Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson's Political Philosophy (Cultural Memory in the Present)
Alexandre Lefebvre
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 0804785791
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
We tend to think of human rights as the urgent international project of protecting all people everywhere from harm. Bergson shows us that human rights can also serve as a medium of personal transformation and self-care. For Bergson, the main purpose of human rights is to initiate all human beings into love. Forging connections between human rights scholarship and philosophy as self-care, Lefebvre uses human rights to channel the whole of Bergson's philosophy.
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Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson's Political Philosophy (Cultural Memory in the Present)
Platonism, Christianity, or Kantianism). And neither does he put forward a sociological account of it (as would Durkheim). Instead, his account is vitalist through and through: “In passing from social solidarity to the brotherhood of man, we break with one particular nature, but not with all nature. It might be said, by slightly distorting the terms of Spinoza, that it is to get back to natura naturans that we break away from natura naturata” (DS 1023–24/58). Love (or mysticism), therefore, does
Society 107 itself,” then open love is a way in which to recuperate, or reinsert ourselves within, the essentially genetic and mobile tendency of life.58 Or, to sum up all three features we have considered, it is through the experience of love that we achieve a vision of life as a creative, simple, and above all uninterrupted movement. From Naturalism to Metaphysics and Back Again My account of the open tendency of life has been schematic rather than in-depth. The reason is that our interest
raises—economic cooperation and population control—do not concern us (or at least not in the same way that they concern him), the principle behind them does. For Bergson says that if war is to be curbed, it is in the present circumstances necessary to establish an inter- (and not a supra-) national organization to monitor, regulate, and even intervene in national policies. “It is a dangerous mistake,” he says, “to think that an international institution can obtain permanent peace [la paix
ethics—because, as we also know, the juridical subject of human rights performs an irreducible function in and of itself: to turn the closed tendency against itself and guard against those people that love or that mysticism cannot touch. A Bergsonian concept of human rights is thus situated at the point of exchange between politics and ethics. Certainly it acknowledges the traditional role of the juridical subject of human rights, which is to define and protect a set of inviolable capabilities.
classical work of philosophy: “The essence of classicism is precision. Those writers who became classical are those who said what they wanted to say, nothing less, but most of all nothing more” (C 1478). It is for this reason that we should take a step back in order to get our bearings. In this chapter, I will argue that Bergson’s investigation of moral obligation in Two Sources is critical in the Kantian sense of the term. He will analyze the conditions of existence of a basic human capability