Grace and the comic: the "two senses of life" in Bergsonian Aesthetics

Abstract

Although Bergson is not known as a thinker who devoted a significant part of his work to aesthetics, much has been said about the proximity of his philosophical reflection to art and about the expressive force of his prose (which gained him a Nobel Prize in literature). This ambiguity is perfectly in keeping with Bergson’s thought, which was fundamentally characterized by duality, an ambivalence that Frédéric Worms calls "two senses of life". This article presents an interpretation of two aesthetic categories ”“ grace, a quality of movement in artistic form, and the comic, this petit problème philosophique that is also related to art ”“ as manifestations on the aesthetic level of the "two senses of life" discriminated by Worms in Bergson’s philosophy as a whole. It is argued that the distinction between the pragmatic and metaphysical senses of life also has repercussions on the aesthetic plane, and that the experiences of comic and graceful forms represent this ambivalence in the field of art, each expressing one of the two tendencies toward which life is moving.