Henri Bergsono gyvybės kilmės hipotezė vengia pateikti šios problemos sprendimą, visgi filosofas pateikia keletą pasiūlymų. Nuodugnus jo tekstų skaitymas netiesiogiai atskleidžia prielaidą, kad gyvybė žemėje atsirado vykstant natūraliems procesams. Šiame straipsnyje nagrinėjama élan (polėkio) sąvoka bei akcentuojama šios filosofinės sąvokos evoliucija Bergsono mintyje. Élan argumentuotai atskiriamas nuo jo nuolatinio palydovo vital (gyvybiškasis), kadangi siekiama pabrėžti jo nedvasinį aspektą, kuris taikomas tam, ką Bergsonas apibūdino kaip „fiziologinę gyvybę“. Noriu pabrėžti, kad élan turi savo istoriją ir kad neabejotinai buvo akimirka, kuomet élan (...) prasidėjo. Galiausiai argumentacija perkeliama nuo élan istorijos ir kilmės prie gyvybės istorijos ir kilmės. (shrink)

The ‘Pascalian’ tradition in French thought is a moral rigorism that demands practical embodiment while denying that any embodiment of its demands can ever be complete. The power of this tradition may be seen even in French political moralists of the 20th century. It is revealed in Bergson’s view that the open morality must seek practical expression through the closed society, while constantly subverting it. It is revealed in Levinas’s claim that the ‘saying’ requires to be ‘said’ but always undermines (...) the said, so that what is explicit is ‘always wanting’. Directly, and also through the influence of Levinas, the Pascalian tradition exerts a complex influence on Derrida, in whose thoughts about the topic of justice moral rigorism transforms into an idea of radical epistemic incompleteness, or infinite deferral. ‘Pascalians’ such as Bergson, Levinas and Derrida are convinced, consequently, that the ethical can be given only sporadic or uninstitutionalized political expression; in this regard, they may be contrasted with ‘Lockeans’ who believe that political theory is at one remove from our deepest ethical or religious conclusions. In light of that contrast, the differences between Continental and Anglophone political theory may be traced to post-Reformation circumstances rather than, as is often supposed, to the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Many neo-Darwinists treat natural selection of genes and individual organisms as broadly equivalent. This enables Wilson & Sober (W&S) to propose a multilevel group selection model by drawing parallels between individuals and groups. The notion of gene/individual equivalence is a profound misconception. Its elimination negates W&S's current approach but offers the best way forward for both life and behavioural sciences.

Misunderstandings often develop when scientists from different backgrounds use the same words (e.g., “selection”) when they mean different things by them. Theorists must therefore choose and define their terms carefully. In addition, proponents of “new” theories need to demonstrate empirically that theirs are more powerful than the existing theories they wish to supplant. Wilson & Sober have not yet done this.

The six commentaries raise five issues about multi-level selection theory that we attempt to address: (1) replicators without vehicles, (2) group selection and movement between groups, (3) absolute versus relative fitness, (4) group-level psychological adaptions, and (5) multi-level selection as a predictive theory.

This article offers a novel interpretation of Karl Popper’s influential yet controversial book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper, it argues, sheds light on a pivotal social and political question: How can we value genuine human plurality without succumbing to the illusion that enmity can be removed from the socio-political realm? What we find in Popper, I argue, is an “anti-utopian agonism,” that is, his conception of an open society harbors significant agonistic elements—a commitment to human plurality, an (...) endorsement of (some) social and political struggles, and an acute awareness of the tragic dimensions of political life. Simultaneously, Popper’s distinctive anti-utopianism makes an important contribution to agonistic theory on two fronts. First, his concept of “the strain of civilization” reveals a deeper notion of tragedy, which gives him the edge over the rather shallow notion of tragedy we find in the agonistic tradition. Secondly, he develops a tripartite notion of enmity, which is theoretically interesting and practically relevant. The aim of this article is not only to contribute to the scholarship on Popper and agonism but, first and foremost, to demonstrate how The Open Society still matters as an inspiring work that illuminates the practically relevant question of how to value diversity without illusions. (shrink)

