Back in the 1950s a philosopher named John L. Austin taught at Oxford University and has become famous for his detailed analytical examination of the later philosophy of one Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, rather than engage in broad generalizations about the importance of ordinary language in sorting out the various philosophical puzzles to which traditional theorizing had led traditional thinkers, Austin devoted himself to the careful analysis of the patterns and logic of everyday speech by way of helping the fly, to use Wittgenstein’s image, “find the way out of the fly bottle” (a device used before fly-paper).
Austin’s little book How to Do Things with Words is an excellent example of linguistic philosophy at its best, although it is painfully detailed and a bit tedious. What I wish to focus on here is his analysis of what he called “performative utterances”, those in which one is actually ACCOMPLISHING’ a deed in addition to uttering a sentence. We are all familiar with the usual grammatical distinctions between declarative statements and their various partners, such as questions and exclamations, etc. What Austin “discovered” are what he called “performatives”, that is, statements in which the speaker actually performs another linguistic act when speaking, an act in addition to uttering the words of his or her statement.
It is an actual fact that prior to Austin’s analysis no philosopher seems to have noticed such “performative utterances”. In this sense it is then appropriate to say that he “discovered” them. His point was that in certain instances a speaker may well accomplish a deed in addition to that of making a statement or uttering a proposition. In baseball, for instance, when the umpire utters the words “Strike one” he is not only giving a description of where he believes the pitcher’s ball was in relation to the home plate, but he is in addition performing the act of declaring that the pitcher has thrown a “strike”. He is not merely describing where the ball was in relation to the home plate, but he is announcing that the pitcher has thrown a “strike” against the batter. If it is the third strike, the batter is “out”.
To take another example, when I say “I am sorry” I am not only saying those words, but I am, as a matter of fact, performing the act of apologizing. Or again, when I, as an ordained Minister, utter the words “I pronounce you husband and wife” in the proper circumstances I am “performing” the act of actually marrying two people in addition to uttering those words. I am making a statement AND I am marrying two people. Here, then, is a speech act in which a speaker actually performs a “social act” as well as a linguistic one. Thus, Austin has shown us “how to do things with words” and he has discovered this particular common, yet extremely important, aspect of the everyday speech. At least, no other thinker seems ever to have been given credit for doing so.
In addition to being an important discovery about a very significant aspect of human linguistic activity, Austin’s insight here underscores the broader fact that language is a “many splendored thing” in and of itself. It is, indeed, the very thing the later Wittgenstein worked so hard to bring to the fore. At the very beginning of his major work, Philosophical Investigations, he speculated about the many different ways the meaning of one word utterance, such as “March”, can be construed. First, as an answer to a question about which month we are in, or as an order to a group of soldiers on the parade ground, etc. Context is everything.
I am reminded here of the sort of muddles we linguistic people get ourselves into when we fail to properly read the context of our utterances. Think of the depth of confusion perpetrated by Lou Costello and Bud Abbott in their famous skit about the question “Who’s on First?” Is “who” a person or the first word of a question? Or of the difficulties ensuing from my subtle directive to my ten-year-old son that “The door is open”, which he insisted on interpreting as an observation rather than as a directive to go shut the door he had left open. Language is, indeed, a many splendored thing! And a rather slippery thing, as well.

Henri Bergson was born in 1859, the same year as John Dewey and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. His major works were Time and Freewill (1889), An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), Creative Evolution (1907), and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Bergson taught at the University of Paris for most of his career, but he was well-known all over the world. Bergson died in 1941 at the age of 82.
At the core of his evolutionary philosophy was the distinction between two entirely different ways of knowing reality, that of objective external analysis and that of internal, direct intuitive experience. The former provides relative, limited knowledge of its subject while the latter, according to Bergson, yields absolute knowledge of its subject. Following the objective analysis of a phenomenon we obtain factual and physical knowledge of its nature, but in following our intuitive knowledge of a phenomenon we gain direct knowledge of its essential nature. While the former method provides us with an external, scientific understanding of its nature, the latter provides us with an internal, deeper understanding.
Our objective knowledge of an object or situation is relative and subject to error, while our intuitive, direct knowledge of it goes directly to its essential situation in time and space is always limited to our perspective and position in the world, while our direct, intuitive knowledge engages the reality in question as it is in itself, not in relation to any observer. Our knowledge of both time and space, as well as the realities in them, is thus always subject to error and misunderstanding.
When moving from epistemological questions to those of metaphysics Bergson focused on that which he contended characterizes the basic nature of reality, namely a driving force, which he labeled elan vital, at the heart of all existence. Bergson taught that at the core of this driving force is a power which seeks to eternal extend itself beyond the present toward self-fulfillment in the future. He claimed that this elan vital is clearly seen at work in the process of evolution as it displays itself down through history. This process has produced a vast display of life forms and developments here on earth, culminating in humans.
Thus, we see that Bergson’s philosophy bears a striking resemblance to the evolutionary science developed and propagated by Charles Darwin’s evolutionary works. However, where Darwin failed to see any moral dimension at the heart of the evolutionary process, Bergson sought to ground the understanding in both morality and religion in it. In his book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion Bergson argued that human moral and religious thought arise from the powerful dynamic created by two contrary human tendencies. One, the drive to preserve what human societies have always sought, to codify whatever insights and directives have been established in the past as providing guidelines for a society’s future.
Secondly, these same societies have always found a need to drive beyond these very standards and directives to establish what are thought to be higher, better standards by which to live. Bergson labelled the former efforts the static drive or dimension within human culture and society, while the latter he labelled the dynamic force within the development of cultures. Human history, according to Bergson has and will be driven by the dynamic relation between these two behavioral forces.
Bergson seemed not to have believed that either of these two forces is more worthy or important than the other: both are necessary and both are inevitable. Thus, he did not seek to establish any moral value to the various stages or levels of the evolutionary process. In this sense he did not seem to believe in any notion of moral progress or development within human history. I had a friend who wrote his doctoral dissertation on just this issue, and he concluded that Bergson was entirely without any views concerning the superiority of any value system over another. So, this raises the question as to whether he was really an evolutionary thinker.