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| Moment of decision |
October 18 was the birthday of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Born in 1859, Bergson presented his French doctoral thesis (two were required then, one in French, a second in either Latin or Greek) on “The Immediate Givens of Consciousness,” in English usually titled “Time and Free Will, to the examining faculty in 1889. The question he addressed was that of determination vs. free will: When we come to a fork in life’s road, are we free to choose which path to follow, or has our path forward been predetermined before we reach what looks like a point of decision? Bergson’s answer was that a "path" ahead in time does not exist. The fork does not exist. The future does not exist. We only create our path and our direction forward by going forward. Moreover, although we are definitely creatures of habit and perform countless habitual actions every day without thinking about them at all, we always have a measure of possible freedom, and when we act out of that freedom it is the expression of our whole life up to that moment.
Bergson died on January 3, 1941, of bronchitis. But it is what he did before he died that matters, not the manner of his death. Refusing the occupying Nazis’ offer of exemption from their race laws against Jews (inspired by American race laws against Blacks), just as he had already refused “honors” they wanted to bestow on him, Bergson stood in line to be given the yellow star indicating his heritage. He didn’t have to do it. He could have let himself be bought off. But he took a stand.
What good does it do for one person to make a stand? Wasn’t his a futile gesture? His wearing of the yellow star did not save anyone from the gas chambers, and he himself did not even live to see Paris liberated.
I say, he died a free man, a man of integrity – perhaps with a broken heart, but not with a broken spirit.
What kind of future do you hope to create? What legacy do you want to leave behind?
2 comments:
A lot of people now days are not aware of the horrors of WW2 - over 60 million deaths, the holocaust etc. The Jewish people have the 'Righteous Among the Nations' for those that saved those of the yellow star. Little Denmark was the most successful, saving over 90% by hiding and shipping them on little boats over to Sweden. Denmark was not cited because the citizens there didn't think they did anything anyone else would do. Hatred unfortunately exists, but it surely has no place in
government or politics...certainly in the United States.
Sadly, the more I read of our nation's history, the more I realize that the United States was born divided. Currently I am reading a book published in the 1830s by an Englishman who spent three years living and traveling in America. I'll probably be writing about that book soon on my main blog, Books in Northport, so for now I'll only say that much of it makes depressing reading -- not that we don't know already about enslaved Africans and broken treaties with indigenous Americans, but "seeing" it through the eyes of a stranger in our land, at the time, makes it much more vivid than a textbook account.
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