Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941) was a French philosopher whose work on time, memory, intuition and evolution made him the most widely read thinker in Europe in the early twentieth century. [1] He argued that lived time, which he called durée or duration, is a continuous qualitative flow that cannot be captured by the spatialised measurements of science. [2] He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927.
Early life and education
Henri-Louis Bergson was born in Paris on 18 October 1859 to a Polish-Jewish composer father and an English-Jewish mother. [1] He was educated at the Lycée Condorcet, where he excelled in mathematics and won a national prize in the Concours général, before choosing philosophy over science.
He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1878 and passed the philosophy agrégation in 1881. He taught in lycées at Angers, Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, completing his doctorate at the University of Paris in 1889. [3]
Philosophy
Bergson's doctoral thesis, published as Time and Free Will (1889), distinguished between the homogeneous, measurable time of physics and duration, the heterogeneous flow of consciousness in which states interpenetrate rather than succeed one another as discrete units. On this basis he defended human freedom against deterministic accounts of the mind. [2]
Matter and Memory (1896) addressed the relation of mind and body, proposing that perception is oriented toward action and distinguishing habitual, bodily memory from the recollection of particular past events. Laughter (1900) analysed comedy as the perception of something mechanical encrusted on the living. [1]
His most famous book, Creative Evolution (1907), argued that evolution cannot be explained by mechanism or by a predetermined design, and introduced the élan vital, a vital impetus driving the divergent and unpredictable proliferation of living forms. [2] His final major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), distinguished closed societies governed by obligation from open morality arising from individual creative insight.
Public career
Bergson was appointed to the Collège de France in 1900, where his lectures drew audiences far beyond the academic world, including society figures and foreign visitors. [3] He was elected to the Académie française in 1914.
During the First World War he undertook diplomatic missions to Spain and to the United States, where his meetings with President Woodrow Wilson supported the case for American entry into the conflict. He later served as the first president of the League of Nations' International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, a forerunner of UNESCO. [1]
He exchanged public criticisms with Albert Einstein over the philosophical interpretation of relativity, a debate set out in his 1922 book Duration and Simultaneity, in which Bergson maintained that physics could not exhaust the meaning of time.
Later life and legacy
Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 in recognition of his ideas and the literary quality of his writing, and he held the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. [4] Suffering from severe rheumatism in his later years, he was drawn toward Catholicism but declined to convert, stating that he wished to remain among those who would be persecuted.
He died in Paris on 4 January 1941 during the German occupation. His influence extended to Marcel Proust, William James, Alfred North Whitehead and later to Gilles Deleuze, whose work prompted a renewed reading of Bergson in the late twentieth century. [3]
