"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to accept." Henri Bergson
I went through a Bergson reading phase a few years ago. It was fun. He's one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, and certainly of its first half. It would have been nice for him if he had lived to see the end of German occupation in France.
Anyway, it's true. People seem incapable of seeing one thing when they're convinced they're going to see something else.
I went through a Bergson reading phase a few years ago. It was fun. He's one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, and certainly of its first half. It would have been nice for him if he had lived to see the end of German occupation in France.
Anyway, it's true. People seem incapable of seeing one thing when they're convinced they're going to see something else.
2 comments:
Once again you've introduced me to someone with a familiar name but whose philosophical writings were not. Now that I've spent half an hour reading the brief history of his life and accomplishments on wikipedia I can see why his work would appeal to you. Assuming our local large bookstore reopens I will make an effort to find some of his more accessible material.
The quote you noted is very apt to our time as it was to his. In many ways our society has become more materialistic and mechanistic than any of us would wish and that makes his views about our innate unity with the larger creation all the more relevant today. It's also one I'm very much attached to even though I'm no kind of philosopher.
When I first read: "The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to accept."
I was immediately reminded of two other quotes - one famous (at least to me) and another I'd come across only recently:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
~ Upton Sinclair.
“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity”.
~ Marshall McLuhan
I understand one of his later essays was about laughter and I can't help but think Bergson would have liked this one:
“I'm not crazy about reality, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal.”
~ Groucho Marx
I'm not positive which books of his set me off on this road but looking at places like Wikiquote it seems like Creative Evolution and Introduction to Metaphysics have a lot of his best thinking and writing. I like ideas that aren't necessarily something I agree with but aren't something I disagree with either, so much that they present something in a way I hadn't thought of before.
One thing I believe is that because a lot of our technology is so new we've come to think of its workings as some new truth that's made irrelevant everything that came before it. That's short term thinking. Nature has its own changes and its own constancy, all of which are taking place while only a small number of us even take notice.
Those are very fetching quotes as well. I should probably delve into McLuhan's work at some point. Three things I know of to associate with him: a public TV special about him which I remember Tom Wolfe hosting in his plantation suit; his cameo in Annie Hall; and being the model for the Brian O'Blivion character in Videodrome.
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