Introduction. The contemporary European social and cultural landscape feels the pressure of security challenges. It is true, that Europe has a strategy of overcoming the possible challenges, but it has sense to review ones strategy abilities to be effective at the face of new manifestations of aggression. Methodology. The authors use heuristic philosophical methodology which can make mentioned strategy more holistic having clear vision of the essence of war and peace phenomena. The research is going to perform precious conceptualization of (...) the strategy contours initiated at the previous publications of O. Bazaluk. Originality. Authors defined the series “fatal” mistakes of the European Security Strategy and formulated the list of objectives of the revised security strategy. Conclusions. Five key objectives of perspective European Security Strategy were formulated. The first objective should include the complex measures for the identification, registration and organization of the system of preventive work with mentalities, in which the pathologies in the structure and function of the neural ensembles of subconsciousness and consciousness are clearly expressed that refract the active principle in aggressive manifestations. The second one should include the complex measures ensuring control over the direction of the physicochemical, predisposing, provoking and supporting factors of the external environment that have a direct impact on the manifestations of a mental space in ontogeny. The third objective should include the complex measures of prediction and solution of international conflicts. The fourth objective of the security strategy should be aimed at eliminating the cause of war. The fifth objective should provide the complex measures involving the peaceful extension of comfortable conditions for the full realization of its internal creative potentials by a mental space. (shrink)

Introduction. The contemporary European social and cultural landscape feels the pressure of security challenges. It is true, that Europe has a strategy of overcoming the possible challenges, but it has sense to review ones strategy abilities to be effective at the face of new manifestations of aggression. Methodology. The authors use heuristic philosophical methodology which can make mentioned strategy more holistic having clear vision of the essence of war and peace phenomena. The research is going to perform precious conceptualization of (...) the strategy contours initiated at the previous publications of O. Bazaluk. Originality. Authors defined the series “fatal” mistakes of the European Security Strategy and formulated the list of objectives of the revised security strategy. Conclusions. Five key objectives of perspective European Security Strategy were formulated. The first objective should include the complex measures for the identification, registration and organization of the system of preventive work with mentalities, in which the pathologies in the structure and function of the neural ensembles of subconsciousness and consciousness are clearly expressed that refract the active principle in aggressive manifestations. The second one should include the complex measures ensuring control over the direction of the physicochemical, predisposing, provoking and supporting factors of the external environment that have a direct impact on the manifestations of a mental space in ontogeny. The third objective should include the complex measures of prediction and solution of international conflicts. The fourth objective of the security strategy should be aimed at eliminating the cause of war. The fifth objective should provide the complex measures involving the peaceful extension of comfortable conditions for the full realization of its internal creative potentials by a mental space. (shrink)

The six commentaries raise five issues about multi-level selection theory that we attempt to address: (1) replicators without vehicles, (2) group selection and movement between groups, (3) absolute versus relative fitness, (4) group-level psychological adaptions, and (5) multi-level selection as a predictive theory.

Wilson & Sober's discussion of group selection is marred by the absence of plausible examples of human group-level behavioral adaptation. The trait of authoritarianism is one possible example of such an adaptation. It reduces within-group variance in reproductive success, manifests itself more strongly in response to group-level threat, and is found in a variety of cultures.

Today, in a Western secular context, the affective phenomenon of religious zeal is often associated, or even identified, with religious intolerance, violence, and fanaticism. Even if the zealots’ devotion remains restricted to their private lives, “we” as Western secularists still suspect them of a lack of reason, rationality, and autonomy. However, closer consideration reveals that religious zeal is an ethically and politically ambiguous phenomenon. In this article, I explore the question of how this ambiguity can be explained. I do so (...) by drawing on Paul Ricœur’s theory of affective fragility and tracing back the ambiguity of religious zeal to a dialectic inherent to human affectivity and existence itself. According to Ricœur, human affectivity is constituted by the two poles of vital and spiritual desires which are mediated by the thymos. As I show, this theory helps us to understand that religious zeal as a spiritual desire is neither plainly good nor plainly bad, but ambiguous. Moreover, it enables us to acknowledge the entanglement of abstraction and concretion that is inherent to the phenomenon of religious zeal. Finally, this theory helps us to understand why religious zeal, as one possible expression of the human quest for the infinite, is both a promise and a threat. In conclusion, human existence is tragic not in that we necessarily fail, but in that no matter which path we take with regard to our spiritual desires—that of affirmation, rejection, or moderation—we are and remain fallible. (shrink)

