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Dans cet article, les débats du début du XXe siècle sur le bergsonisme en Finlande sont examinés avec une attention particulière pour les formes sélectives d'appropriation qui accompagnent les transferts d'idées à travers les frontières géographiques et linguistiques. Les appropriations savantes et sociales sont examinées dans le but d'explorer ce que la rencontre entre Bergson et la vie culturelle finlandaise peut nous apprendre sur la circulation internationale des idées. Cette étude met en évidence les dynamiques allant du centre à la périphérie de la vie intellectuelle européenne et les transferts philosophiques impliquant plusieurs parties. En Finlande, Bergson a été filtré à travers le prisme d'une culture académique traditionnellement orientée vers l'Allemagne et en partie médiatisé par des célébrités et des milieux régionaux tels que la ville de Copenhague, point de relais important dans le trafic d'idées vers et depuis la Scandinavie.

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1The contributions to this volume originate in a colloquium, which took place in Helsinki at the end of 2021. While this meeting did not focus on the Northern European reception of Bergson, but rather on the growing interest in his oeuvre in contemporary scholarship on philosophy, art, history and politics, the location nevertheless warrants a brief comment on Bergsonism in Finland. In what follows, the debates on Bergson during the philosopher’s own lifetime – when Finland transitioned from a Western borderland of the Russian empire to a republic in 1917/1918 – will be considered with particular regard to the selective forms of appropriation that accompany the travel of ideas and cultural products across geographical and linguistic frontiers. We will discuss both scholarly and social appropriations, with a view to exploring what the encounter between Bergson and Finnish cultural life can tell us about the international circulation of ideas in early 20th-century Europe.

2Generally speaking, Bergsonism belonged to a philosophical interlude in Finland in the 1910s and 1920s, between the dominance of 19th-century German philosophical systems, closely tied to the moral and religious aspects of national romanticism, and the subsequent pre- and post-Second world war gravitation towards Anglo-American philosophy. To be sure, Bergson did not leave a huge mark on Finnish philosophy, in terms of followers or books devoted to his work. But the reactions and sometimes heated responses to his ideas raise questions about the logic of philosophical transfers in this period. Intellectual historians, philosophers and literary scholars have long debated the mechanisms of such transfers and the nature of the trans- or international space in which they occur. Where some think of this space as a republic of letters floating above the tumultuous everyday struggles between material and political interests, others are reluctant to separate the sphere of ideas and philosophical debate from the uneven geometries of power in international interaction. Yet another line of reasoning, inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, proceeds from the assumption that this is a false dichotomy (e.g., Bourdieu 1985; 1992; Sapiro et al. 2018). Intellectual activity, Bourdieu argues, should be analysed in a dual relation: on the one hand to the larger social cosmos in which it is embedded, and on the other to the social microcosm constituted, in this case, by the scholarly universe. Asymmetries of power do matter in this universe – a relatively autonomous world endowed with its own rules and norms – but in a field-specific way. Importantly, they are only partially overlapping with political and economic hierarchies (Bourdieu 1992; Casanova 1999).

Centres and peripheries

3These multi-layered power geometries can get rather complex even when examined in the context of a single national space, let alone when the analysis is extended to include the interaction between several regional or linguistic intellectual fields. Applied to the topic of Bergson in Finland as a specific case of French-Nordic philosophical transfers, we can begin by drawing attention to some of the most apparent geopolitics of intellectual life. In the period of nationalism and imperial rivalry at the turn of the 20th century, power in the cultural sphere was about whose local concerns had the potential to be diffused and taken up by others beyond the boundaries of a given intellectual space, and conversely about who could afford to ignore whom. When the work of a philosopher such as Bergson acquired the status that it did in Paris around 1900 and began to spread beyond the borders of France, the centralising logic was enforced by philosophers and intellectuals across the world, taking up Bergsonian ideas and treating them as if they were universally applicable. Part of the younger pre-war generation of European intellectuals, in Finland as elsewhere, saw Bergson as the leader of a global orientation towards a third way between naturalism and idealism.

