PAOLA MARRATIdemocracy), the concept of duration has been elaborated elsewhere: between psychology
and biology.
Thus, the strange phrase that concludes the second part of theIntroduction to Meta-
physics, published two years after the Oxford lecture, in 1922, becomes understandable:
‘‘One is never compelled to write a book.’’^10 Bergson has just discussed, in a concise and
systematic manner, the achievements of his method, and the contribution he has been
able to make to the solution of a number of problems. He has also recalled what elsewhere
he names ‘‘the need for precision in philosophy,’’^11 which amounts to the necessity of
producing singular concepts that fit each singular object instead of considering knowledge
to be a given set of categories or conceptual schemes ready to be applied to any new fact,
object, or event we happen to encounter.^12 Bergson could have ended hisIntroductionin
this way without feeling obliged to declare that nobody is obliged to write a book, which
is, after all, nothing more than a logical consequence of what he has just affirmed and
which only becomes strange, if not enigmatic, when it is enunciated as such. To be sure,
the book he did not feel compelled to write is not just any book. Bergson knew very
well what was expected of him because of his philosophical authority, his institutional
responsibilities, and the political functions in which he served.^13 It was a book of moral
and political philosophy that was expected of him and about which one wondered why
Bergson still had not written it.
As is well known, Bergson ended up writing this book:The Two Sources of Morality
and Religion, which came out in 1932. As is also well known, expectations were not ful-
filled, andThe Two Sourcesdid not find the immense resonance that his other books had
done. Still today, and despite the renewed interest in Bergson’s philosophy, this book
remains somewhat on the margins. Nevertheless, it is an important text, not only in its
relation to Bergson’s œuvre as such, but also, and above all, with regard to the specific
questions it raises.
How is one to think the origin of morality, the history and future of human societies,
or the function of religion once one situates oneself—as Bergson does—outside any his-
toricist perspective, as well as outside any abstract rationalism? Bergson’s problem in
considering human history is that he can take neither a Hegelian nor a Kantian position.
Human history—the becoming of societies, of morality, of forms of political organiza-
tion—is a part of the movement of the evolution of life and shares with it a radical lack
of teleology. One of the crucial arguments ofCreative Evolutionis the absence of any pre-
established direction that could underlie and orient the paths taken by forms of life in the
course of evolution. According to Bergson, the opposition between deterministic and
finalistic approaches to evolution is only a superficial one: they both share the same mis-
taken assumption that ‘‘all is given.’’ For determinism, on the one hand, ‘‘all is given’’ in
the past in the form of a linear causal chain that makes of evolution the unfolding of a
previously given program. For finalism, on the other hand, the movement of evolution
aims at the achievement of a finality and is thus oriented toward the future, but a future
PAGE 594594.................16224$ CH29 10-13-06 12:37:03 PS