The discovery of the immediate: on the philosophical movement of Bergson’s time and free will

Abstract

Our aim is to uncover what would be the methodological and, at the same time, the meditative meaning of Time and Free Will, Bergson’s first published work. To do this, we intend to follow the philosopher through the in-depth movement that constitutes the study in question, describing the main passages – as qualitative passages or qualitative changes – between its three chapters, as well as those that are essential within each chapter. In this way, we place ourselves at the beginning of Bergsonism, adopting, therefore, the very posture recommended for philosophy when it wants to be precise, that is, assuming the Bergsonian attitude when reading his own work; an attitude in which the philosophical movement is a direct and immediate sympathy with the real, but whose immediate coincidence is made by the consideration and dissolution of what is obstructive, that is, in which the philosophical movement, as a discovery of the immediate, opens us up to the complex meaning of the immediate. In this way, we intend to discover the deeper meanings of Time and Free Will as, itself, the opening of Bergsonism, and, finally, to also understand that this stance that we adopt, and which motivates our reading of the Time and Free Will, is not actually a philosophical “prejudice” that we force, a priori, on the work to be investigated: it is the work itself that reveals to us the meaning of this stance.