4But of course, this is not the whole picture. Two additional variables must be added to the equation. On the one hand, ideas are refracted through prevailing interests and norms in the recipient context. International circulation is key to universalisation, but every intellectual import is also selective, meaning that only those elements are picked up, or prioritised, which are “useful” or “make sense” for the recipients and their philosophical projects. Conversely, they can be contested or rejected by local rivals who challenge their significance or merit. The second variable to be considered in assessing the traffic of ideas between centres and peripheries – which, notwithstanding the schematic and insensitive aspects of this dichotomy, surely applies to the relationship between Helsinki and Paris – is the following: if centres are the drivers of universalisation, peripheries are not only imitators but also combiners. This gives them at least a potential advantage, insofar as innovation often relies upon the unexpected combination of elements from a variety of sources. Incidentally, this idea was central to Bergson’s (eventually successful) rival for the chair in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Gabriel Tarde, for whom imitation was not a negative word: we all imitate, Tarde stressed, and novelty is often born out of imitation and combination (Tarde 1890). But if power in the intellectual realm is concentrated in places like fin-de-siècle Paris, the cultural capital of the world, then some are more inclined to export and others to import. The potential advantage of the weaker parties in this relationship is their curiosity and openness to a range of intellectual sources. Ideally, peripheral internationalism could provide a fruitful contrast to the provincialism of the metropoles, with a certain blindness to the world beyond them.

5The creative potential of non-dominant cultural spaces, then, lies in their comparative awareness of intellectual developments in the competing centres. If great power competition and rivalry to some extent constituted an obstacle to the traffic of ideas between cultural centres like Paris, Berlin and London, the centres were equally present in the intellectual life of an internationally curious small country periphery (Nygård and Strang 2016). Of course, this caricatured picture does not account for the degree to which French and German thought, as the most obvious example, after all mirror each other (Espagne 2004). But when one “great nation” borrows from another, there is a tendency to downplay or deny the import, whereas import may be more of a virtue in the periphery. This understanding was in any case characteristic of the self-understanding of some of the most influential Scandinavian intellectuals at the time, and it was most clearly articulated by the Danish and – in Nietzsche’s words – “great European” intellectual Georg Brandes (Nygård 2023). To be sure, Brandes may have had egoistic reasons for fashioning his own activity in this way, and for promoting Scandinavian culture as an intellectual crossroads at the intersection of French, German and English influences. But his programmatic view of the universalism of the periphery as an act of translating a plurality into one – as opposed to universalising local debates – does capture something of the way in which Scandinavian intellectuals navigated European intellectual space.

Durkheim contra Bergson in Helsinki

6The plurality that became known as Bergsonism in early 20th-century Finland took shape in the minds of Bergson’s Finnish adepts in and around the University of Helsinki. It received its specific local flavour against the backdrop of a German-oriented academic and intellectual culture (Klinge 1987), an environment where “French” and “German” more often than not functioned as markers of competing intellectual positions. The turn of the 20th century being the highpoint of Herderian nationalism in European small states, those who positioned themselves at a distance to national chauvinism in Finland tended to identify as French-oriented cosmopolitans. But in this context “French” connoted the naturalist ideals of the late 19th century, and the anti-nationalist Francophiles of this generation were predominantly hostile to Bergson, denouncing the philosophy of duration as modern mysticism. Conversely, Bergson’s most enthusiastic readers in Finland sought to reconcile his philosophy with German idealism, especially with the ideal of Bildung and its metaphysical underpinnings.

7Furthermore, we should not overlook the fact that the reception of Bergson in academic philosophy was determined by the politicisation of vitalism by some of his early popularisers in Finland, such as the philosopher of sport and journalist Artur Eklund (1880-1927). A reactionary modernist who embraced fascism before his early death in 1927, Eklund placed Bergson at the core of a struggle over conflicting worldviews among young intellectuals. He weaponised the philosophy of life as an argument combining the general pre-war appetite for action and heroic deeds with local debates between linguistic nationalisms, the “language question” between Finnish and Swedish being omnipresent in Finland at the time. With reference to Bergson, Eklund, in 1912, not only announced the end of “the tyranny of reason” and a return the “enigmatic richness of existence,” but even prescribed intuition as a means for the Swedish-speaking academic youth to discover their Germanic racial qualities (cited in Nygård 2011, 186, 206).