In fin-de-siècle France, we witness a strange circulation of concepts between philosophy, theoretical and experimental psychology, and the borderline realm of what we would now call meta- or parapsychology. This was a time characterized by a complex process of redefinition of the disciplinary frontiers between philosophy and psychology, which favoured the birth of hybrid conceptualities and stark oppositions as well. Furthermore, the great scientific advances in physics, physiology, and psychology fostered hope for a full rational explanation of reality, even of (...) its most unfathomable layers and seemingly bizarre phenomena. Focusing on the case of Émile Boirac’s research on what he termed ‘cryptopsychism’, notably in his book Our Hidden Forces, this article aims to show how Kantian notions and models of consciousness belonging to the canon of French spiritualist philosophical psychology were taken up by scientists such as Pierre Janet and ended up being assimilated and discussed in the more obscure and precarious realm of scientific inquiry into metapsychical phenomena. Far from being a mere historical curiosity, this quest for a scientific account of the latent and subconscious life of the mind sheds light on the intricate relationship between philosophy and the human sciences between the 19th and 20th centuries. (shrink)

This article proposes to investigate Jan Patočka’s idea of “post-Europe”, in the context of his understanding of European contemporary history. Therefore, I first stress how important it is for Patočka to conceive a “post-European perspective”, i.e. a peculiar insight into historical problems and conflicts that would allow humanity to find a possible path out of the condition that characterizes the twentieth century. Second, I focus on the existential figure that, according to Patočka, is capable of engendering this perspective, and whose (...) fundamental traits are equality, detachment, openness and courage. Thus, I consider Husserl’s idea of Europe, Arendt’s concept of the political and Bergson’s concept of the open soul as fundamental references for Patočka’s reconstruction. I conclude by showing how Patočka’s ethical stance on Europe and post-Europe can also be meaningful in light of the current European economic and political crisis. (shrink)

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

The utopia we are dealing with here could have been called ‘the mother of all utopias’ since it is in fact humanity's greatest, most primal dream, indeed the one that defines us as human. This great utopia, from which are woven our representations of paradise, for example, is immortality, the theme of René Barjavel's novel entitled The Immortals (1973).

Society has reached a new rupture in the digital age. Traditional technologies of biopower designed around coercion no longer dominate. Psychopower has manifested, and its implementation has changed the way one understands biopolitics. This discussion note references Byung-Chul Han’s interpretation of modern psychopolitics to investigate whether basic human rights violations are committed by Facebook, Inc.’s product against its users at a psychopolitical level. This analysis finds that Facebook use can lead to international human rights violations, specifically cultural rights, social rights, (...) rights to self-determination, political rights, and the right to health. (shrink)

Issue is taken with Dawkins and Krebs's (1978) conception of communication as being by nature manipulative and with Cronk's proposals concerning the evolution of morality, both of which are grounded in evolutionary biology. An alternative view, which recognizes that which humanity has in common with other species but which emphasizes humanity's distinctiveness, is offered to account for religion and morality.

After considering core ‘interruptions’ of identity and justice in the post-secularist agonisms of Connolly and Levinas, I mine their views for core practical insights about the possibilities for theist-atheist respect. After considering Connolly on ‘content v. comportment’ and after exploring the virtue of mystery as part of a mystery/contestability/generosity triad, as well as Connolly’s, Levinas’, Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s levels of optimism and pessimism about theism, I end by pointing to cracks in Connolly’s path to pluralism, and I recommend that the (...) ‘open and trembling’ mood of Levinas’ phenomenology serves as an important model for the kind of generous comportment that atheists and theists need on our path to respectful agono-pluralism. (shrink)

Humans appear to be possible candidates for group selection because they are often said to live in bands, clans, and tribes. These terms, however, are only names for conceptual categories of people. They do not designate enduring bounded gatherings of people that might be “vehicles of selection.” Hence, group selection has probably not been a major force in human evolution.

Jacques Derrida’s ‘Faith and Knowledge’ presents an account of the complex relationship between religion and technoscience that disrupts their traditional boundaries by uncovering both an irreducible faith at the heart of science and an irreducible mechanicity at the heart of religion. In this paper, I focus on the latter, arguing that emphases in Derrida’s text on both the ‘sources’ of religion and its interaction with modern technologies underemphasize the ways in which a general ‘mechanicity’ is present throughout religion. There is (...) no faith, I contend, that is not in some way materially constituted according to a mechanicity operative not only at its origin but continuously and in ever-changing forms, and not only in its interactions with other fields and institutions but within its own structure and daily life. By closely examining ‘Faith and Knowledge’—along with examples from his essay ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ and Michael Naas’s Miracle and Machine—I argue that more attention should be paid to the mechanisms, both human and non-human, that populate and perform religion in its factical life. Mechanical bodies and practices are enlisted by religious traditions in order that these traditions continue to exist by continually reconstituting themselves in, for example, the repetitive use of religious objects or the vocal recitation of creeds. Such mechanical acts of religion are not ultimately opposed to the faithful experience that is often taken to be the wellspring of religious life; on the contrary, they are the conditions for the possibility of this experience. (shrink)

