Process Philosophy in Whitehead and Bergson

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Pedro Asmar de Lucas Brea, who reached out to me about his research on Bergson and energy.

Pedro is a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Herbst Program for Engineering Ethics and Society, and also a lecturer at the University of Colorado Denver in Philosophy. He holds a PhD in philosophy, but originally majored in physics as an undergraduate. Near the end of his physics studies, he experienced severe depression, which he eventually realized was a side effect of the worldview of scientific materialism that came along with his physics training. His healing began when he started studying philosophy, especially the existentialists, beginning with Nietzsche. Eventually, he discovered Bergson and decided to mount a critique of scientific materialism by focusing on the reality of time and change in his dissertation.

Pedro laid out how his dissertation addresses energy using a Nietzschean genealogical approach, tracing the concept from the ancient Greeks through early Christianity to modern thermodynamics. Nietzsche features in his second chapter, and Bergson in the third. The dissertation tries to overcome the mechanistic worldview by giving change its ontological due and showing how materialistic science has not taken the reality of time seriously. Part of his personal journey involved Nietzsche freeing him from the rigid will to truth that led him into nihilism, then Bergson giving him the metaphysical tools to engage with physics so as to deconstruct materialistic metaphysics from the inside out.

I asked him whether reading Nietzsche helped relieve his depression. “Reading Nietzsche makes you want to run up a mountain,” he said, describing it as empowering but somewhat limited for deeper engagement with physics. Bergson, by contrast, provided a fuller philosophical framework for taking time seriously, especially in Matter and Memory. We also discussed his more recent turn toward ethical questions, mysticism, and the notion of the Good, as found in thinkers like Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Plotinus.

I shared my own reflections on Bergson and Whitehead, pointing out that Whitehead attempted to save Bergson’s mode of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism. I noted that Whitehead’s idea of “actual occasions” posits a discrete yet non-instantaneous pulse of becoming—a concept that might offer a more systematic account of how time and creativity work. It is not easy to tease out how this differs from Bergson’s sense of a continuous though heterogeneous flow of duration. We discussed how Whitehead tries to reconcile quantum discontinuity with spatiotemporal continuity, while Bergson is more emphatic about maintaining the continuity of duration as a qualitative multiplicity.

We plan to continue the conversation by reading Bergson’s lectures on Plotinus—which have been recently translated by my colleague at CIIS, Jack Bagby.

Watch the video of our dialogue:

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