speaking of novelty

Let’s say that, instead of rating the greatest philosophers of all time, we were to rate the most original philosophers of all time.

For instance, I’d call Heidegger one of the ten greatest philosophers of all time, and probably one of the ten most original as well. But if you know a bit about Husserl and the Asutrian School, you can make pretty good sense of where Heidegger was coming form, what lineage he was drawing from and how he transformed it.

But by originality in this context I’d mean something more like an author who makes you think: “where the hell did that come from? What’s going on here?”

And of the top Western philosophers, I would probably award that prize to Bergson. At times it feels as if he came from a parallel earth, from a different history of philosophy.

True enough, no one emerges entirely in a vacuum. But Bergson is as close to a bolt from the blue as it gets in the history of Western philosophy.