Notes on Bergson and Descartes

Charles Peguy (1873-1914) was a French religious poet, philosophical essayist, publisher, social activist, Dreyfusard, and Catholic convert. There has recently been a renewed recognition of Peguy in France as a thinker of unique significance, a reconsideration inspired in large part by Gilles Deleuze's Difference et repetition, which ranked him with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In the English-speaking world, however, access to Peguy has been hindered by a scarcity of translations of his work. This first complete translation of one of his most important prose works, with accompanying interpretive introduction and notes, will introduce English-speaking readers to a new voice, which speaks in a powerful and original way to a modern West in a condition of cultural and spiritual crisis. The immediate circumstance of the writing of this last prose essay, unfinished at the time of Peguy's early death, was the placing of Henri Bergson's philosophical works on the Catholic Index, and Peguy's undertaking to defend his former teacher from his critics, both Catholic and secular. But the subject of Bergson is also a springboard for the exploration of the perennial themes--philosophical, theological, and literary--most central to Peguy's thought.Bruce Ward's excellent translation of Charles Peguy is timely and welcome. For the English reader who has only encountered Peguy's translated poetical texts, this book will shed a brilliant new light on a figure of outstanding significance.--Aaron Riches, Assistant Professor of Theology, Benedictine College, Kansas, author of Ecce Homo: On the Divine Unity of Christ (2016).Charles Peguy, a significant thinker in turn-of-the-20th-century France, remains an enigmatic figure in the English-speaking world. Notes on Bergson and Descartes contains Peguy's defense of his former teacher, philosopher Henri Bergson, in an effort to protect the latter from the Catholic Index. Peguy vigorously supported Bergson's insistence on thinking about the most important questions, and the included essays more generally display how Peguy took up in his own way Bergson's efforts to 're-deepen' the heritage of Christianity while exposing the spiritual bleakness of modernity. We are indebted to Ward for translating these important if demanding works, by one of the truly profound men of our time.--David L. Schindler, Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology, John Paul II Institute, The Catholic University of AmericaBruce K. Ward is Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus of Thorneloe University at Laurentian (Sudbury, Ontario). He is the author of Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal Virtues, as well as two books on Dostoevsky, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (co-authored with P. Travis Kroeker) and Dostoevsky's Critique of the West: The Quest for the Earthly Paradise.