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Bergson’s position can be extremely helpful in adjudicating this philosophical debate. A Bergsonian understanding is, in many ways, aligned with critical realism, especially in its insistence that our knowledge needs to be rooted in the real. (Hence Bergson’s concerted and ongoing attempt to base his philosophical claims on a profound examination of the nature of human consciousness, as well as on an insightful and detailed understanding of the hidden structure of material reality.) Nonetheless, Bergson’s work is a very odd sort of foundationalism in that it is a foundationalism of ceaseless change. This is not a foundationalism that affirms static Oneness (whether divine or not), rock-solid particles, changeless laws of nature, or any substantive Ego. Bergsonism is, in certain respects, an antifoundational foundationalism, a philosophy that affirms that what is true is that truth itself is always changing, a philosophy that affirms continual multiplicity and diversity, a philosophy that celebrates human freedom and creativity, both in ourselves and in others.11 Bergson’s foundationalism is in many ways so deeply antifoundational that it no longer makes sense to call it foundationalism. For Bergson, the Same is never present, neither in our own consciousness nor in the world around us; he posits that every moment is a manifestation of the ceaseless play of difference. In addition, Bergson argues that philosophy itself must not only be continually on the alert for systemic distortions in the perspectives of others, but must also attempt to notice how its own outlook needs continual, self-reflexive reexamination and revision. Nonetheless, Bergsonism is not an affirmation of anarchy and chaos. As human beings, the flux of difference within our conscious experience takes place within an equally evident continuity; that is, the multiplicity and manyness within us emerges within the ongoing unity of memory. In a similar way, the spontaneity of our creative freedom emerges not only out of the deeply embedded patterns of culture that remain active in the hidden layers of our unconscious memory (more on this in section 2), but also out of the equally insistent patterning found in the natural structures of our physicality (a physicality that, itself, emerges organically out of the interpenetrating fields that make up the physical matrix of the cosmos). Furthermore, Bergson’s insistence that reality is not split up into static, disconnected parts, but rather is a resonant, pulsating, overlapping, ever-new “song” gives us good reasons to cherish difference and otherness in the world around us; but at the same time, it also shows us why it makes sense to value the underlying empathetic connection we feel with these other human beings. Bergson ’s melodic metaphor can also provide a coherent worldview that supports the notion that perhaps our lives would be more rewarding and joyful if we could only learn how to “tune in” to and harmonize with the continually shifting fields or “notes” that are “sounding” in and through and from the variety of beings/ entities that make up the world around us. MELODIES OF THE SELF AND THE WORLD 99 In addition to the ways in which Bergson’s perspective can help us find some middle ground in the ongoing philosophical debate between the foundationalist /antifoundationalist perspectives, Bergson’s discussion of our human tendency to fear and resist change and our natural inclination to split the world up into fractured, isolated parts that we attempt to manage and control can also give us some much-needed insight into some of the central, albeit hidden, causes of our most troubling social and psychological problems. For instance (to give only some of the more egregious examples), various forms of religious fanaticism and our troubling historical attraction to totalitarian modes of government clearly have a strong connection to our desire to keep our world the same, to our need to have problematically black and white answers to moral dilemmas, to our intolerance for murky ambiguities, to our yearning for a world in which everything has its systematic, rigidly ordered proper place. Similarly, on a more prosaic level, surely it is not accidental that so many of us work in hermetically sealed offices filled with tidy cubicles, that we design schools with desks bolted to the floor in straight rows, and that we build subdivisions of cookie-cutter houses, carefully separated and isolated from each other by high hedges and manicured lawns. Arguably, all of this behavior (among many more possible examples) is at least in part a sociological/psychological reflection of a visceral, almost...

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