Expertise has become a plague. On one topic after another, from public health to social justice, we're told to defer to the arbitrarily shifting opinions of our betters. Try to raise a contrary fact and it's, "Now, now, you'll only hurt yourself trying to think."
A generalization, perhaps. But it's also a reminder of why I find the philosophy of Henri Bergson so refreshing. One of his vital (to use one of his own favorite words) quotes is "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought." In other words, his vision of philosophy is not an esoteric study best left to the elect. It's truly democratic, open to all who commit themselves to observing reality and sharing what they find. He wrote a good deal on a range of topics, and I wouldn't say that I agree with everything I've read. But he puts it all out there to grapple with.
It's interesting and a little funny that he raised a scandal by having groupies Or rather, he attracted large groups of female fans, and that's how it was interpreted at the time. If you see pictures of him he was, in Fargo terms, "funny lookin', more'n most people even." Although unlike Steve Buscemi's Carl Showalter, he was almost certainly circumcised. I don't think his draw for them was sex appeal, or at least not in any conventional sense. More that what he was saying was for them as much as for anyone else.
2 comments:
I have scant familiarity with Henri Bergson other than knowing he was a French philosopher of the last century. Naturally enough since you've described his work being of interest I decided on a brief trawl through the biographical elements posted on the internet. Now I can at least understand why it is you found him worthy of mention and likely too how it was he came to be so popular - groupies, eh? Hmm.. Britannica had this to say about one of his earliest books:
Thus, for Matière et mémoire he devoted five years to studying all of the literature available on memory and especially the psychological phenomenon of aphasia, or loss of the ability to use language. According to the theory of psychophysiological parallelism, a lesion in the brain should also affect the very basis of a psychological power. The occurrence of aphasia, Bergson argued, showed that this is not the case. The person so affected understands what others have to say, knows what he himself wants to say, suffers no paralysis of the speech organs, and yet is unable to speak. This fact shows, he argued, that it is not memory that is lost but, rather, the bodily mechanism that is needed to express it. From this observation Bergson concluded that memory, and so mind, or soul, is independent of body and makes use of it to carry out its own purposes.
That statement alone makes me understand his popularity. I will definitely do some follow-up reading.
As far as the current plague of expertise is concerned I think you may well enjoy the article Jer found this morning on a website he's come to read regularly. We both like the term 'midwits'.
Yeah, like I said, he was for a spell quite popular in his own lifetime. (Whether he was "very popular" in the Young Frankenstein sense I won't try to guess.) In the latter half of the 20th century his work was not entirely forgotten but his reputation was downgraded somewhat. I don't remember exactly how I found out about him but I do know why I latched on. In college and right after I had a friend/roommate who was very big on Nietzsche. Ol' Friedrich has always been a very interesting figure, but I felt the need to look for my own patron saint philosopher. Bergson's curiosity and his small-d democratic sympathies appealed to me. As did his ability to find positive lessons in things like that study of aphasia.
I like the term "midwit." Having read a little more of William Briggs's blog I can definitely say that he's swimming against the cultural tide. Coca-Cola's internal "be less white" memo deserves all the ridicule he can muster.
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