The Research On H.Bergson’s Thought Of Free Will

As one of the far-reaching French philosopher at the end of the19th century and the beginning of20th century, Bergson is the representative figure in the philosophy of life in the western world. Starting from the nature of life, he points out the drawbacks in our lives such as to the personal expression ours with words and the things learning with rationality, which, according to him, is influenced by the spatialization of time. To reach a better distinguish between the duration and extensity, between quality and quantity, between succession and simultaneity, Bergson carries out researches by selecting the common issues between metaphysics and psychology, that is, the free will.With the employment of the intuition method, Bergson carries out thorough discussions on the contents of duration, aiming to solve the issue of freedom, the disputable issue in philosophy. His theory of free will is actually originated from the criticism against physics determinism and psychology determinism, therefore deducting the possibility for the existence of free will in the philosophical theories. In the evolution of life, he finds another driving force-Elan Vital, which presents the ideology that freedom creates ideology in the evolution process. In the late years of Bergson, his thoughts returned to the reflections over the human morality and the society. As having found some drawbacks for the emergence of scientism in the western world and the numbers of contradictions in the social development as the unharmonious condition between the materials and the spirits, Bergson starts to engage himself in finding a new metaphysics. His thoughts, however, are off the track of social reality and there are certain limitations underlying in his thoughts as the idealism and irrationalism, therefore there are some unconquerable issues in his philosophical system.Free will throughout the course of Bergson’s thought. Behind each concept in his thoughts, we can find the shadow of free will. For a long time, in the process of the study of Bergson’s philosophy, people always put the focal point to the concept stretching, intuition, etc, but ignore the meaning of free will. Therefore, carrying out systematic researches on the history of thought of "free will" in Bergson’s philosophy and carrying out simple analysis on it is particularly important. From "free will", a new point of view to conduct a comprehensive study, can help us further study Bergson’s philosophy, and highlight the significance of Bergson in the alternate process of the modern western philosophy.