Reading Notes on Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion
This post started off as a handful of lines banged out on my phone's notepad as I was working my way through Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Literally this: I thought I might elaborate a little bit, and that's how I ended up with much too many paragraphs of mostly overly-excited connection drawing. Some of this is a little caricatural, but if they capture something of a spirit, or at least incite some to read some of the authors mentioned, then they will have done their job! Alain Badiou I'm stretching my bow a little to start, but what Bergson shares with Badiou is the latter's 'anti-constructivist' bent. For Bergson, there are, as it were, two kinds of moralities - open and closed. 'Closed' morality is just that which is built up, habit by habit until one reaches its limit in 'society'. But this social morality is always partial, always distinguished from the morality of other societies. By contrast, 'open' mo