Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition - Hardcover

Keith Ansell-Pearson claims that Henri Bergson's thought marks an upheaval in philosophy of equal magnitude to Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. I can't think of a better author or book to make the case.

Yet another great book from one of our most important scholars on Bergson (and Nietzsche, and Deleuze). There is no question that Ansell-Pearson succeeds in introducing Bergson more thoroughly to the Anglophone world, illuminating all of the most central areas of Bergson's thinking. Of particular note are the final two chapters on ethics and religion in Bergson, areas usually left unexplored by Bergson scholars. Bergson: Thinking beyond the Human Condition is one of the best, if not the best, studies of Bergson.

In his synthetic overview of the work of Henri Bergson Keith Ansell-Pearson explores how "we as human beings can think beyond our own condition.†? This is an urgent question in the age of the Anthropocene and Ansell-Pearson is right to think Bergson can help us answer it. His book demonstrates, with great clarity, the importance of Bergson's work to the present day. It will prove indispensable not only to teachers and students and but to anyone who wants to see our contemporary world in a new light.

A thought-provoking contribution to the renaissance of interest in Bergson, this study brings him to a new generation of readers. Ansell-Pearson contends that there is a Bergsonian revolution, an upheaval in philosophy comparable in significance to those that we are more familiar with, from Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger, that make up our intellectual modernity.

The focus of the text is on Bergson's conception of philosophy as the discipline that seeks to 'think beyond the human condition'. Not that we are caught up in an existential predicament when the appeal is made to think beyond the human condition; rather that restricting philosophy to the human condition fails to appreciate the extent to which we are not simply creatures of habit and automatism, but also organisms involved in a creative evolution of becoming.

Ansell-Pearson introduces the work of Bergson and core aspects of his innovative modes of thinking; examines his interest in Epicureanism; explores his interest in the self and in time and memory; presents Bergson on ethics and on religion, and illuminates Bergson on the art of life.