ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to consider the sociobiological themes that underpin Bergson’s Laughter (1900) in order to bring them into dialogue with those found in his last great book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). In the former, Bergson argues that laughter is both a living thing and a social thing, and in the latter, he shows that social cohesion has a biological ground. But where Laughter shows how easily social cohesion is reinforced, Two Sources shows the difficulty of breaching social norms to achieve broad societal transformation. The chapter shows for both texts the capacity to transform ourselves is not only a key feature of Bergson’s sociobiology, but also what distinguishes simply living from living well.
