Bergson's philosophy of art

The chapter presents Bergson’s philosophy of art in the double sense of philosophizing with and about art and an artistic philosophy. It argues that Bergson’s philosophical commitment to creation and novelty, which not only influences but shapes his metaphysics, led him to an indefensible voluntarist conception of artistic creation that prevented him from writing a book of aesthetics. The argument proceeds in three steps - an investigation of the tension between a notion of truth in art, of revelation, and a notion of artistic creation; a discussion of how Bergson puts the idea of genius as the principle of art production to work within his metaphysics as a whole; and a study of canon formation as a form of retroaction - to demonstrate that, in the end, art for Bergson may well be more a solution than a problem in its own right, more an answer than a question.