ANDRÉ LUIZ AVELINO

The first two canonical works by Henri Bergson (1859-1941) are articulated, namely Essai Sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience (1889) and Matière et Mémoire - Essai sur la relation du corps à l'esprit (1896), from two of his lectures, Le Cerveau et la Pensée (1904) and L'âme et le Corps (1912), since the first of the two conferences should be taken as “a starting point for a theory of the spirit considered in its relations with the determinism of nature ”and the second mentioned conference expresses Bergson's choice to philosophize according to the “possibility and even the probability of survival ”of the spirit to the end. L'âme et le Corps, in its literality, presents itself as revealing the Bergsonian project of a spiritualism, proper, philosophical, which, in our reading, finds its foundations in the three other texts mentioned. With this, we understand that the understanding of this project allows us to understand, in turn, Bergson's position that the distinction between body and spirit must be determined no longer in terms of space, as established by traditional dualism, but, yes, in function of time, being, therefore, a dualism that greatly diminishes, if not completely suppresses, “the theoretical difficulties that dualism has always caused and that, suggested by the immediate conscience, adopted by common sense, it is little esteemed among the philosophers”, that is, dealing with a necessary and not problematic dualism, since it is not substantialist.