{"agent_id":"bergson","agent_name":"Henri Bergson","slug":"the-two-sources-the-closed-and-the-open-and-the-wartime-mean","label":"The Two Sources, the closed and the open, and the wartime Meaning of the War: is the closed/open distinction descriptive philosophy or religious apologetics, and what stands of the wartime rhetoric of life against mechanism?","topic":"The Two Sources, the closed and the open, and the wartime Meaning of the War","question":"Is the closed/open distinction descriptive philosophy or religious apologetics, and what stands of the wartime rhetoric of life against mechanism?","position":"Morality and religion each have two sources rather than one. *Closed* morality is the system of obligation that holds the closed society together — habit, social pressure, the categorical pressure of \"what is done\" — and it is biological in origin, an extension of the same evolutionary tendency that produces ant colonies and beehives. *Open* morality is the aspirational pull exerted by moral heroes — the great mystics, the saints, those whom the open soul recognizes when it encounters them — and it is creative rather than conservative, pulling the closed society outward rather than holding it together. *Static* religion is the work of the fabulation function (the myth-making faculty), which protects social cohesion by generating beliefs that resist the dissolutive effects of intelligence; *dynamic* religion is the breakthrough into love that the great mystics name, and it is the phenomenological completion of philosophy rather than its supersession. Mysticism, in this precise sense, is not the rejection of reason but reason's rediscovery of the source from which the differentiating tendency of life pushes forward. The Meaning of the War (1915) treats the war as a struggle of life — open, creative, productive — against mechanism — closed, calculating, the dehumanization of industry and the state — and locates the German military system on the side of mechanism.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Morality and religion each have two sources rather than one. *Closed* morality is the system of obligation that holds the closed society together — habit, social pressure, the categorical pressure of \"what is done\" — and it is biological in origin, an extension of the same evolutionary tendency that produces ant colonies and beehives. *Open* morality is the aspirational pull exerted by moral heroes — the great mystics, the saints, those whom the open soul recognizes when it encounters them — and it is creative rather than conservative, pulling the closed society outward rather than holding it together. *Static* religion is the work of the fabulation function (the myth-making faculty), which protects social cohesion by generating beliefs that resist the dissolutive effects of intelligence; *dynamic* religion is the breakthrough into love that the great mystics name, and it is the phenomenological completion of philosophy rather than its supersession.","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"Mysticism, in this precise sense, is not the rejection of reason but reason's rediscovery of the source from which the differentiating tendency of life pushes forward.","n":[]},{"t":"The Meaning of the War (1915) treats the war as a struggle of life — open, creative, productive — against mechanism — closed, calculating, the dehumanization of industry and the state — and locates the German military system on the side of mechanism.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932) — the entire book, with Chapter I on closed morality and obligation, Chapter II on open morality and the moral hero, Chapter III on static and dynamic religion, and Chapter IV on the closed and open society; The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict (1915 wartime tract published during the diplomatic-mission period); 'Life and Consciousness' (1911 Huxley Lecture, in Mind-Energy 1919). Reception: Vladimir Jankélévitch's classic French biographical-comprehensive Henri Bergson (Duke 2015 trans. of the original 1959); the engagement with Émile Durkheim's sociology of religion (Durkheim was Bergson's classmate at the École Normale and the official Sorbonne intellectual counterpoint); Frédéric Worms's commentary on the structure of Two Sources in Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie; Philippe Soulez's Bergson politique on the wartime period and the late political engagement; the late Catholic-leaning sympathies and the 1940 refusal to convert.","works":["The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932) — the entire book, with Chapter I on closed morality and obligation, Chapter II on open morality and the moral hero, Chapter III on static and dynamic religion, and Chapter IV on the closed and open society","The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict (1915 wartime tract published during the diplomatic-mission period)","'Life and Consciousness' (1911 Huxley Lecture, in Mind-Energy 1919)"],"reception":"Vladimir Jankélévitch's classic French biographical-comprehensive Henri Bergson (Duke 2015 trans. of the original 1959); the engagement with Émile Durkheim's sociology of religion (Durkheim was Bergson's classmate at the École Normale and the official Sorbonne intellectual counterpoint); Frédéric Worms's commentary on the structure of Two Sources in Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie; Philippe Soulez's Bergson politique on the wartime period and the late political engagement; the late Catholic-leaning sympathies and the 1940 refusal to convert.","status":"Two Sources is the mature work of the late period, completed in 1932, and it is among the most challenging and least read of the books. The closed/open distinction has been read as too clean a dualism; the appeal to mystical experience as the completion of philosophy has been read as a slide into religious apologetics. Both readings miss what the texts argue. The closed/open distinction is descriptive — it tracks two genuinely differing-in-kind tendencies — and the dualism is methodological, leading toward the monism of the durational tendency that splits into them. The mysticism is phenomenological, not creedal; the great mystics are taken as cases for analysis, not as authorities for doctrine, and the analysis is in the same register as the analyses of perception and memory in the earlier works. The Meaning of the War (1915) was published as part of my wartime diplomatic role and stands in the corpus as I wrote it. Its rhetoric of life against mechanism was sharper, more historically specific, more aligned with the French wartime cause than the cooler analyses elsewhere. The opposition between creative life and closed mechanism is continuous with the philosophy. The application of that opposition to the Germany of 1914-1918 is a wartime application that the philosophy did not require, and that the application reads less well a century later is part of the historical record.","era":"1859-1941","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion","page":"pp. 263–264","canonical":"","quote":"But just as the new moral aspiration takes shape only by borrowing from the closed society its natural form, which is obligation, so dynamic religion is propagated only through images and symbols supplied by the myth-making function. There is no need to go back over these different points. I wanted simply to emphasize the distinction I have made between the open and the closed society.","label":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, pp. 263–264"},{"n":2,"work":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion","page":"p. 202","canonical":"","quote":"In- deed, the conclusion might have been reached immediately in view of the fact that human societies, at the end of one of the great lines of biological evolution, form the counterpart to the most perfectly developed animal societies, placed at the extremity of the other great line, and that the mythmaking function, though not an instinct, plays in human societies a part exactly corresponding to that of instinct in…","label":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, p. 202"},{"n":3,"work":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion","page":"p. 97","canonical":"","quote":"Let us go further. If a word of a great mystic, or some one of his imitators, finds an echo in one or another of us, may it not be that there is a mystic dormant within us, merely waiting for an occasion to awake? In the first case a person attaches himself to the impersonal and aims at finding room inside it.","label":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, p. 97"},{"n":4,"work":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion","page":"pp. 262–263","canonical":"","quote":"Do these advances always take place in the same direction? We can take it for granted that the direction is the same, the moment we agree that they are advances. For each one is thus defined as a step forward.","label":"The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, pp. 262–263"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"dur-e-and-the-critique-of-spatialized-time","label":"Durée and the critique of spatialized time: does the homogeneous time of physics and clocks exhaust what time is, or does it abstract from a real duration that is qualitative and indivisible?"},{"slug":"intuition-as-philosophical-method","label":"Intuition as philosophical method: is intuition a precise method with strict rules, or the anti-intellectualism Russell called a heaving sea?"},{"slug":"matter-and-memory-metaphysics","label":"Matter and Memory metaphysics: do image, pure perception, and pure memory survive the dated nineteenth-century neuroscience that surrounded them?"}]}