8Bergson was thus mobilised by conservative litterateurs such as Eklund in their defence of irrationalism, national chauvinism and organicist ideals of the nation, the cult of heroic individuals and the neo-romantic philosophies of will, all of which were part of the activist “ideas of 1914” (Verhey 2015). In France, anti-speculative Durkheimian sociology sought to distance itself from these litterateurs, but also from a traditional view of social studies as literature (Lepenies 1988). In remote Finland, the demands for specialisation were more relaxed. Rolf Lagerborg (1874-1954), Bergson’s most prominent Finnish critic, was both a writer and a scholar. Nevertheless, in the pervasive political and intellectual debates on nationalism, religion, and idealism, he mobilised the language of the sociological Enlightenment at Durkheim’s Sorbonne against conservative literary intellectuals in Finland, and specifically in favour of his campaign to make society, rather than religion, the ultimate source of morality (Jalava 2005, 334). A naturalist philosopher, psychologist and radical cosmopolitan critic of nationalism – and hence a controversial figure in Finland, increasingly so in the interwar period of right-wing nationalism – Lagerborg positioned himself at the forefront of an anti-Bergsonian campaign, personally transferring Durkheim’s stance to the Finnish debates. His orientation towards France dated to his youth, in particular to a minor academic scandal connected to his dissertation in moral philosophy in 1900. The dissertation was rejected at the University of Helsinki, where his constructivist view of morality came into conflict with the prevailing spirit of nationalist Christian idealism. Lagerborg decided to try his luck in Paris. Three years later, he successfully defended a French version of the thesis (on the essence of morality) at the Sorbonne. The jury was led by Durkheim. Not only did Lagerborg remain a Durkheimian throughout his life, but for him, the episode established a pattern of seeking support abroad for controversial positions at home. When the strategy worked, it was because small countries like Finland were, in the words of Lagerborg himself, superlatively wary of their external reputation (Lagerborg 1945, 382).

9In the intellectual debates in the capital Helsinki and its university, Lagerborg continued in the footsteps of his mentor, the sociologist (and Durkheim’s rival) Edvard Westermarck, defending empiricist psychology against Christian idealism and speculative philosophy. Both Lagerborg and Westermarck belonged to an influential anticlerical society called Prometheus, at a time when philosophical and cultural debate revolved around the opposition between the naturalist “scientific” philosophy that had its breakthrough in the 1880s and, at the other end of the spectrum, German idealism, which in turn was inseparable from nationalist positions in the cultural debates. These positions were enforced and modified during the time Lagerborg spent preparing the French version of his dissertation at the Nouvelle Sorbonne, with its esprit de géométrie in positivist opposition to the esprit de finesse of Collège de France where Bergson lectured.

10For his followers in Paris, Bergson came to embody everything the Sorbonne was lacking. For his adversaries, his elegant rhetoric served to conceal his philosophical imprecision: “as if philosophy were art,” Lagerborg wrote, playing the role of Durkheim in Finland against the Bergsonism of some of his younger colleagues, Hans Ruin (1891-1980) especially. Crucially, Lagerborg appears to have concluded (albeit not without esteem for Bergson’s eloquence) that every “intellectual influence” that in his local environment could serve as an argument for metaphysics, religious revival, the soul – and the soul of the nation – had to be rigorously rejected. He laid out his arguments in series of articles, notably a longer study in the Swedish journal of psychology Psyke on “The Metaphysical Intuition. A Study of the Mysticism of Bergsonism” (Lagerborg 1914).

  • 1 Föreningen Prometheus protokoll [Minutes of the Prometheus society] 12.2.1914, Åbo Akademi Universi (...)
  • 2 As reported by the daily newspaper Dagens Tidning (13.2.1914).

11In the Finnish encounter between idealist or spiritualist philosophy and classical pedagogical ideals on the one hand, scientific sociology and secularised morality on the other, Lagerborg became a spokesperson for a Finnish “parti intellectuel” condemning Bergson as a symptom of modern mysticism and subjectivism. Pulling no punches, he denounced the new philosophy of life as an irrationalist disease that should be rinsed out with “Kant and cold water.”1 Bergsonian intuition, Lagerborg argued, offered no better shortcut to the truth than any previous iteration of mysticism. However, he predicted that Bergson one day would be awarded with the Nobel prize: “He is being pushed forward by a chauvinistic pack of French patriots, cheering for god and a three-year conscription, and the worthy academy that once awarded someone like Eucken will certainly accept him. Vitalis Norström, the philosopher is already his man, and the reactionary idealism will surely win over others for his cause.”2

