Human works and natural requirements: the significance of man inside nature in Gabriel Tarde and Henri Bergson

Abstract

This work aims to be an analysis of the affinities that presents Gabriel Tarde's and Henri Bergson's philosophies of nature when it's about to think the men's meaning, place and role among the works of nature. We will take as thread guide a double shared postulate. Firstly the admission that a nature who is creative fulfills on the act of creation well-defined requirements. At the entire nature we will find in operation a creation effort who is the source of every one of their products, from matter to man. Secondly the verification that these products prolong the requirements in which they find their purpose or reason of existence with more or less success. Once discriminated the series of beings who emerges from that great creation enterprise, Tarde and Bergson will locate the man on her extremity. This man will be described at the same time as one of its products, tied to all that presides his dawn, and as an exceptional one, the product in which will be possible to nature to find a solution to their primordial creation's requirements in an exceptional successful way. But this man emerged from the general movement of nature, prolonging pre-anthropological requirements, will not be made, only by the exercise of his freedom, sociability and inventiveness, an immediately absolute success. Will be required the action of exceptional individuals who, dragging humanity by their example, will solve the contradictions that nature's inventive genius just skirted relatively. These will be the mystics, that we will find at the Tarde's and Bergson's works accomplishing an analogue role. But we will take care to demonstrate that these affinities do not allow us to affirm a full parallelism between the tardian's and bergsonian's developments. For Tarde the effort that we found throughout the nature is an effort of progressive harmonization, he seek put in unison one pulsive multiplicity that makes background to what is regular in the universe. For Bergson it's about an effort to introduce indetermination in the universe of necessity, work done by the living world's evolution that creates organisms whose actions will fight against the inertia of matter. For the first the nature appear as a great composition plan in which matter, life and man figures as stages in a process that leads to progressively comprehensive harmonies. For the second a cosmology that deals with the integration between the cosmos strata is inseparable from a philosophy of life and even from a biological transfomism sui generis. Instead of well-delimited stages, Bergson presents life and matter as tendencies that contradict yourselves, from whose clash results the whole organized world and, inside your limits, the mankind as one of the solutions that life found when she has converted the matter, obstacle at first, in instrument. (AU)