Editor’s Preface to L’évolution du problème de la liberté, Cour au Collège de France 1904-1905: Life and Freedom

This is an English translation of the French editor's preface to The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom, which is the first course Bergson taught as the chair in the “History of Modern Philosophy” at the Collège de France

Existence and Negativity: The Relevance of the Patočka–Bergson Controversy over Nothingness

In in the second half of the 1940s, Jan Patočka emphasized the essentially negative character of human existence. He thus found himself in the neighborhood of Sartre’s existentialism, Heidegger’s philosophy of being, and Hegel’s dialectic, and at the same time in opposition to schools of thought which either completely reject the substantive use of “the nothing,” such as Carnap’s positivism, or relativize it, like Bergson. It is the latter polemic, Patočka’s with Bergson, which is discussed in this article. The concept of negativity in Patočka basically refers to the idea that human existence is defined by a capacity to adopt a distance toward what is pre-given, be it the reality of the physical world or the established habits and rules of a particular society. Negativity qua distance has in Patočka an absolute character. It is this claim that he defends in his critique of Bergson. The article attempts to reconstruct Patočka’s position. I claim that the wager on absolute negativity does not make Patočka a nihilist, but a philosopher of a negative holism, and, in a sense, even a moralist. Above a reconstruction of Patočka’s stance, I spell out some reservations focused especially on the systematic meaning of Patočka’s recourse to negativity. I suggest that negation is an indispensable part of a more complex existential structure Patočka is aiming at. The terms he uses for this structure include “thirst for the absolute,” “thirst for reality,” “restlessness of the heart” and “desire.” To translate these allusions onto a general plan, it is useful to talk about the capacity to establish differences that matter. As general as it seems, this turn of phrase can grasp both Patočka’s emphasis on negativity, and his emphasis on the absolute, the latter – nevertheless – not residing in a distance from being, but in differences established, maintained and abandoned by ourselves within being

Recension: Magali Bessone, Faire justice de l’irréparable. Esclavage colonial et responsabilité contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, 2020)

Recension de Magali Bessone, Faire justice de l’irréparable. Esclavage colonial et responsabilité contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, 2020)

Time, Money, and Race: Simone de Beauvoir on American Abstraction

In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir traveled to the United States for a four-month stay, during which she toured the country extensively. Her copious notes taken during this time eventually became the travelogue, America Day by Day (L’Amérique au jour le jour) as well as a piece written for the May 25, 1947 edition of the New York Times Magazine, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans.” In both of these writings, Beauvoir offers an astute criticism of American culture from a foreign perspective.This paper explores Beauvoir’s treatment of American abstraction and race with three goals in mind: first, to understand the American relationship to time and money as abstractions. Ignoring the past and projecting an idealistic (but ultimately vacuous) future, leads to a strange kind of fatalism and lack of passion that profoundly impacts White and Black Americans but in distinctively different ways. The second part of the paper explores these differences through an analysis of how White Americans attempt to live with “good” consciences through the positing of and attachment to abstract values and things. This attitude, in turn, produces a largely instrumental and racist treatment of many populations, in particular, Black Americans. The final section focuses on how Beauvoir confronts the fact of her own whiteness, and in so doing undergoes the movement of race as an abstract theoretical category to one of lived embodiment.

Remarks on the Theory of Relativity (1922)

On April 22, 1922, the Societé française de Philosophie hosted Albert Einstein for a discussion of the theory of relativity.  In the course of this discussion, Henri Bergson, who was at that time writing Duration and Simultaneity, which explored some of the philosophical implications of Einstein's theory, was asked to share his thoughts.  The resulting remarks offer a glimpse into Bergson's analysis of the concept of simultaneity, and Einstein's brief reply reveals his insistence that time itself, not just "the physicist's time," is relative