12Lagerborg’s firm stance against Bergson was not least determined by the perceived potential of Bergsonism for boosting nationalism and religion in Finland, apparently confirmed by the fact that a declining trend among students in theology at the University of Helsinki was reversed in the 1910s as well as the increasing interest in religion and metaphysics in the student journals Ylioppilaslehti and Studentbladet (Tigerstedt 1939, 96, n.5). The young defenders of the new metaphysics were passionate about Bergson’s proposal to place “life” at the centre of philosophy. But life was a poor concept, Lagerborg (1914) argued, adding that Bergson knew it, and would in vain fight against a simplified interpretation of this notion. Furthermore, the social consequences of philosophical intuitionism were catastrophic: the Bergsonian quest for the absolute threatened to stall social progress by turning attention from what was immediately at hand and making do with the existing state of affairs, promising inner peace instead of unleashing combative energy.

13Where Lagerborg saw Bergsonism evolving into an updated version of earlier philosophies of the soul, thus interfering with his campaign against national romantic Christian idealism, Hans Ruin, himself also a scholar and Swedish-language essayist like Lagerborg, had a different understanding of the philosophical and social consequences of Bergsonism. An anti-naturalist philosopher and writer like his father Waldemar Ruin (1857-1938), rector of the University of Helsinki in 1915-1920, Hans Ruin recognised that while vulgar Bergsonism had indeed merged with national chauvinism, this was not a sufficient reason to denounce a philosophy that promised to rescue philosophy from naïve naturalism and positivistic reductionism, without renouncing scientific rigour, and according to Ruin in ways that were fully compatible with the German ideal of Bildung.

14Especially in the interwar years, after his dissertation in 1921 (a critical analysis of English empirical psychology), Ruin became a prolific essayist and philosopher and psychologist of art. The dissertation was preceded by a philosophical debut in the journal Nya Argus in 1914: a lengthy introduction to Bergson, portrayed as signalling “The renaissance of philosophy.” Ruin challenged Lagerborg’s way of presenting “the Bergsonian disease” to a Finnish audience without a serious discussion of the sources of Bergson’s success among the academic youth in France, “the very birthplace of positivism and rationalism.” Later, in Själens försvarsproblem (The defensive struggle of the soul, 1929) Ruin defends the soul against “the cold light of empirical psychology” and in Poesins mystik (The mysticism of poetry, 1935) he draws on the Bergsonian metaphor of symphonic music for describing the inner life of the individual as an indivisible whole that is completed only when the last note is struck. But he mobilises this insight as an argument for Bildung as the gradual unfolding of the inner potential of a unique individuality (Ruin 1935,186-188). Bergsonism thus became a means of modernising older idealistic philosophies of the soul, the main difference being that the soul was now something constantly changing rather than a stable entity that could be fixed – immobilised – by the intellect or a philosophical system (Nygård 2011, 142-143).

15This is one example of how Bergson’s concept of le moi profond was often read in Finland through the prism of German educational ideals centred on human perfectibility through inner growth (Ringer 1969, 98-99). We may be able to find later traces of this propensity in the logical empiricist Eino Kaila’s (1890-1958) writings in the 1940s on the “deep-spiritual life” (syvähenkinen elämä).

Adaptations, transfers, and relay points

16To the extent that Bergsonian ideas were burdened by socio-political connotations when they reached the pages of philosophical journals, Bergson was held up by critics as a warning of what the philosophy of intuition would inevitably lead to. For the naturalist philosophers who fashioned themselves as the defenders of scientific philosophy, Bergsonism had to be shown the door before it had even entered. For their part, Bergson’s Finnish followers sought to reconcile the philosophy of duration with different strands of German Lebensphilosophie. In the interwar era, Bergson greatly influenced contributions in philosophy by Erik Ahlman (1892-1952) and in pedagogy by J. A. Hollo (1885-1967). The latter was responsible for the only contemporary Finnish translation of Bergson (L’Énergie spirituelle translated as Henkinen tarmo in 1923). We should note that, at the time, academic readers of Bergson could rely on the original language versions or German translations, and especially on the Swedish contemporary translations and presentations of Bergson by Algot Ruhe (1867-1944): Le Rire in 1910, L’Évolution créatrice and Introduction à la métaphysique in 1911, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience in 1912, Matière et mémoire in 1913 and L’Énergie spirituelle in 1921.

