the precariousness of human life. This type of religion has led to closed societies leaning toward pseudospeciation and parochial altruism. Bergson, however, did not only describe static religion but also recognized dynamic religion leading to an open society. Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, with its call to love one’s enemy, is his key example. By going beyond Bergson, we can recognize dynamic religion as the mystic core of all world religions. Dynamic religion enables a universal fraternity, which is an essential element of every democracy in overcoming its populist temptations by respecting, internally, the rights of minorities and, externally, the universal human rights. Three examples from different religious backgrounds show how dynamic religion supports democracy through fraternity: the fraternal tradition in modern Catholicism, the Muslim philosopher S.B. Diagne and the Hindu M.K. Gandhi. Full article

Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872–1958) was Uruguay’s leading twentieth-century philosopher. He worked on social and political philosophy, moral philosophy, aesthetics, and feminism. Considered to be one of Latin America’s most original thinkers, Vaz Ferreira’s philosophy was nonetheless responsive to and, in some cases, influenced by the work of a number of other figures. This article explores Vaz Ferreira’s roots in the thought of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Dr. Gregorio Marañón, Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, Harald Höffding, Hugo Münsterberg, Wilhelm Dilthey, Miguel de Unamuno, John Stuart Mill, William James, José Enrique Rodó, and Henri Bergson. His feminist philosophy was influenced by his sister, María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, Dr. Paulina Luisi, and other suffragists. I seek to distinguish among the influences Vaz Ferreira ultimately rejected, those he could not escape, those he adapted, and those he most favored as he developed his unique philosophy of freedom. Full article

Our aesthetic experiences are today conditioned by machines, which operate at multiple levels: at the moment of conception of a work, at the moment of conservation and distribution of the work, and at the moment of its contemplation. For art today, it is no longer a theoretical question of asking whether the machine can act with freedom in the sense of a game that remains as of yet open-ended—or if humans themselves can still so act in a world entirely conditioned by technology—because the brute fact is that machines are becoming ever more autonomous, and humans ever more dependent upon them. For some artists, therefore, the ideas of autonomy and sacralization are best addressed, not in the posing of serious questions, but rather through the subversive activity of enticing the machine to reveal its comic nature—and wherein we discover, with Bergson, the essentially rigid and mechanical nature of the humorous. Full article

This essay takes up the encounter between philosophy and literature through a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s remarks from “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” about Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as an attempt “[t]owering above” other ventures into Lebensphilosophie to “lay hold of the ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses”. Despite his initial affirmation of Bergson’s understanding of experience as connected with tradition, Benjamin criticizes the philosopher’s account for sidestepping “the alienating, blinding experience of the age of large-scale industrialism” in reaction to which, as Benjamin insists, Bergson’s philosophy of memory developed. Yet even as Bergson shuts out the historical import of modernization, according to Benjamin, he also spotlights a “complementary” visual experience “in the form of its spontaneous afterimage”. Benjamin subsequently defines Bergson’s philosophy as “an attempt to specify this afterimage and fix it as a permanent record”, an endeavor that inadvertently “furnishes a clue to the experience which presented itself undistorted to Baudelaire’s eyes, in the figure of his reader”. If the literary critic might be viewed here as weighing in on a long-running antagonism between philosophy and literature, then his assessment is resolute: by praising the self-conscious historicity of Baudelaire’s lyric, Benjamin declares that poetry succeeds where Lebensphilosophie fails. Notably, Baudelaire is not the only figure to upstage “ahistorical” Bergson, since Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud facilitate this victory. To contextualize the second section of “Motifs”, where Benjamin discusses the novelist’s “immanent critique of Bergson” this essay offers a reading of “On the Image of Proust” as a propadeutic to Benjamin’s privileging of “Baudelaire” over “Bergson” in the first section of “Motifs” to broach the destinies of diminished perception before he turns to Freud in the third section. Drawing upon Freud’s thermodynamic model of a selective and protective perceptual-conscious system from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Benjamin explains how perception calcifies in adapting to industrialism. Notably, however, his “energetics” does not remain bound by closed-system economic premises insofar as he conceives Baudelaire’s correspondances as an antidote to reification and modernization fatigue. The resulting configuration emerges against the backdrop of a lament about the decline of tradition-infused, long-term experience [Erfahrung] that accompanies the rise of isolated experience [Erlebnis]. In tracking Benjamin’s seemingly melancholic emplotment of the literary image between “Proust” and “Baudelaire”, the essay ultimately focuses on how he amplifies its sociohistorical potential to attest to the dehiscence of tradition as a community-sustaining force. Full article