Obligation, emotion and reason: the complex unity of Bergson's moral

a unidade complexa da moral de Bergson

Abstract

It was only in her last major work, The Two Sources of Morals and Religion, that Bergson dealt with morals herself. Even so, he did not treat it separately, as the title of the work already indicates: only the first chapter, “The moral obligation”, is explicitly dedicated to him. Furthermore, in that same chapter, it is a question for Bergson of relating "morality" to "sources" that are external to him and which are both related to "life". The simultaneously late and partial place of morality in Bergson's work, therefore, leads us to the question of its autonomy in its own philosophy: between biological “sources” that seem to found it and a “religion” that seems to realize it, does the moral that its readers could expect since its first book, Essay on the immediate data of conscience, whose third chapter was dedicated to freedom, have a real unity of meaning? Is there, properly speaking, a Bergson "moral philosophy"?