ABSTRACT
Bergson’s idea of philosophy is, rather classically, one that views it as universal and tends to negate the influence of context. In this chapter, I argue on the contrary that his 1932 work on ethics, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, is deeply shaped by his experience of the First World War. Though Bergson never explicitly centres the conversation on the topic, it is arguably the origin of all conceptual creation in this work. The First World War, or other situations of conflict and violence, are constantly surfacing through examples in the discussions about “closedness”, “openness” and “virtual instinct” or “mythmaking function”. It is a continuous but also a virtual, mostly implicit presence – in that sense it is comparable to a phantom haunting the philosopher’s writings. Bergson himself uses the image of a phantom in an uncanny passage in which he describes how he experienced an instinctive superstitious reaction when first confronted with the outbreak of the war, personifying the event into a ghost hiding in his room. To speak of war as a “phantom” therefore also serves to evoke a shift outside of rationality towards the realm of ‘fabulation’ (mythmaking) that occurs in situations of trauma.
