The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Henri Bergson’s philosophy champions “the possibility of making the concept of life more fundamental and inclusive than that of force” (488). His 1907 book Creative Evolution brought him immediate fame in philosophic circles. Growing up with the materialism of Spencer, he came to share the frustrations of those scientists who could not discover the innermost realities of life despite all their experimentations. Materialism also tends to lead to determinism, and it is hard to imagine the most extraordinary works of art and literature springing from purely mechanical forces, as opposed to a creative spark which reflects at least a measure of free will. Bergson became skeptical of such radical skepticism, although he understood the temptation to accept only what one can verify through the senses and cognition.

However, consciousness is not an automatic process, as people are burdened with memories and choices which require reserves of psychological energy to overcome. Human beings alone can break the routine of instinct, and while the actual brain does operate according to certain fixed processes, “consciousness is distinct from the organism which it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes” (492). Like a movie camera that creates an illusion of movement with a rapid sequence of images, the intellect “catches a series of states” (494), while intuition can grasp the essential vitality of life itself.

The intellect remains important for perceiving and analyzing material forces, but psychology is beginning to uncover functions of the mind which are not reducible to traditional scientific inquiry. In this view, evolution is no longer a dreary struggle for survival, but rather an explosion of vitality and diversity. Every new life is a unique product of the parents’ genetic inheritance, and species show incredible mutations for overcoming the rigors of their physical environment. Life itself is a creative impulse, and to confuse life with mechanics is an absurdity worthy of that most human of all reactions: laughter.

Benedetto Croce is a much different figure than Bergson, one of the few notable Italians to break from his Catholic faith. He lost his entire family in an earthquake at the age of 17, living off their inheritance until entering politics. In his first works, a commentary on Marxism, he found much worthy of praise in Marxist ideology but ultimately rejected its materialism in favor of a revived Idealism. He sought a pure concept of reality itself, a “logic” (511) binding the whole universe together, assembling a vision of the universe to which religion can only pretend. Historians, for example, will never be able to assemble a complete record of the facts, but they can provide a “revelation of causes and consequences and correlations” (513), a comprehensive account of the key facts of human experience.

Croce also wrote on aesthetics, arguing that an understanding of beauty preceded an understanding of logic in the human consciousness. Art is the ability to capture the essence of an image in its true, ideal form. The essence of the thing is beauty, and one’s ability to appreciate beauty depends on “our ability to see by direct intuition the reality portrayed” (516) through the outward image. Durant ultimately does not think particularly highly of Croce’s work, doubting that a philosopher can capture the essence of beauty when the greatest artists in history have been unable to put it into words.

The scion of a great British political family, Bertrand Russell alienated himself from his aristocratic background with his penchant for controversy. Fiercely opposed to religion, and skeptical of the value of a classical education, he insisted on the scientific method, and especially mathematics, as the most important form of knowledge. He hoped “to reduce all philosophy to such mathematical form, to take all specific content out of it, to compress it (voluminously) into mathematics” (521) until philosophy itself had achieved total objectivity and finality.

This commitment to abstract rationality came to a screeching halt upon the outbreak of the WWI (known at the time as the Great War), which shifted Russell toward an intense political philosophy of pacifism and socialism. He argued that a new kind of education would raise up modern peoples who would refuse to be chained to the old dogmas of religion, nationalism, and private property, attaching themselves instead to artistic beauty and the pursuit of the common good. Disappointed with his first-hand experience with communism in the newly established Soviet Union, Russell found in China the potential for “open-mindedness […] realism […] a willingness to face the facts as they are” (528). He suggested the relative decline of Europe and the emergence of new cultures on the world stage could help cure humanity of the ills that Western civilization had done so much to spread.