BERGSON AND PERU

Eduardo Yalàn Dongo

This article examines the reception and transformation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy in early 20th-century Peru, arguing that its assimilation generated an original current of thought we term materialist spiritualism. Beginning with Alejandro Deustua’s spiritualist introduction of Bergson, disseminated through Francisco García Calderón and consolidated in Mariano Ibérico’s La filosofía de Enrique Bergson (1916), Bergsonism provided a framework to articulate freedom, creation, and value as central categories for cultural and educational renewal. We explore how Ibérico radicalized Bergson’s ideas by integrating a tragic and mystical aesthetic, while Antenor Orrego reinterpreted the moi profond as a continental and telluric force, connecting subjectivity with geography and history. José Carlos Mariátegui further socialized this deep self, translating it into collective praxis and revolutionary myth, thus spiritualizing Marxism without abandoning materialist foundations. In contrast, Pedro Zulen’s critical engagement with Bergson exposed epistemological contradictions in intuitionism, pushing Peruvian philosophy toward pragmatism and social concern. Rather than a mere imitation of European thought, these appropriations reveal a creative doubling of Bergsonism — an iconogenetic process in which intuition becomes a method of social and aesthetic illumination. This study concludes that revisiting Bergsonian resonances in Peru allows us to understand how early 20th-century thinkers sought to reconcile matter and spirit, forging a philosophy that was at once mystical, aesthetic, and politically transformative, offering a relevant horizon for rethinking contemporary Peruvian thought.