Il problema estetico in Henri Bergson: la critica di Raymond Bayer alla teoria della percezione pura

In 1941, namely the year of Henri Bergson’s death, Raymond Bayer publishes in Revue philosophique an inflammatory article on Bergson’s philosophy, wondering whether the French philosopher had ever delivered an actual aesthetic theory. Although it is well known that Bergson recurred, along his entire corpus, to several examples borrowed from art, and based his metaphysical assumptions on the psychological act of intuition, he never wrote a treatise on aesthetics, nor he dealt minutely with the problem of beauty. As shown by Bayer, this characteristic of Bergson’s philosophy raises several doubts: being his metaphysics essentially anchored on the concept of pure perception, and being this very perception a form of knowledge that primarily belongs to the artist, Bergson should have elaborated an aesthetic theory. Now the problem is to understand why he did not do that.