The real and the unreal: metaphysics and philosophy of knowledge in Bergson and Husserl

Abstract

This essay aims to investigate the question of non-being in Contemporary Philosophy by contrasting Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with Henri Bergson’s philosophy of knowledge. The fundamental question concerns what the meaning of non-being is and whether we can think of it without contradiction. I hypothesize that Husserl’s and Bergson’s answers to this question are irreconcilable and that this allows us both to understand the specificity of each of these philosophies and also to indicate different orientations for ontoepistemological research. By explaining the re-signification elaborated by pure Phenomenology of the problem and of the method of Transcendental Philosophy, I initially intend to show why the former is constituted as an eidetic science whose phenomena are “unrealities”. Secondly, concerning Bergson’s theses on the status of the “possible” and the “real”, I propose that the unreal phenomena that constitute the very object of pure Phenomenology reveal the philosophical misunderstanding that grants a pre-existence in the form of an idea of the possible (or ideal) to the real. If relevant, this path allows us to articulate in Bergson a post-transcendental philosophy of knowledge that points to a new type of ontological realism. Finally, I intend to show that, in a more fundamental sense, the onto-epistemological differences between Bergson and Husserl are secondary to a shared philosophical spiritual direction.