Duração, consciência, memória e liberdade em Bergson

Abstract

This dissertational work is a concise outline of the thought of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher, in order to speak about the notion of duration. Knowing that such a concept is not separate from what we call the theory of memory, because the author, thinking about the relationship between consciousness and world, realizes that this duration is also first of all consciousness, and therefore memory. Such duration of our consciousness implies an indivisibility between past and present, for every past state is always retained in the present, which is inseparable from the past states. Thus, the past is in itself the unconscious or exactly, according to Bergson, the virtual. Retention refers to the very essence of our consciousness because we can not be conscious without retaining the past in some degree and anticipate the future in a certain degree of action onto the world. The hypothesis justifying this work is that every action in the world to Bergson is always bodily, and it is through the body that we change everything around us, and can then affirm that the duration is also creation, therefore duration is Consciousness, Memory and Freedom. We propose in this study a dialogue on the concept of duration and knowing in which conditions the duration becomes self-consciousness, being that the philosopher takes the evolution of life as the story of a Consciousness chain that penetrated the matter charge d with a plurality of virtualities. To this end, it is necessary to elucidate the doctrine of works: An Essay on the immediate data of consciousness (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907) in order to follow the path of the author in the groundings of his Ontology, because according to Frederich Worms, it is possible to take the work of Bergson, as an initial intuition about the duration itself. Finally, the scope of the present work it shows that the real free act is creation of itself and by itself, for the very duration is originality where nothing is repeated. The very reality endures, in other words, there is a movement of uninterrupted creation which we only intuitively perceive in ourselves as a self.