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If we want to understand the present significance of Bergson's thought one century after his birth and nearly two decades after his death, we have not only to restate the central ideas of his philosophy, but also to sketch briefly the main phases of his philosophical development. His first book appeared in 1889, and both its original French title — Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience — and the title of its English translation, ">Time and Free-Will, clearly indicate the problems which he faced at that time. Since then the three problems — that of theoretical self-knowledge, that of time, and that of freedom — remained closely related in his thought; in truth they were merely three aspects of one and the same problem. In the three successive chapters of his first book Bergson applied to the problem of self-perception or introspection the method which he himself characterized as "inverted Kantianism". While Kant, and the classical epistemology in general, tried to answer the question to what extent are the subjective elements present in our perception of the external world, Bergson raised a similar question concerning our introspection: Is not our self-perception colored by imaginative elements borrowed from the sensory perception in a similar way as our sensory perception is colored by "psychic additions"?

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-2123-8_5

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