The text below was a baccalauréat subject. There was no need to know Bergson’s doctrine, but it could help you to understand this text.
Text to comment
What is a true judgment ? We call true the assertion which agrees with reality. But in what can this concordance consist ? We like to see in it something like the resemblance of the portrait to the model : the true assertion would be the one which would copy the
reality. But let’s think about it: we will see that it is only in rare, exceptional cases that this definition of the real finds its application. What is real is such and such a determined fact taking place in such and such a point of space and time, it is singular, it is changing. On the contrary, most of our
affirmations are general and imply a certain stability of their object. Let us take a truth as close as possible to experience,
this one for example: “heat dilates bodies”. What could it be a copy of? It is possible, in a certain sense, to copy the dilation of a given body at given times, by photographing it in its various phases. Even, by metaphor, I can still say that the statement “this iron bar expands” is the copy of what happens when I witness the expansion of the iron bar. But a truth that applies to all bodies, without specially concerning any of those I have seen, copies nothing, reproduces nothing.
BERGSON, Thought and Motion, 1934
Correction of the extract of Henri Bergson
This text is about truth. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) wrote a lot about truth and duration.
For Bergson, we make assertions that are considered “stable” while reality never stops changing, in other words reality is unstable.
We think of truth as a correspondence between the assertion and reality.
But as we have just seen, reality does not have the stability that we attribute to it. Our assertions therefore rarely correspond to reality.
→ All the other answers and topics for the bac philo 2013
→ 1st subject of S de philo au bac 2013 corrected: Can we act morally
without being interested in politics?
→ 2nd subject of S in bac philo corrected: Does work allow for self-awareness?
