REALITY AND KNOWLEDGE IN HENRI BERGSON

In opposition to positivist-psychologist reductionism, which reduces the human being to just one more element within the material world, subject to natural laws, Bergson defends a conception of reality as a plurality of impulses and tendencies. A reality in which the human being is understood as creative freedom, with duration and giving duration to all other things, as a spiritual reality from which may be extracted much more than it contains. Additionally, this creative freedom which is the human being, and which allows the individual to participate in all other things, does not arise by chance as mechanists contend, nor as a mere adaptation to the environment as Darwinists believe, but possesses the ultimate meaning that the individual constantly improves reality and the self, giving being to what was not.