Hero of the Month: Henri Bergson

Okie, I must admit that I have not read much about him. In fact, I only knew him today. But, this french philosopher has many interesting philosophies that might give me a clue about how art and ideology works. Not that I am keen to pursue that area as my dissertation because the only credible prof who can do such amazing supervision has left the department. Anyway, I think Bergson is leftist, platonic, darwinian and freudian all at once. It has been postulated that his theory of 'intuition' and 'Élan Vital' is able to shed light on the rationalities behind some of the artistic movements during the interwar years, such as dadaism, surrealism, cubism and futurism. Right up my own little un-enlightened valley because I've been keen to find out how these movements come together.

I'll go library now to borrow a book about how Bergson's theories are able to shed light on the birth of the modern museum. Think I'll push my much procrastinated friggin stupid stats assignment to another day. Today shall be jimmy's self-indulging day in the nonsensical world of meaningless art. Will leave you guys with a quote by Bergson on comedy, which was taken from a book which I stumbled upon in Prague. I feel like meditating on those words:



"The first point to which attention shoud be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape maybe beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it - the human caprice whose mould it has assumed...

... Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter."


Perhaps there is an intimate reciprocity between self-contempt and extraordinary self-satisfaction. Only when one has fallen out with oneself and no longer suffers with a good conscience, only in the throes of stricken vanity, only then does one become a pitiful and repulsive spectacle unto himself in his own tragic-comedy.