THE BERGSONIAN MOMENT: SCIENCE AND SPIRIT IN FRANCE, 1874-1907

Modern European Intellectual History;History of Science and Philosophy;Bergson;History

McGrath, Larry SLeys, Ruth ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Modern European Intellectual History;    History of Science and Philosophy;    Bergson;    History;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60291/MCGRATH-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

My dissertation is an intellectual and cultural history of a distinct movement in modern Europe that I call ;;scientific spiritualism.” I argue that the philosopher Henri Bergson emerged from this movement as its most celebrated spokesman. From the 1874 publication of Émile Boutroux’s The Contingency of the Laws of Nature to Bergson’s 1907 Creative Evolution, a wave of heterodox thinkers, including Maurice Blondel, Alfred Fouillée, Jean-Marie Guyau, Pierre Janet, and Édouard Le Roy, gave shape to scientific spiritualism. These thinkers staged a rapprochement between two disparate formations: on the one hand, the rich heritage of French spiritualism, extending from the sixteenth- and seventeeth-century polymaths Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes to the nineteenth-century philosophes Maine de Biran and Victor Cousin; and on the other hand, transnational developments in the emergent natural and human sciences, especially in the nascent experimental psychology and evolutionary biology. I trace the influx of these developments into Paris, where scientific spiritualists collaboratively rejuvenated the philosophical and religious study of consciousness on the basis of the very sciences that threatened the authority of philosophy and religion. Using original materials gathered in French and Belgian archives, I argue that new reading communities formed around scientific journals, the explosion of research institutes, and the secularization of the French education system, brought about this significant, though heretofore neglected wave of thought. The Bergsonian Moment reframes the formative role of science in the fin de siècle. Following France’s defeat to Germany in The War of 1870, French Republicans invoked science as a wellspring of national regeneration, precipitating a crisis that historians have framed as society’s moral anxiety in the face of materialism and as intellectuals’ disillusionment in the promise of reason. I interpret the period, to the contrary, as a historical opening seized to transform the meaning and scope of science. Far from having led a revolt against positivism, as a long-standing historiographical narrative holds, Bergson drew on the natural and human sciences to expand the bounds of reason, and led to an enduring reconsideration of the place and value of memory, time, and experience in modern Europe.