Customer Reviews

Challenge of Bergsonism

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Leonard Lawlor has written a small book "The Challenge of Bergsonism" which analyses and explains Bergson's most difficult work "Matter and Memory". In "Matter and Memory" Bergson attempts to relate the mind and the body in terms of what he calls memory. This does not simply mean memory in the way it is understood in common usage. Here, Bergson's concepts of duration, intuition, creation and memory all share in the study.

Lawlor discusses Bergson's idea of images at first through perception, then onto a deeper study of memory and finally Bergson's philosophy of language. None of these three chapters are separate from each other. They are all interrelated through the above concepts of memory, duration, intuition and creation. The flow of duration of a conscious being is duration itself with its aspects of a flowing of the past to the present so that conscious life is always an awareness of the past even though the totally new is added on each moment. Although life is memory, memory is not simply the past.

These ideas are difficult to fathom and just when you thought you had some sort of handle on them Lawlor wakes you from your satisfied slumber to shock you into further understanding, or at times confusion. It is difficult enough to read Bergson by himself and the sophisticated analysis of Lawlor does not really make this much easier. It is the depth of these concepts and the inability to pin them down that makes this book a difficult read.

As usual I reread Bergson to get a deeper understanding and texts such as Lawlor's try to help make life easier. But once Bergson is properly understood, as Lawlor does, the scope and intuitive character of his work comes to the fore.

A difficult read but worth it.