IS HENRY BERGON’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION TRULY EUROCENTRIC?

Aurélien Gallèpe

In this article, we propose to examine the ambivalence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of religion in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932): on the one hand, his thought seems to be influenced by his European historical roots; on the other hand, Bergson’s invention of the concept of the “myth-making function” (fonction fabulatrice) in Chapter II leads us to believe that Bergson wanted to propose a global concept to describe a certain universal religious attitude. This concept would allow humanity to go beyond the European point of view and even to criticize Europe’s claim to a monopoly on rationality (and thus also criticize Europe’s political hegemonic ambitions). Finally, the introduction of this new concept would have one last hidden function: to allow Bergson to self-criticize his own positions during the 1914-1918 war, as if the Bergson of 1932 wanted to emphasize how much the Bergson of 1914 had himself been a victim of the human tendency to fabulate. Consequently, Bergson would offer humanity an anticolonial intellectual tool, a tool that he himself put into practice in The Two Sources to criticize, in veiled terms, his own past political mistakes.