Bergson

Time and perception are two major concerns of Woolf in many of her novels and short stories. Woolf as a modernist writer often tries in her fiction to find an epistemological solution to the problems of mortality and immortality, appearance and reality and diversity and unity and she succeeds, I think, by taking on a kind of perception that is intuitive and temporal. For her, true perception is time-bound, but like Bergson she divides time into mechanical and organic one. In her writing, she often associates symbolically the former with death and aridity and the latter with life and fertility, presenting them in the images, to name but a few of keyboard of a piano or alphabetical letters and tree or green shawl and dress, respectively. Evidently, in her views and the solution, she finds to the problems of time and perception Woolf is influenced by Bergson whose theory of time has also influenced so many other modernists. This paper elaborates on the relationship between time and perception in the works of Woolf, especially in her two major novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs Dalloway (1924) and her short story “An Unwritten Novel” (1921).

When studying Henri Bergson's works, one can understand that as he proceeds from theoretical philosophy to applied philosophy, he criticizes deterministic view in favor of freedom and establishes foundations of this attitude. He is of the view that by obtaining true knowledge, we would achieve practical purposes including dynamic religion, open society and, more importantly, freedom. Bergson establishes his epistemological and metaphysical foundations in a way that he provides an appropriate base for the realization of freedom in open society. This study attempts to interpret Bergson's idea about freedom in light of his dualistic system, and by referring to the place of freedom within the dualistic system, it also attempts to explain Bergson's conception of freedom and show how and why freedom would be realized. Furthermore, this paper seeks to show that freedom would be realized by disregarding the wrong parts of Bergson's dualism in relation to dynamic religion, with the help of intuitive knowledge which takes duration into account and in an open society, while closed society, static religion and the epistemological attitude which rely on intelligence and have a spatial approach to time would hinder the occurrence of freedom. Thus the cognitive basis of conceiving free will is considered in the light of a dualistic approach in which the positive side (life) realizes the freedom, while the negative side (matter) causes determinism.

SUBJECT AND OBJECTIVES : The present study has been conducted with the aim of getting to know the most important application of self-knowledge from the perspective of Allameh Tabatabai and Henri Bergson with a comparative view. METHOD AND FINDING : The results of this research, which was carried out with a descriptive-analytical, comparative and inferential method, show that Allameh Tabatabai and Henri Bergson, prominent philosophers of the East and the West, by providing a solution to one of the most important challenges of modern man, propose a new and deep look for man to return to himself. In the first step, this research has addressed two areas of thinking in the knowledge of the self and, in the most general look at the components of the incorporeality of the self, the relationship between the soul and the body, the change in the self and the soul as the main agent of perception in the opinions and thoughts of Allameh Tabatabai and Bergson with a comparative view. The data collection tool was MAXQDA software, which was used to increase the accuracy of data coding and categorization. CONCLUSION : According to the obtained results, Allameh Tabatabai considered the knowledge of God to be the most important result and the final goal of self-knowledge, and Bergson, looking intuitively at the soul and from another angle, introduced creative evolution as the best result of this knowledge.