Aged 80, already ill, Henri Bergson (1859-1941) went downstairs to the street (in his slippers and a sleep skirt) to underwrite a Nazi-registration-form, that he was one of the so called unworthy living creatures, a Jew, having no rights, being discharged, honourless, defenseless, unprotected. When in the "Etat Francais" also a Jew statute had been announced, the French government had offered an exception treatment to Bergson, that famous citizen of Jewish birth. However professor Bergson refused receiving such a gift from such hand. 1920, on the occasion of the establishment of the United Nations, Henri Bergson had been a first president of the commission for mental co-operation (when times were to be called still worthy to human beings). 1927 he had received the Nobelprize of literature regarding to his main-publication "Creative Evolution". At the end of his life the public ethic level had been fallen down immeasurably deep. Commissions for "mental co-operation" (1920) evidently had disappeared and instead had been replaced by tanks, execution committees, gasification camps and other genocide methods. The esteem of an human being you cannot measure exactly via empiric sciences (i.e. Nazi biological race sciences). An anthropology of such a bedeviled horizon of course fails his subject. The risk of every empiric, specialized science (i.e. psychology, social and political sciences) is to underestimate human beings via shortened views, operating with the handicap of false subtle ideologies, conceptions, definitions - and the practice to analyze only a small section of time. To seize the "life melody" of a human being, it is not sufficient to emerge ridiculously only one or two notes. The entire "SPAN", if possible from the birth to the end of a biography, - only such a span (the complete melody, not a single note) is able to illuminate the secret of a human personality to a sympathizing viewer. Only via this method you can discover the dynamics, movements, changing spirals, the will to carry through, the persistent believe at the own worth of a person - even if the social associates have lost such a horizon long time ago. Bergson's father had been a music teacher and a composer - considering this fact, the idea of talking metaphorically about "single notes" and a complete "life-melody" touches the heart. The upcoming of the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud surely inspired Bergson - and though there are some mad, too punctual views in this Vienna theories: this specialized science delivered a plenty of hypotheses better than the usual biological ones. Otherwise Bergson inspired a lot of novelists: Marcel Proust or James Joyce, Sartre (his writings about Flaubert) or Nikos Kazantzakis' movie "Alexis Sorbas" (featuring Anthony Quinn as the pure embodiment of "elan vital"). Erik H. Erikson with his innovative book "Identity and life cycle" also is one of the innumerable researchers, who developed knowledge into this advanced direction: the concept of duration, of showing a complete life-melody. A quotation out of a lecture held 1911 by Bergson at the university of Oxford: "Via philosophy we can get accustomed, never to isolate the present from the past. Via philosophy all things gain a depth of field, something like a fourth dimension, which permits to associate the earlier perceptions with the present." In the title of Bergson's book "Creative Evolution" the nature of this unusual human is as crystallizing as in that delivered gesture, underwriting the Nazi-registration-form, just as the inhumanity of German occupiers required. Surely none of them understood the nonchalant irony of this doing (in the spirit of a mind, which never loses a sort of a "BIRDS VIEW"). I like to compare this scene with a fragment of Emile Cioran, another French author; he wrote: "Did you see, how the birds, at first hunting in the roads, suddenly did ascend high above the roofs: to regard Paris in a distance?" This is a remarkable metaphor: visually strong - alike the "LIFE-MELODY", giving a hint to the long time memory of ears ...

Bergson's works are always inspirational and the remarkable thing is that he doesn't assume anything he always explains what is needed (almost always) unlike the standard treatises on philosophy by other philosophers. It is never that much of an effort to read Bergson and as such it makes his works far more accessible than usual for a philosopher, probably one of the reasons he was all the rage in the early 20th Century, people can actually understand what he was talking about. What is the reason for this ? I think much of it has to do with his unwillingness to separate his insights into distinct pieces as is the norm in philosophy. His essays tend to flow along nicely without being stuck in difficult terminology which must be remembered as you progress, anything such as the word duration which has a special significance in Bergson work becomes part of the flow of the essay rather than being in any way special it is always reinforced through the dialogue. Another interesting aspect is his lack of references to others, possibly a result of the French way of Education which encourages self reliance and expression as much as possible.

In this work, one of his earliest (1887), Bergson introduces his concept of duration which is less of a concept than a real lived sense that is happening in your life right at this moment. But first he introduces the reader to the intensities of psychic states such as beauty, grace, joy, sorrow, pain etc and how a misinterpretation of real lived experience gives rise to a way of philosophy which separates real duration as it is experienced into space-like time, this is also evident in feelings which are modified through the space-like construction of experience. Although this first chapter fails to convince once you proceed onto the construction of the idea of duration you feel on much safer ground, one feels Bergson has seriously studied this phenomenon, not of course just in thought or conceptualisation but, in his own lived experience present at every moment. He goes on to explain the falseness of the spacialisation of time which inevitably leads to the paradoxes of Zeno in ancient days and determinism with its lack of human freedom. He overcomes the usual arguments of determinism by simply just not defining freedom or its prior conditions since this would once again introduce determinism and spacialise duration.

Bergson's work is simply highly insightful of the human condition far more than any dry attempt at it through the usual approaches such as Descarte's or Kant's. He literally lives his work using his own experience to enliven it, I mean literally enliven it, Bergson's work is living in a sense. It is less an argument than a movement through your own feelings and intuitions which then allow you to understand what he is saying, it isn't difficult concepts you can't wrap yourself round. It does occasionally suffer from a lack of clarity wich is an advantage other philosophers have over him but a careful reading will help.

Superb as always.