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It is curious that a philosopher who one phenomenologist, Sartre, admits "bowled' him over and who another, Merleau-Ponty, acknowledges "bowled over philosophy' would receive such scant attention from phenomenology — both in its emergence as the dominant discourse in continental philosophy and its persistence as such today.¹ Despite Bergson's immense popularity at the turn of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Péguy suggested as early as 1913 that his thought, or the fashionableness of it, was already in the process of dying. That is, it was clear that Bergson would leave behind no Bergsonian school; Bergson was dead, and European intellectuals had killed him, with a cultural Vice grip' of sorts. Indeed, even "the enemies of [Bergson's] enemies were ranged against him': Radical thinkers found Bergson's "spiritualist' notion of freedom unsatisfying, while the Catholic Church indexed Bergson's writings in 1913 charging that his notion of the élan vital allegedly mixed human consciousness with revelation and privileged prideful, self-determining virtue over humility and grace.² Then began the period of the world wars, which for European intellectuals brought home the tragic dimension of human existence to which Bergson's "optimistic' thought could not present a plausible response. ³

DOI: 10.1057/9780230282995_1

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