Henri Bergson and George Bernard Shaw: Habit, Life, Death
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14422/pen.v70.i264.y2014.010Keywords:
Henri Bergson, George Bernard Shaw, neo-lamarckism, neo-darwinism, creative evolution, habit, deathAbstract
This article tries to illuminate certain aspects of the philosophical anthropology exposed in the works written by the french thinker Henri Bergson. We will analyze the confrontation of his original doctrine with the sui generis bergsonianism of the irish intellectual and playwright George Bernard Shaw. The Shaw´s Preface. An Infidel Half Century, included in Back to Methuselah, written in 1921, will be the main text that we will use to engage Henri Bergson with this peripheral bergsonianism. The theories about the concept of habit will be our guideline, in the context of the metaphysics of the organic evolution, and we will reach to the ‘limiting concept’ of death, which seems to reconcile both positions: the surmountable death. In Bergson and in Shaw habits (the Culture) are not an integral part of the essence of the human being, and death (question in which Bergson is much more elusive) plays in their work an amphibious role, between Culture and Nature
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References
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