The Enlightenment picture of nature as a machine whose whole is fully explained by its separable parts; Bergson rejects it as a theory of life.
A bicycle, toaster oven or jack-in-the-box: springs, gears and screws fit together logically with no mysticism, so you can study each part in isolation.
The image Shore uses for it, in our paraphrase.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Mechanism treats nature as a machine: isolate each part, understand it, reassemble. Applied to life, that reaches only the parts and yields a thin, derivative picture of the whole.
Put simply Bergson rejects "mechanism", which treats nature like a machine such as a bicycle: understand each part, then reassemble. Applied to life, it grasps only the parts and gives a thin, second-hand picture of the whole.
Intuition completes intellect rather than rejecting it, and consciousness needs both. Rely on mechanistic intellect alone, though, and you get an impoverished world drained of creativity.
Put simply Bergson: intuition completes the intellect rather than rejecting it, and the mind needs both. But rely on the machine-like intellect alone and you get a poorer world, drained of creativity.
What is funny is what lacks self-awareness: the aspect of someone that resembles a thing, rigid, mechanical, moving without life. Laughter is society's corrective, jolting that automatism loose.
Put simply Bergson on comedy: we laugh at the side of a person that acts like a thing, rigid and mechanical, unaware of itself. Laughter is society's way of correcting this, jolting people out of autopilot.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
SpencerSpencer's account of evolution: living things change biologically because they adapt directly to the pressures of their surroundings. L7 · 11:06
BergsonMechanism treats nature as a machine: isolate each part, understand it, reassemble. Applied to life, that reaches only the parts and yields a thin, derivative picture of the whole. L7 · 28:07
Spencer's evolutionism cuts present reality into pieces and recomposes it, presupposing what it claims to explain.
BergsonMechanism treats nature as a machine: isolate each part, understand it, reassemble. Applied to life, that reaches only the parts and yields a thin, derivative picture of the whole. L7 · 28:07
BergsonIntellect is built for inert matter. It measures, categorizes and breaks things into separable pieces from outside; at ease only with the discontinuous and dead, it cannot grasp life. L7 · 39:12
Intellect is the faculty whose analytic partition of matter yields mechanism; fine for machines, blind to life.
Terms that appear in the same claims.