INTRODUCTIONNegatively speaking, Bergson’sTwo Sourcesseemed simply to amplify and clarify his
original break with the Greek Parmenidean-Eleatic conception of a static, atemporal
being, which subconsciously continued to govern philosophical thinking ‘‘since our intel-
ligence secretes it naturally,’’^172 as well as with the Cartesian privileging of mathematical
reasoning. Positively speaking, it deepened the alternative view of a processual and dy-
namic metaphysics, inspired by the nineteenth-century emergence of ‘‘sciences of life’’
(notably evolutionary biology, but also sociology and psychology).^173 Like Descartes, as
Henri Gouhier notes in his introduction to the Centennial Edition of the published works,
Bergson conceived of philosophy as a science, but, Gouhier goes on to explain, the cri-
tique of Cartesian rationalism and Kantian criticism, central to Bergson’s overall project,
is no simple return to the metaphysical thought their projects had set out to overcome.^174
Kant was right, Bergson argues, to suppose that to apprehend ‘‘the absolute’’ one must
invoke ‘‘intuition,’’intellektuelle Anschauung—which, Kant claims, is no option for us
finite rational beings—but he understands neither the concept of the absolute or sub-
stance nor the method of intuition in these restrictive Kantian terms. In Bergson’s words:
‘‘If one reads theCritique of Pure Reasonclosely, one realizes that Kant has made a cri-
tique, not of reason in general, but of a Cartesian mechanism or of Newtonian physics.’’^175
As the conclusion ofTime and Free Willexplains, taking mechanism as directive of
natural science and as the model for positive knowledge in general, Kant was forced, like
Descartes, to remove all ‘‘acts of freedom’’ from the realm of the empirical, where experi-
ence is governed by laws of causal connection. By contrast, taking one’s lead from a
methodic intuition rigorously defined and, more broadly, from the nascent insights of the
sciences of life would, Bergson suggests, open up a completely different perspective and
allow one to touch upon ‘‘the ‘noumena’ immanent in ‘phenomena.’ ’’^176 In consequence,
our knowledge need no longer be relative to a world of appearances cut out in causally
linked—indeed, strictly mechanically determined—spatial instances and temporal in-
stants. Instead, it may turn out to be expansive and limited in surprisingly different ways:
‘‘Relative, it [our knowledge] would be struck by complete metaphysical impotence, it
would leave us outside thething in itself, that is to say, reality. On the contrary, being
limited, it keeps us within the real [le re ́el], even though it shows us naturally only a part.
It is up to us to make an effort to complete it.’’^177
The motif of making the necessary extra ‘‘effort’’ reveals a broader conviction,
namely, that, for all we know, we may not yet have exhausted—and, indeed, may never
fully know, let alone know in advance—what our minds, our bodies, our spirit, can do.
Kept within ‘‘the real,’’ we may very well end up making (producing, inventing, creating)
‘‘gods,’’ which is to say, ‘‘everything or nothing,’’ in any case, a necessary indeterminacy,
as Marrati clearly explains. Precisely this process, Bergson suggests, constitutes the very
fabric of ‘‘life.’’
But if the model for reason—for philosophy, with its scientific, intuitive method—
should be ‘‘life,’’ another question immediately imposes itself: ‘‘According to what model
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