By G. William Barnard
Dwelling attention examines the bright, yet now mostly missed, insights of French thinker Henri Bergson (1859-1941). delivering a close and available research of Bergson's inspiration, G. William Barnard highlights how Bergson's knowing of the character of attention and, particularly, its courting to the actual international stay strikingly proper to varied modern fields. those variety from quantum physics and approach suggestion to philosophy of brain, intensity psychology, transpersonal idea, and spiritual reviews. Bergson's idea of attention as a eternally dynamic, inherently temporal substance of fact itself presents a imaginative and prescient that may functionality as a persuasive replacement to mechanistic and reductionistic understandings of cognizance and fact. Barnard closes the paintings with numerous "ruminations" or neo-Bergsonian responses to a sequence of extremely important questions similar to: What does it suggest to stay consciously, authentically, and attuned to our internal depths? Is there a philosophically refined option to declare that the survival of cognizance after actual dying is not just attainable yet most likely?
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Extra resources for Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson (SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)
We've got reversed the standard classical proposal that the self sustaining “elementary elements” of the realm are the basic fact, and that many of the structures are in basic terms specific contingent types and preparations of those elements. relatively, we are saying that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the complete universe is the basic fact, and that really independently behaving elements are only specific and contingent varieties inside this complete. 7 What quantum physics underscores many times is the truth that the classical proposal of atomism is not just deceptive, yet essentially mistaken. all the features formerly ascribed to debris from the early Greek atomists via Newton are wrong—particles will not be indestructible or uncreated; they don't seem to be immutable, and they're now not sincerely localized in area. As Čapek succinctly places it, “they aren't debris in any respect. ”8 it's very tricky for us, as humans, to renounce the concept debris are tiny, self-sufficient balls of topic whizzing via empty area, yet as Bergson argued, a long time prior to physics came visiting to his mind set, this common-sense figuring out is not really the reality. it really is meaningless to think about “billiard ball-like” debris cascading and rebounding within the void. there's no void, there aren't any billiard ball debris. as an alternative, what we discover is a universe crammed to the brim with ceaseless dynamism, a universe permeated with advanced, interpenetrating, and overlapping fields, a universe that's itself not anything yet movement and alter. From the point of view of quantum physics, the knowledge of the universe as one of those sizeable Clock has been smashed, now not into tiny bits, yet relatively right into a vortex of interconnecting vibrations and fields. Atoms which have been, at one aspect, regarded as indestructible and unchanging chunks of topic are actually seen as advanced interactions of dynamic fields of power. Empty area is now thought of to be a colourful ocean of potentiality, a matrix from which hundreds and hundreds of debris emerge and disappear. And the inflexible determinism assumed by way of classical physics has softened right into a complicated technological know-how of traits and chances. nine Bergson stated It First Astonishingly, the non-atomistic imaginative and prescient of fabric truth that's articulated by means of quantum physics is strikingly just like what Bergson had expected in 1896 (when topic and reminiscence was once published). at present, the revolutions that have been approximately to overhaul physics have been simply slightly at the horizon. still, even then, Bergson used to be confident that we might by no means be ready to clarify the GOING past CLASSICAL PHYSICS eighty five nature of fabric fact if we proceed to imagine that it's composed of discrete debris, of sturdy gadgets that circulation approximately from position to put in an unchanging house. In topic and reminiscence, Bergson argued that topic can't be lowered to atoms relocating within the void, if basically as a result incontrovertible fact that whatever else exists to boot: strength or strength. Even on the finish of the 19th century, it was once famous that quite a few kinds of forces appear to function among atoms (e.