Bergson and philosophy as a way of life

The chapter presents Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a way of life, as a thinking that seeks to make contact with the creativity of life as a whole. This endeavor to alter our vision of the world, and ultimately, our action and sense of being in the world, seeks to operate a “conversion of attention.” For Bergson, such a conversion is tied in with what he calls the “true empiricism” that allows us to experience and think change as that which makes up living reality as a whole. Bergson conceptualizes this move beyond the human in terms of sympathy, a term employed both descriptively, to develop the notion of a sympathetic whole of life in which philosophy as a way of life resituates the self, and prescriptively, as urging us to overcome our estrangement from “the ocean of life” to which we owe our existence. This effort of sympathy takes the form of a spiritual exercise. Not limited to mere contemplation of the world, it transforms the manner in which we perceive the reality of duration and thus opens the path for a different way of living

What was 'serious philosophy' for the young Bergson?

The chapter is an intellectual biography of the early Bergson and lays out his immediate reasons for abandoning plans to earn a medical degree after completing his studies in philosophy. In the process, it shows Bergson’s later accounts of the early stages of his intellectual itinerary to at least be tinged by a retrospective illusion: Bergson did not start out as a psychologist-philosopher to become, via an interest in the philosophy of science, a metaphysician. A detailed overview of the institutional and intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century France demonstrates how the separation of disciplines in independent faculties of the French academy put immense pressure on philosophy to legitimate itself. This pressure was felt all the more acutely by those who, like the young Bergson, lacked economic, symbolic, and cultural capital. By abandoning the plan to study medicine, Bergson conformed to the institutional and doctrinal constraints placed on philosophy. This strategy of adaptation proved to be effective not only in the choice of topics he discussed in his dissertation but also in the way he moved toward, appropriated, and recast metaphysics as his career continued