Henri Bergson

One of the most well-known philosophical work on the phenomenon of laughter belongs to Henri Bergson, the author of Laughter written in 1900. There Bergson examines laughter as a social activity caused by certain comic situations, which in their turn obtain particular patterns of mechanics or repetition. According to Bergson, laughter is an exclusively human phenomenon such that only human beings are able to laugh and also are the primary objects of laughter. In all other cases, nature or inanimate objects are laughable as long as they remind any human features (Bergson 11). Further, Bergson argues that laughter is also a social act, which can be performed in a group of people. This is an arguable statement, since following his logic as long as a person has an object to laugh at or a comic situation, he may not need other people for laughing. What I am interested in Bergson’s work is his view of laughter as a manifestation of indifference, meaning that a person should not feel neither sympathy nor hatred towards the object at the moment of laugh. This seems to be quite generalized approach towards laughter, which in The Idiot is not simply a thoughtless impulse, but a way to establish certain social borders. Furthermore, reversely laughter itself generates various types of emotional responses, that in case of Prince Myshkin vacillates between sympathy and disdain. Bergson also identifies automatism as significant contribution to laughter. Behaving automatically or in…

lifetime, as we grow older time passes by more and more quickly to the point that find that fond memories that feel as if they were yesterday were days, months , even years ago. Not only is the perception of time divergent for different people, it also evolves as we do, as our lives and situations change so does our view of time. It is based upon our awareness or consciousness. In French philosophy they use their senses to describe and explain how we perceive nature and the world around us.…

Bergson: Time, Memory and Modernism Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) was a French philosopher whose philosophy had a marked influence on later 19th century poetry and also on 20th century modernist thought. In my presentation, I will outline in brief Bergson’s key philosophical thoughts and how they influenced modernist literature. Bergson maintained that in animals, evolution caused a division between the instinct and the intellect. Although the two are not exclusive of…

replacing it with a model of an ever changing, evolving self, Bergson reviews our perception of epistemological processes and divides them into the perception of the outside features of an object and the perception of an object originating from within. Due to the practical rationality of everyday life we access the world, other people and our own selfhood from the outside and divide the world up mentally into static fragments that are easily comprehensible and stable. These fragments are…

The role of depth in inciting the other senses has been discussed, but what if there was no depth and the entire composition was as flat as it could be. Flatness relieves a painting of the sculptural effect, but does it only present a space inhabitable to man? As far as this assessment is accurate, Greenberg fails to factor in what type of space is represented in flatness. Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio is a very flat painting, with everything in two dimensions. This painting agrees with in the…

Henri Fayol was a French engineer and manager in a mine industry and formed the theory to create the base of business administration and business management that is used today. He was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1841. He joined an engineering school in Lyon which is the second largest city of France. By the age of 19, he graduated as a mine engineer in 1860. As a engineer he joined Rambourg and Co at Boigues. He was the first engineer who came up with the solution to various kinds of problem in…

Henri Fayol, born 29 July 1841 in Istanbul and deceased on the 19th of November 1925, was a French mining director and engineer, who analyzed and synthesized a theory of management called Fayolism. Fayol’s motivation was not financial, as he had developed his theory at the late age of 75, after a lifetime of collecting and recording observations, while pursuing his career as the manager of a successful metallurgy. The roots of his work may have sprouted from his private life, respectively…

driving the artist’s subjective emotional state. Rather than using idealized forms or classical codes, Fauvists believed that color had a spiritual quality that linked directly to the viewer’s emotional experience. This radical idea revealed that color could be used symbolically, breaking its previously established role as a descriptive element (MacTaggart, 2007). When asked to define Fauvism, Maurice de Vlaminck replied, “What is Fauvism? It is me; it was my style... my way of combined revolt…

To attract and keep the attention of the audience in a genre as stale and traditional as still life painting can be a difficult task, but many painters have risen to the challenge in the hundreds of years since its invention. These methods are numerous and involve the exploration of tensions such as those that exist between abstraction and representation, or moralizing versus hedonistic. Considered one of the lowest types of art by the French Academy, Still Life with a Bottle of Rum, Shoes, and…

Reflection on Matisse Henri Matisse was born in 1869, the year the Cutty Sark was launched. The year he died, 1954, the first hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll. Matisse lived through some of the most traumatic political events, worst wars, greatest slaughters, and the most demented rivalries of ideology. Yet, this did not affect his artwork. He never express his political opinion or experiences living throughout the horror of the 20th century, instead his painting were “the equivalent of…