This text is a reflection in action of an artistic process based on a scientific research. ENSAIO is the choreographic project that resulted from the translation mechanisms of laboratory concepts to a bodily approach, where it proposes a possible mainstreaming of artistic and scientific processes combined. This project joined artistic higher education schools in dance and scenic arts (ESD and FCSH) and Polavieja lab, a neuroscience research lab in Champalimaud Foundation – Center for the Unknown. This text aims to reveal (...) the creative choreographic and performative potentials hidden in this scientific research concerning neurosciences. Identifying cross materials to artistic and scientific processes, it was possible to design a structure of the creation process and the construction of a choreographic performance. The common platform has been found in the process of translation and the definition of the same concept substrate, which made possible the approach of the two instances: studio and laboratory. One of its key features is the promotion of the communication among its agents: scientists and dancers. And the possibility of modelling and absorption from what it comes from this sharing and collaboration. The methods and the choreographic procedures mirrored and promoted this sharing and, therefore, the involvement of the body. Where, the body is the agent able to reflect and trigger this process, a body as an essay that is constantly in research. A body able to coordinate between various media and to expand the reflection on itself. Although science and art are individual instances that inevitably specialise and segregated away. Therefore, this text focuses on examples of cross-thinking of both scientific and artistic cultures, and the articulation of the theoretical and practical bodies in a practice-as-research on the development of the ENSAIO creative process. (shrink)

While post-modernist assaults on modernity correctly expose the pretensions of modernity – including its constructs of meaning in history, its abnegation of mystery, and its lapses into scientism, historicism, and relativism – the philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan discerned progress as well as decline in recent intellectual history. In part this is because under contemporary conditions we can avoid the pretensions of modernity, since – in the wake of modern science and modern historical scholarship – we witness the differentiation of (...) interiority, which, properly understood as the discovery of the self, may be seen as leading to a new integration of the spiritual, the intellectual, the moral, and the historical. (shrink)

Near is andDifficult to grasp, the God.Religion, too, perhaps religion even more, seems to be “near” enough; for it is such proximity, it would seem, that allows us to make all kinds of statements about it—whether in defense of it or against it. Yet were we to be asked, “What is religion?” and what makes an experience “religious,” or rather, what makes us append this characterization to any particular experience, we would find that, in Hölderlin’s words, religion is “difficult to (...) grasp”. To paraphrase one famous passage: “We know perfectly well what we mean when we speak of [religion] and understand just as well when we hear someone else refer to it. What, then, is [religion]? If no one asks me, I... (shrink)

Recent philosophy has witnessed a renewed interest in the works and ideas of Henri Bergson (1859–1941). But while contemporary scholarship has sought to rehabilitate Bergson’s insights on time, memory, consciousness, and human freedom, comparatively little attention has been paid to Bergson’s relationship to pantheism. By revisiting the ‘pantheism’ controversy surrounding Bergsonian philosophy during Bergson’s lifetime, this article argues that the panentheistic notion of ‘being-in-God’ can serve as an illuminating framework for the interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy. By examining the ‘pantheist’ readings (...) of Bergson and comparing and contrasting Bergson’s philosophy of life with Spinoza’s panentheistic metaphysics, this paper shows that an account of ‘being-in-Life’ is key to Bergson’s metaphysical outlook as well as his account of philosophy as a practice of ‘intuitive’ thinking. In so doing, this paper highlights some of the implicit religious motifs not only in Bergson’s metaphysical outlook but also in his conception of the task of philosophy. (shrink)

This article examines Henri Bergson’s conception of human rights in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. I claim that he provides an original view of human rights. Rather than understand human rights primarily as an institution to protect all human beings from serious social, legal, and political abuse, Bergson conceives of them as a medium of personal transformation. In particular, I argue that for him the true potential of human rights is to initiate all human beings into a way (...) of life open to love and joy. (shrink)

