ABSTRACT
In a 1914 lecture, Bergson declared: “The problem of personality may be regarded as the central problem of philosophy.” Although he had often deployed personality as an example to illustrate his thoughts on freedom, durée, the union of the soul and the body, and the nature of life and becoming, between 1910 and 1919 he framed his emerging theory of personality as metaphysics itself. In this chapter, I first explore Bergson’s early privileging of the image of personality through his identification of durée with the experience of being someone, understood as a lived qualitative continuity of change. For Bergson, personality becomes a metaphysical entity to be described and not an epistemological problem to be solved. Turning to his later theory of personality, I argue that a paradoxical logic of expression provides the foundation for his “personal” metaphysics, a metaphysics that is neither relativism nor subjectivism. As such, Bergson’s theory of personality offers a new philosophy of mind or Spirit (in neither the analytic nor the Hegelian sense of the terms). I conclude by showing how this “personal” metaphysics prepares the ground for an ethics of virtuous practice.
