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Posts Tagged ‘Bergson’

Between spirit and spirituality

28 Jul

Henri Bergson was looking for a new philosophy of life, one that goes beyond what intelligence can meet, the psychological and creative dimension of evolution, complementing this philosophy with Teilhard Chardin’s idea of ​​the noosphere, it is not a simple collage, but convergence between philosophy, religion and a spirituality that fosters a dialogue with cultural worldviews.

The different theories of life intend to reach knowledge through categories developed by intelligence, wisdom and intuition can go further, what Bergson says, intelligence itself is a product of evolution, we know more than primitive man knew.

The intelligence created by the needs of life to act on objects, nature, acting itself and the wisdom necessary for this, was initially based on matter, but when replacing the whole with the part, it became illegitimate, to understand life and the direction of evolution, a new method of thinking is needed that understands the natural sense of intelligence, with the help of intuition, is not contradictory with the wisdom present in various worldviews.

For Bergson, what characterizes intelligence is what he calls “duration”, starting from their own existence as living beings, to learn what life is as a perpetual and continuous variation of our spirit, then raises the duration of the universe that is formed incessantly, and in every minimal form that he reveals his creative impulse, this state of change goes beyond mathematics and physics that can only model each change in a short “duration”.

Teilhard de Chardin, when characterizing the “human phenomenon” sees it as a complexification of matter, then unlike Bergson he will not separate what he calls inert “matter”, and for Teilhard de Chardin it is a “living” body of everything that exists , for which he was accused of pantheism, and sees in the existence of the Universe like Bergson something that cannot be separated from a creative evolution, which changes forms and mechanisms of interaction, “wisdom” also evolves.

Also the problem of duration here Bergson distances himself from science, at least from the current one that sees time not as a “duration” but as a “fold”, Chardin is closer to Science when he sees in evolution the approximation of creation and the complexity of the universe, nature and man the approximation of the Creator and eternity.

Bergson’s evolution then moves towards the evolution of the life of consciousness, thus returning to subjectivism and the abstract consciousness of the idealists, for Chardin, when he called man a “human phenomenon” (it is not contradictory with the fact that the “likeness” of God goes along for eternity), says what kind of consciousness is the human, the consciousness of its physical existence that does not separate from the spiritual.

BERGSON, Henri. (2005) A evolução criativa (The Creative Evolution). Brazil: SP: Martins Fontes.

CHARDIN, Teilhard. (2001) O fenômeno humano (The human phenomenon). Trans. Armando Pereira da Silva. Brazil,SP: Cultrix.