In cinematic experience, a view from nowhere appears in an instituting moment – neither in time nor out of time, but part of time itself – when a camera reflex lifts the viewer’s perception out of somewhere and into the infinite time of the film. We argue that the view from nowhere found in Birt Acres’s film Rough Sea at Dover – a fifteen-second shot of waves breaking against a sea wall in Dover, England in 1895 – transcends all attempts (...) to turn it into a view from somewhere, as an empty space that carries the auratic trace of the past into the present through phase shifts of technical mediation. In Simondon’s terms, the view from nowhere opens up possibilities of becoming all ways at once in the reflexive capacity of the human organon. Following Stiegler’s organological technics, we identify the capture of perception by the apparatus of recording and playback in the digitally automated algorithm as a threat to the reflexive capability of the organon to see otherwise in the creative individuation opened up in the phase-shifting process. Our analysis triggers a switch from an anthropocentric to a neganthropic-ecological mode of seeing in which the auratic trace of the event of waves crashing against the pier is seen in an inhuman view from nowhere that carries the threat of automatized systems in which human noesis – self-reflexive capacity – is eclipsed by machines. By seeing otherwise, the eclipse by machines is reversed to reveal the complex becoming of the film in its materiality as a work of creative individuation. (shrink)

A 5,000 word review-essay of Anthony Steinbock's Moral Emotions (Northwestern University Press, 2014).

Group selection may be defined either broadly or narrowly. Narrowly defined group selection may involve either selection for altruism or group selection between alternative evolutionarily stable states. The last variety of group selection is likely to have been particularly important in human evolution.

Introduction: Another Diction The hack. The salesman. The fired cop. The drifter. The betrayed criminal. Each of these constitutes a novel literary invention; each gives a new sense to the investigative character. They are not modifications of the classical model, stamped with the rational imprimatur of Sherlock Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin, or Joseph Rouletabille – there is no line of filiation from these to Vachss’s Burke, Pelecanos’s Nick Stefanos, or Himes’s Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Even Lacan’s powerful (...) psychoanalytic reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” reveals Dupin to be a genius only in a game whose dialectical structure is given in advance. Although the subjects that come to occupy this structure only acquire determination through the assumption of their places, the dynamic form of the dialectic is itself “foreclosed” by the phallus whose circulation organizes the system. Dupin understands the circulation of the signifier only because this circulation is the figure of the law. Rejecting the phallocentric rationality of the mastermind, the new figurations of Vachss, Pelecanos, Himes, and others retain only in order to parody the grand orchestration of reason – their language is slang not deduction. They are not detectives but “dicks”: a name that incorporates within its reduction an empirical transformation of the transcendental. In fact, it is a transformation of the very sense of inquiry that requires this new type of conceptual personae in order to traverse its contours. The philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze – which he characterizes as a “transcendental empiricism” – is directed toward freeing thought from its determination by the philosophical traditions that constitute its history. Such a freeing would allow for a philosophical conceptualization of present events that are no longer able to be adequately conceptualized by that history. The distinctive character of Deleuze’s project comes from his insistence on the discontinuity between the tradition of thought and the new formulations that it is called upon to generate. For Deleuze, the philosopher is the one who asks about the generation of new concepts and thereby places herself in a double bind. On the one hand, the philosopher is historically conditioned, thrown into a tradition whose tools present a limited number of possible conceptual resolutions of a particular event. On the other hand, this conditional determination of philosophical thought is repeated, perpetually, so that the philosopher is always a parody of herself: solving the question of the determination of a present event by resolving the question of the determinability of the present by the past. This situation of parody is the limit of thinking; it is where thinking develops according to the vicissitudes of history. (shrink)

The term “value” has a wide range of current usage in philospohy and the sciences. Descriptively, a man's “values” may refer to all his attitudes for-or-against anything. His values include his perferences and avoidances, his desire-objects and aversion-objects, his pleasure and pain tendencies, his goals, ideals, interests and disinterests, what he takes to be right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, his approvals and disapprovals, his criteria of taste and standards of judgment, and so forth.

ABSTRACTClarisse Coignet played an important role in a number of the most important intellectual movements in nineteenth-century France. She grew up around and documented the leaders of...