17Like Ruhe in Sweden, Hollo was not only a translator but also an introducer of Bergson. In a series of articles on intuition in Western philosophy (Hollo 1915-1917) he situates Bergson in the contemporary era, when what Hollo depicts as a longstanding opposition between discursive and intuitive philosophy had come to a head. The promise of Bergsonism, he concludes, was to offer more secure knowledge of something that art can only hint at. For his own part, Hollo applied these insights to the discipline of pedagogy, in an anti-naturalistic study on imagination (Hollo 1918-1919). This meant, for instance, calling for an intuitive, sensible educator – “alive with his whole being” – to replace the older “machine-like schoolmaster-type.” The role of fantasy in education was to provide an escape from the habitual; organic personal growth through synthetic innovation in contrast to passive reception and analytic dissection. In a later pedagogical study, Hollo (1927) mobilises la durée to dismiss the schematic ordering of human lives into distinct phases, especially the separation of the early educational period from the uninterrupted flow of life.

18One of the earliest introductions of Bergson in Finland was signed by the already mentioned Eino Kaila in 1911. As opposed to the previously discussed Swedish language scholars Lagerborg and Ruin, Kaila was a key figure in Finnish language philosophy. Subsequently a peripheral member of the Vienna circle, in the 1920s he completed the transition from (German) idealism to (logical) empiricism in Finnish philosophy; the trajectory was continued by his pupil Georg Henrik von Wright (1916-2003), who went on to succeed Wittgenstein at Cambridge after the Second World War and paved the way for the analytic tradition in Finnish philosophy. Kaila, professor of philosophy first in Turku (1921) and then Helsinki (1930), was also a prolific critic of literature and theatre. The monistic philosophies of nature and synthetic worldviews he was drawn to in his youth, were in the early 1910s substituted for Bergson and James, and eventually for the unity of science ideals of the Vienna Circle since the late 1920s.

  • 3 On Bergson’s critique of Høffding’s interpretation of intuition, insufficiently connected to la dur (...)

19Against the backdrop of recent discussions on cultural and ideational transfer (Espagne 1999 and 2004), the reception of Bergson in Finland draws attention to the role of mediators in the circulation of ideas. In 1911, the young Kaila had presumably attended not only the lectures of Bergson in Paris, but also those held at the University of Helsinki by Danish philosophical celebrity Harald Høffding (1843-1931) on the principle of personality in philosophy, which was incidentally also the theme of Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France that same spring. In his lectures, published in both Swedish and Finnish, Høffding (1911a and 1911b) presented Bergson in tandem with William James’ pragmatism, as was subsequently the case when Bergson was discussed in Finland. In these lectures, Høffding gave a balanced interpretation of Bergson, approving his attention to the uninterrupted flow of life, but also critical of the vitalist tendencies in Bergsonism.3 An influential philosophy professor in Copenhagen, Høffding had been discussing Bergson with his students in Denmark already in 1905, before Bergson became an international celebrity. He introduced the philosophy of intuition for a wider audience in his Lehrbuch der Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (1907), which included a discussion of Bergson and appeared in Finnish translation in 1910.

  • 4 Eino Kaila, too, compares Bergson’s and Larsson’s concepts of intuition in a review (Kaila 1915) of (...)

20Copenhagen had often functioned as a gateway in the traffic of ideas between Scandinavia and the European continent, and it is no coincidence that the reception of Bergson in Finland was mediated by a Danish philosopher – just as the early reception of Bergson in Sweden through John Landquist (1881-1974) was mediated by Høffding a few years before (Battail 1979, 15). Hans Larsson (1862-1944), the Swedish philosopher and essayist whose own contributions to the philosophy of intuition (Intuition. Några ord om diktning och vetenskap from 1892 and Viljans frihet from 1899) were well known in Finland, provided another filter for the Finnish reception of Bergson. Arguments for or against Bergson were frequently also about Larsson, especially after his polemical book on Bergson, Intuitionsproblemet [The problem of intuition] from 1912. Commentators such as J. A. Hollo in Finland (1915) saw Larsson as advocating a more Kantian and “softer” approach to intuition.4 To the extent that Larsson’s intuition ‑ a synthetic act more than something entirely distinct from intelligence – rested on “stable ground” and was more compatible with conceptual reason, Hollo likens the shift from Bergson to Larsson to moving from the hustle and bustle of the metropole to the tranquillity of the Scanian countryside.

