KnowledgeInSight
Phenomenology for Consciousness Studies
0% of Course 2 complete

Course 2 · Module 2

Before Merleau-Ponty: Bergson to Beauvoir

Meet the thinkers who shaped French phenomenology in the first half of the 20th century: Henri Bergson on lived time, the Gestalt psychologists and Kurt Goldstein on perception and the organism, Jean-Paul Sartre on consciousness and the body, and Simone de Beauvoir on the body as situation. You'll learn how each challenged the idea that experience is built from isolated sensations or moments, and you'll compare competing accounts of how we live our bodies among others. These ideas still inform research on temporal experience, perceptual organization, neuropsychology, and embodiment.

Module objectives

  • Explain Bergson's concept of duration and his critique of spatialized time
  • Describe how Gestalt psychology and Gelb and Goldstein's clinical studies challenged atomistic accounts of perception
  • Compare Sartre's account of consciousness and the body with Beauvoir's account of the body as situation

3 lessons · 28 items · 3h 39m

Lessons

  1. Lesson 1 Bergson to Beauvoir: Bergson's Duration This lesson introduces Henri Bergson's distinction between clock time, which lays moments side by side like points in space, and duration (durée), the lived flow in which moments… 61111h 3m
  2. Lesson 2 Bergson to Beauvoir: Gestalt and the Organism This lesson covers two early 20th-century challenges to the idea that perception is assembled from atomic sensations. One is Gestalt psychology's evidence that wholes come before… 61111h 3m
  3. Lesson 3 Bergson to Beauvoir: Sartre and Beauvoir on the Body This lesson compares Jean-Paul Sartre's and Simone de Beauvoir's accounts of consciousness and the lived body. Sartre offers a self-less consciousness, the look of the other, and… 611111h 33m

Further reading

These are the primary texts behind the ideas in this module. Reading them is optional: explore the ones that match your interests. You don't need them to complete the module, which explains their key ideas. Each entry gives the recommended edition, free options where they exist, and where to buy or borrow it.

  • Beauvoir, Simone de. (1949) 2010. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  • Bergson, Henri. (1889) 1913. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen.
    • Module focus: Chapter 2, "The Multiplicity of Conscious States: The Idea of Duration"
    • Free: Project Gutenberg 056852 (public domain; ch. 2 is "The Multiplicity of Conscious States: The Idea of Duration")
  • Bergson, Henri. (1896) 1911. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: Swan Sonnenschein.
  • Goldstein, Kurt. (1934) 1995. The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man. Foreword by Oliver Sacks. New York: Zone Books.
  • Köhler, Wolfgang. 1929. Gestalt Psychology. New York: Horace Liveright.
  • Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1936) 2004. The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description. Translated by Andrew Brown. London: Routledge.
  • Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1943) 2018. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Sarah Richmond. London: Routledge.
  • Wertheimer, Max. (1923) 1938. "Laws of Organization in Perceptual Forms." Translated by Willis D. Ellis. In A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, edited by Willis D. Ellis, 71–88. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.