Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour Emily Herring - Henri Bergson: Herald of a Restless World
Mar 8, 2025
Emily Herring, a scholar of intellectual history and early 20th-century philosophy, discusses Henri Bergson and his public influence. She explores Bergson's ideas about time, intuition versus analysis, and Creative Evolution. Conversation covers his celebrity, clashes with contemporaries, reception amid war and prejudice, and surprising parallels between Bergson's worries and today’s concerns about algorithms and AI.
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Intuition Reclaims Lived Time
- Bergson argues concepts tidy reality but erase its qualitative flow, prompting a different method for philosophy.
- He proposes intuition as an active effort to rejoin lived continuity that concepts spatialize and flatten.
Analysis Misses The Movement
- Analysis slices movement into static points and never yields the movement itself.
- Bergson's intuition aims to coincide with an object's ongoing flow rather than reconstruct it from fragments.
Instinct, Intellect, And Intuition Linked
- Bergson treats intellect and instinct as evolutionary solutions, not opposites.
- Intuition emerges because human intellect retains ancestral life-tendencies tied to instinctual knowledge.
