6 - Aporetic Philosophy

Summary

The view of philosophy as a practice of being worried by problems or difficulties (by an aporia or bewilderment), and trying to resolve or dissolve them (through thought, discussion, writing or other practice), is ancient and widespread. Although Bergson's work is not overtly aporetic in style or character, he is sensible to any philosophy which constitutes itself as a set of problems, and, as we have seen, has a diagnosis of how such problems sometimes arise. It is a peculiarity of this book to draw out from Bergson's writings, in the spirit of this diagnosis, some approaches to such problems, even when he does not himself address them, or offer solutions to them, or dissolutions of them.

While I recognise that there is some artificiality in this, in the sense that I thereby give a certain privilege to problems which Bergson did not consider real, there are nonetheless two good reasons for this approach. First, Bergson himself often took up and responded to problems arising outside his own central areas of work. And secondly, there is a value in showing how problems which seem deep from one philosophical perspective disappear, or become trivial from another.

In what follows, I shall try to develop further the results so far obtained from our reading and reconstruction of aspects of Bergson's work by applying them further to the problems of the weakness of the will, Buridan's Ass, and the Sorites problem for vague observational predicates.