Pragmatism and Humanism: Bergson as a Reader of William James

Abstract

The followers of the structuralist method in the History of Philosophy used to say that philosophers are not good historians, for they cannot read and understand other authors without projecting their own ideas onto then. Thus, accepting or denying other philosophies, what the philosopher actually does is a kind of experience with his own thought on another's. Something further than an objective analysis of the doctrine to which he refers. As if the other author's ideas were just a pretext or a reference for articulating their own concepts. This consideration could initially work as a standard of moderation of the enthusiastic admiration that Bergson had for William James. In fact, if the Bergson's role in his age was that of reinstating the possibility of metaphysics in the French philosophy, denied by the positivism and by the neo-Kantian epistemologists, how could he accept the declared admiration of James for positivism and for utilitarianism? How can one acknowledge the compatibility between a philosophy that conceives time as Absolute and intuition as a contact with an ineffable totality and an epistemology that links truth to the evolution of the human practice in its relation to the things? Yet the claims that Bergson made about the philosophical Tightness of the pragmatism are not just eloquent but the accounts of his approximations are, perhaps, even more meaningful when - explaining the ideas of the American philosopher - he reveals his own ideas. Only a deep comparative study could rigorously trace the similarities and the differences. Here we will be satisfied with a brief and preliminary view of the Bergsonian account of William James' philosophy by attempting to focus on specific points where affinities seem to emerge, chiefly grounded on Bergson's interpretative reading of James's works.