Elements for a bergsonian inspired moral

Abstract

Starting from a specific understanding of the evolutionary process, we could see that the development of human life through rationality led us to an exploratory and selfish logic towards which we find ourselves today. This argument is echoed in the thinking of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) who, at the end of his life, dedicated himself to thinking about the moral and religious foundations of society, whose closed character would serve as the basis for all forms of oppression and denial of human diversity. However, reading the first chapter of Bergson's book The Two Sources of Morals and Religion (1932), allows us to foresee an apparent paradox: in order to recreate our values, in order to transpose the founded social behavior in the logic of intelligence, in selfishness, in the confrontation with the different, in the unbridled exploration of the natural sources of life and subsistence, in animal exploration, it would be necessary not to return to nature, but to overcome it. After all, according to the bergsonian view, social morality was biologically constituted by means of closure and not opening, so that, in order to rethink our so-called civilized habits, a change would be essential, a transposition of that naturally closed morality to another in the process to expand, as envisioned by the philosopher since 1932.