Physical processes manifest an objective order that science manages to discover. Commonly, it is considered that these processes obey the “laws of nature.” Bergson disputes this idea which ultimately constitutes a kind of Platonism. In contrast, he develops the idea that physical processes are a particular case of automatic behaviors. In this sense, they imply a motor memory immanent to matter, whose actions are triggered by some perceptions. This approach is obviously panpsychist. It gives matter a certain consciousness, even if (...) the latter is different in nature from our consciousness. In some respects, this approach is similar to contemporary panpsychism because it claims that the psychic is a fundamental characteristic of nature, causally active. But it is also original because it does not constitute a theory of the origin of mind in nature. (shrink)

The received view of Bergson's philosophy of life is that it advances some form of vitalism under the heading of an “élan vital.” This paper argues against the vitalistic interpretation of Bergson's élan vital as it appears in Creative Evolution in favor of an interpretation based on his overlooked reflections on entropy and energetics. Within the interpretation developed here, the élan vital is characterized not as a spiritualistic “vital force” but as a tendency of organization opposed to the tendency of (...) entropic degradation. It is then shown how Bergson's view of evolution and living organization resonates with more contemporary scientific approaches belonging to a “thermodynamic paradigm” in theoretical biology in different respects, including the critique of neo-Darwinism and the positing of a driving force behind evolution. Finally, the special interest that Bergson's philosophical biology bears today is considered in terms of the connection between the concepts of élan vital and duration. (shrink)

The utopia we are dealing with here could have been called ‘the mother of all utopias’ since it is in fact humanity's greatest, most primal dream, indeed the one that defines us as human. This great utopia, from which are woven our representations of paradise, for example, is immortality, the theme of René Barjavel's novel entitled The Immortals (1973).

In this essay, I reconstruct H. Richard Niebuhr's interpretation of George Herbert Mead's account of the social constitution of the self. Specifically, I correct Niebuhr's interpretation, because it mischaracterizes Mead's understanding of social constitution as more dialogical than ecological. I also argue that Niebuhr's interpretation needs completing because it fails to engage one of Mead's more significant notions, the I/me distinction within the self. By reconstructing Niebuhr's account of faith and responsibility as theologically self-constitutive through Mead's I/me distinction, I demonstrate (...) Niebuhr's deep yet unacknowledged agreement with Mead: the self is constituted by its participation in multiple communities, but responds to them creatively by enduring the moral perplexity of competing communal claims. I conclude by initiating a constructive account of conscience that follows from this agreement. Conscience is more ecological than dialogical because it regards our creative participation in multiple ecologies of social roles oriented by patterns of responsive relations. (shrink)

This paper argues that Darwin's theory of evolution offers two modes of understanding the relation between life and human knowledge. On the one hand, Darwin can be included within a general turn to “life,” in which human self-knowledge is part of a general unfolding of increasing awareness and anthropological reflexivity; life creates an organism, man, capable of discerning the logic of organic existence. On the other hand, Darwin offers the possibility of understanding life beyond the self-maintenance of organism and, therefore, (...) beyond the rational of life's putative striving. (shrink)

Using Deleuzian theory for educational research and practice has become an increasingly popular activity. However, there are many theoretical complexities to the straightforward application of Deleuze to the educational context. For example, the ‘new materialism’ that Deleuze refers to in the 1960s takes its inspiration from Spinoza, and is an emancipatory project. Contrariwise, the ‘new materialism’ of the present moment is frequently applied to educational research and practice specifically as a way out of anthropocentric limits and enclosure. This paper explores (...) the combined forces of humanism and naturalism which are at work in Deleuze’s ‘new materialism’, as type of ‘more-than-human’ emancipation method derived from Bergson and Nietzsche; it is a mode of overcoming human limits, which fully takes into account the connections to and with the non-human world and the ecological consequences of human action. This paper will draw out the specific consequences for educational research and practice in schools of the ‘vitalist-nihilism’ we may derive from Bergson and Nietzsche to analyse matter flows as they enter, mingle with, and exit schools. (shrink)

Henri Bergson is one of the few philosophers who both explicitly and extensively discusses the phenomenon of habit. In view of his engagement with habit, does Bergson develop a philosophically robust account of the phenomenon? Most commentary on his account of habit refers to his early work, Matter and Memory. In this paper, I begin by arguing that Bergson's treatment of habit in Matter and Memory is problematic because it does not adequately differentiate between habit and material nature. Despite its (...) neglect in secondary literature, Bergson also discusses habit in the first part of his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. With respect to this book, I subsequently show how Bergson deploys Ravaisson's distinction between instinct and habit to reconceptualize habit as the second of our two natures, our social nature. Lastly, I reconstruct Bergson's late contribution to the philosophy of habit: rather than a tendency that is hard to resist, habit is a resistance to which we tend to submit. By shedding light on the effort that we expend to adhere to them, Bergson's resistance account of habit advances an original and productive perspective on our social habits. (shrink)

