ABSTRACT
Artists as great souls gain knowledge by intuition of what Bergson calls “real time.” This chapter considers queries which arose in reading Bergson. The crucial feature of Le Doeuff’s reading of Beauvoir’s moral reticence is the decisive rejection of the category of the Other as an essential feature of human relations. For Bergson, freedom expresses integral experience. Free acts both express the reader and transform a life, gathering together the whole –integral life – of the universe within pure duration. A Bergsonian kind of mystical intuition runs through French thought: it exists in the soul of an artist, mystic or creator who acts, inspired by a generative love. However obscure Bergson’s own writings on mysticism appear to contemporary philosophers,are vitali-zation of confidence in a creative process motivates the feminist, open and dynamic project of friendship–love for, and within the lives of, women and men.