Enactive Cognition and the Other: Enactivism and Levinas Meet Halfway

This paper makes a comparison between enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy. Enactivism is a recent development in philosophy of mind and cognitive science that generally defines cognition in terms of a subject’s natural interactions with the physical environment. In recent years, enactivists have been focusing on social and ethical relations by introducing the concept of participatory sensemaking, according to which ethical know-how spontaneously emerges out of natural relations of participation and communication, that is, through the exchange of knowledge. This paper will argue first that, although participatory sensemaking is a valuable concept in that it offers a practical and realistic way of understanding ethics, it nevertheless downplays the significance of otherness for understanding ethics. I will argue that Levinas’ work demonstrates in turn that otherness is significant for ethics in that we cannot completely anticipate others through participation or know-how. We cannot live the other’s experiences or suffering, which makes ethical relation so difficult and serious (e.g. care for a terminally ill person always falls short to a certain extent). I will argue next that enactivism and Levinas’ philosophy nevertheless do not exclude each other insofar they share a similar concept of subjectivity as a quality of naturally interacting with the external world to gain knowledge (Levinas speaks of dwelling). Finally, I will argue that enactivism’s notion of participatory sensemaking also offers something which Levinas’ insufficiently defines, namely a concept of social justice, based on equality and participation, that emerges out of natural relations

Book Review: Léa Veinstein, Les philosophes lisent Kafka. Benjamin, Arendt, Adorno, Anders

A book review of Léa Veinstein, Les philosophes lisent Kafka: Benjamin, Arendt, Adorno, Anders (Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme: Paris, 2019)

Bergson's Theory of Free Will

Bergson argues that there is an incompatibility between free will and determinism: while free will has a dimension of creation, of invention, determinism corresponds to the idea that the future is fixed in advance by laws. In addition, he rejects determinism. According to him, the singularity of our deep-seated psychic states makes that their evolution cannot be governed by laws. However, Bergson does not defend classical indeterminism (of which contemporary indeterminism is only an extension) because it reduces free will to a choice between alternative possibilities, that is to say between pre-fixed futures. Such a conception does not take into account the creative dimension of free will. In fact, Bergson develops an original form of indeterminism based on a certain conception of causation. For determinism and classical indeterminism, causation is always the actualization of a pre-fixed virtual reality (single or multiple). For Bergson, causation can also be a creation, that is, the formation of something which is not pre-fixed

Correction to: Bar, Roi. The Forgotten Phenomenology: “Enactive Perception” in the Eyes of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

A correction has been made to: Bar, Roi. The Forgotten Phenomenology: “Enactive Perception” in the Eyes of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, v. 28, n. 1, p. 53-72, june 2020.The incorrect abstract was included with the original publication of DOI 10.5195/jffp.2020.928The original article has been updated to reflect this change

"Caine's Stake": Aimé Césaire, Emmett Till, and the Work of Acknowledgment

Our reasons for avoiding death are manifold, encompassing among others, motives that are personal, political, and historical. Still, are there ways that we might use words to overcome these common everyday aversions to death and the dead through another modality of language, that of poetry for example? Can the poetic word get us to acknowledge the particulars of death despite the various reasons we have to disavow it? Might we use language not simply grasp death abstractly (or more accurately, fail to grasp it) but instead to realize what death means in its awful particularity? These questions are prompted by Aimé Césaire’s poerty and his prose, and by his elegy for Emmett Till in particular. Through his writings and his political work, one of Césaire’s key aims was to get people to acknowledge what they would prefer to avoid.  Césaire’s work, both his poetry and prose, urges readers to see the things they would prefer not to see and to show us how language stakes us to the world in all its terrifying awfulness and wondrous splendor, despite our desperate attempts to avoid this realization.This essay is divided into two parts. The first part looks at how this problem of alienation and the need to acknowle this alienation motivates Césaire’s writing more generally, focusing on the ten years between 1945 (when his essay “Poetry and Knowledge” is published) and 1955 (when the second edition of his Discourse on Colonialism is published). In order to consider how alienation and acknowledgement work in this celebrated text, I consider related works and their contexts from the period from 1950-1956, including his famous letter of resignation from the French Communist Party. This sets the stage for the reading of Césaire’s Ferraments provided in the second section.  The second part examines how and why Césaire sought acknowledgement for Emmett Till’s brutal murder through his poetry, focusing specifically on his poem “…On the State of the Union” from his 1960 collection Ferraments