  • 5 In 1917 Kaila published a book-length study on Renan and in 1921 he translated Renan’s Souvenirs d’ (...)

21An early advocate, Eino Kaila would eventually adopt a similarly restrained position on Bergson. Drawn to the latter’s critique of the immobilising intellect, Kaila (1911) had initially argued that if human reason existed only for pure theory, “it would naturally try to immerse itself within movement itself, which is the essence of reality, whereas immobility is never more than apparent or relative.” But only a few years later he renounced his aspirations of reaching beyond conceptual thought. In an article on Bergson and Ernest Renan, Kaila (1916) emphatically situated himself at a sceptical distance. Bergson was now portrayed as “full-blooded heir to the ancient mystics,” having invoked intuition as a means to dive back into the original principle of life, élan vital.5 We may recall that this reversal occurred in the wake of not only the war, and Bergson’s jingoistic wartime interventions, but also the animated politico-cultural debates on Bergson in Finland between 1912 and 1914, including Lagerborg’s Durkheimian dismissal of Bergson as a modern mystic. Kaila (1916) sided with the latter view by retrieving sceptical “Renanism” against what he now denounced as the metaphysical overstatements of Bergson. However, throughout his career, Kaila remained torn between what J.-F. Battail (1979, 84-85) in his study on Bergson in Sweden observes in relation to Hans Larsson: on the one hand, an aspiration to stay within the Kantian boundaries of knowledge, and on the other a metaphysical vein that made itself felt time and again.

22In an effort to pinpoint certain characteristic features of Scandinavian philosophy, the Danish introducer of logical empiricism Jørgen Jørgensen (1894-1969) invokes similar tensions between empiricism and a restrained gravitation towards metaphysics. This assertion captures a central aspect of the intellectual biographies of leading modernisers in Finnish philosophy since the 19th century, from Hjalmar Neiglick (1860-1889) in the 1880s, to Lagerborg and Kaila in the early, and Georg Henrik von Wright in the late 20th century. The benefit of such compromise, Jørgensen suggests, is a high degree of freedom and variation. The downside is a lack of sharpness and logical consistency, reinforced by social factors such as the limited number of chairs in philosophy in these countries, which in turn poses limits to specialisation and the formation of philosophical schools. Jørgensen (1936, 62) nevertheless sees a mild empirical main current – “of moderate and compromising character” – in Scandinavian philosophy.

23Bergsonism would ultimately not be reconciled with this main current. But the encounter between the philosophy of duration and Finnish thought is an illuminating example of the complexity of intellectual transfers. In Finland, Bergson’s ideas encountered a traditionally German-oriented academic environment and were quickly politicised in the context of both internal ideological struggles between Finnish and Swedish as well as the activist sentiments among the pre-war intelligentsia. In part as a reaction to the latter, local mediators such as Lagerborg selectively transferred the Durkeim-Bergson debate from Paris to Helsinki, where he fashioned himself as a modern enlightenment philosopher and defender of scientific reason against the anti-positivist assault by a younger generation. But Bergsonian ideas were also filtered through relay points such as Copenhagen and mediated by regional authorities such as Høffding and Larsson.

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Notes

1 Föreningen Prometheus protokoll [Minutes of the Prometheus society] 12.2.1914, Åbo Akademi University Library, manuscript collections, ‘Studentföreningen Prometheus arkiv Lagerborg 1914, 154.

2 As reported by the daily newspaper Dagens Tidning (13.2.1914).

3 On Bergson’s critique of Høffding’s interpretation of intuition, insufficiently connected to la durée, see their correspondence in Bergson 1972, 1146-1150.

4 Eino Kaila, too, compares Bergson’s and Larsson’s concepts of intuition in a review (Kaila 1915) of the latter’s study Platon och vår tid (1913).

5 In 1917 Kaila published a book-length study on Renan and in 1921 he translated Renan’s Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1884) into Finnish.

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Stefan Nygård, « Bergson in Finland »Bergsoniana [En ligne], 4 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2024, consulté le 13 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bergsoniana/1799 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/bergsoniana.1799

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Auteur

Stefan Nygård

Stefan Nygård is Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. A published version of his dissertation (in Swedish) on Bergson in Finland appeared in 2011. Recent publications include The Politics of Debt and Europe’s relations with the ‘South’ (2020) and Decentering European Intellectual Space (2018), as well as several articles on Northern European intellectual, social and political history.

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