With Jean-Clet Martin's book, Une intrigue criminelle de la philosophie: lire la Phénoménologie de l'Esprit de Hegel, the latter emerges as a philosopher of (negative) difference and (infinite) repetition, one of the first to inject Being with becoming, in other words, as the brother-enemy that Deleuze had been waiting for and with whom he did establish complex relationships that cannot be conveniently summarized in his Nietzschean moment. In view of his novel and striking reading of Hegel, Martin is invited by (...) the interviewer to defend his suggestions that the negative and the dialectic need not turn into spoilers of the joys of Spinoza and the affirmations of Nietzsche; that Hegel's anti-humanism can be counted as a variation on Deleuze's own; that Hegel did anticipate Deleuze in the distinction between becoming and history and in the separation of the virtual event from the actual state of affairs; that Hegel's death of God ushers in, ahead of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, the death of man in the ‘overman’; and that, despite their infinite proximity, Hegel and Deleuze are separated by two incompatible images of thought that make the difference between them a difference of nature and not only a difference of degree. (shrink)

The extent to which Walter Benjamin's thought is bound up with the conceptual framework and debates of Bergsonism is overlooked to the detriment of our understanding of both. Benjamin's conception of Erfahrung/ experience is defined in relation to Bergson's conception of experience in the durée/duration. Benjamin implicitly evokes and extends a Bergsonian conception of creativity. This is central to Benjamin's understanding of the political implications of the decay of aura. The enhanced potentiality for creativity constitutes the possibility of new forms (...) of genuine Erfahrung in the scattered debris of the old. This would be based upon an affirmative nihilism, the mobilization of the creative second technology, the loosening of the masses, and the `politicization of art'. Crucially, however, Benjamin rejects Bergson's ahistorical approach to creativity within human experience. Virtual difference, the durée, is not external to human history. Creativity does not `flow into' actual human life but is the actualization of virtual difference that is generated and delimited by given socio-technological conditions. Modern creativity is not the gift of` God but of the capitalist mode of production. Benjamin provides a materialist explanation for the utility of Bergson's conception of creativity in the political critique of the present and a materialist justification for the normative prioritization of openness and qualitative segmentarity. He treats the durée as fully immanent to human experience and affirms a politics that is both more realistic and more committed to the value of difference in itself than is articulated in Bergson's own sociobiology. Benjamin does, as such, make a direct and critical contribution to the contemporary attempt to deploy Bergsonism in political critique and to render vitalism sociological. (shrink)

If selection at the group level is to be considered more than a mere possibility, it is important to find phenomena that are best explained at this level of selection. I argue that human religious phenomena provide evidence for the selection of a “pious gene” at the group level, which results in a human tendency to believe in a transcendental reality that encourages behavioral conformity to collective as opposed to individual interest.

Sociologist Niklas Luhmann argued that the law functions as society’s immune system by regulating conflicts that threaten the certainty of expectation structures. In this article, we argue that law itself has become a target of new social immune mechanisms. Since the 1980s, welfare states have increasingly seen their own structures as a threat. Today, the ideal is a public sector consisting of organizations that constantly emerge anew by selecting the structures that fit each specific moment, case, and citizen. To protect (...) public sector organizations against their own structures, ‘potentialization’ now functions as a social autoimmune mechanism by initiating a constant search for new openings and possibilities. This critique of structures includes a critique of legal structures like rights. Looking at the Danish law of early retirement as our empirical case, this paper analyzes, how the tension between law and ‘potentialization’ is built into the law itself. While the law gives citizens certain rights to early retirement, it simultaneously ‘protects’ against the same rights by potentializing citizens. ‘Potentialization’ here functions as a mechanism that protects the operations of a system against its legal structures. It functions by ‘un-relating’ those operations from the structures. This means that when citizens claim their right to pensions, the social workers can reject them on the grounds of a right to a future that is not foreclosed and ‘parked’ on a pension. The paper’s contribution is to show how potentialization works by dissolving even fundamental legal expectations. This profoundly transforms the relationship between the citizen and the public sector. (shrink)