Henri-Louis Bergson (
IPA:
[bɛʁkˈsɔn];
October 18,
1859–
January 4,
1941) was a major
French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th century.
Biography Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in
Paris, not far from the
Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house). He was descended from a
Polish Jewish family (originally Berekson) on his father's side, while his mother was from an
English and
Irish Jewish background. His family lived in
London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the
English language from his mother. Before he was nine, his parents crossed the
English Channel and settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized citizen of the Republic. His sister, Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers), married the English
occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a leader of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris as well.
Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor. Its chief landmarks were the publication of his four principal works: in 1889,
Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience); in 1896,
Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire); in 1907,
Creative Evolution (L'Evolution créatrice); and in 1932,
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion).
Overview Bergson attended the
Lycée Fontaine (now known as the
Lycée Condorcet) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. While there he won a prize for his scientific work and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen, for the solution of a mathematical problem. His solution was published the following year in
Annales de Mathématiques. It was his first published work. After some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the
humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, and when he was nineteen, he entered the famous
École Normale Supérieure. He obtained there the degree of
Licence-ès-Lettres, and this was followed by that of
Agrégation de philosophie in 1881 .
The same year he received a teaching appointment at the
Lycée in
Angers, the ancient capital of
Anjou. Two years later he settled at the
Lycée Blaise-Pascal in
Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the
Puy-de-Dôme département, a town whose name is usually more of interest for motorists than for philosophers, being the home of
Michelin tyres and the
Charade Circuit racing track.
The year after his arrival at
Clermont-Ferrand Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an excellent edition of extracts from
Lucretius, with a critical study of the text and the philosophy of the poet (
1884), a work whose repeated editions are sufficient evidence of its useful place in the promotion of classical study among the youth of France. While teaching and lecturing in this part of his country (the
Auvergne region), Bergson found time for private study and original work. He crafted his dissertation
Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a short
Latin thesis on
Aristotle, for his doctoral degree which was awarded by the
University of Paris in 1889. The work was published in the same year by
Felix Alcan, the Paris publisher.
Bergson dedicated
Time and Free Will to
Jules Lachelier, then public education minister, who was a disciple of
Felix Ravaisson and the author of a rather important philosophical work
On the Founding of Induction (Du fondement de l'induction, 1871). Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism." (Lachelier was born in
1832, Ravaisson in 1813 . Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the
Ecole Normale Supérieure. Cf. his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in 1900 .)
Bergson settled again in Paris, and after teaching for some months at the
Municipal College, known as the
College Rollin, he received an appointment at the
Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. In 1896 he published his second large work, entitled
Matter and Memory. This rather difficult, but brilliant, work investigates the function of the brain, undertakes an analysis of
perception and
memory, leading up to a careful consideration of the problems of the relation of body and mind. Bergson had spent years of research in preparation for each of his three large works. This is especially obvious in
Matter and Memory, where he showed a thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological investigations which had been carried out during the period.
In 1898 Bergson became
Maître de conférences at his
Alma Mater,
L'Ecole Normale Supérieure, and was later promoted to a Professorship. The year 1900 saw him installed as Professor at the
Collège de France, where he accepted the Chair of
Greek Philosophy in succession to
Charles L'Eveque.
At the
First International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August, 1900, Bergson read a short, but important, paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality" (Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance à la loi de causalité). In
1901 Felix Alcan published a work which had previously appeared in the
Revue de Paris, entitled
Laughter (Le rire), one of the most important of Bergson's minor productions. This essay on the meaning of comedy was based on a lecture which he had given in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. The main thesis of the work is that
laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings. We laugh at people who fail to adapt to the demands of society, if it seems their failure is akin to an inflexible mechanism.
Comic authors have exploited this human tendency to laugh in various ways, and what is common to them is the idea that the comic consists in there being "something mechanical encrusted on the living".
In 1901 Bergson was elected to the
Académie des sciences morales et politiques, and became a member of the Institute. In 1903 he contributed to the
Revue de metaphysique et de morale a very important essay entitled
Introduction to Metaphysics (Introduction à la metaphysique), which is useful as a preface to the study of his three large books.
On the death of
Gabriel Tarde, the eminent sociologist, in
1904, Bergson succeeded him in the Chair of Modern Philosophy. From the 4th to September 8 of that year he was at
Geneva attending the
Second International Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured on
The Mind and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion (Le cerveau et la pensée: une illusion philosophique). An illness prevented his visiting
Germany to attend the
Third Congress held at
Heidelberg.
His third major work,
Creative Evolution, appeared in
1907, and is undoubtedly the most widely known and most discussed. It constitutes one of the most profound and original contributions to the philosophical consideration of the
theory of evolution. Imbart de la Tour remarked that
Creative Evolution was a milestone of new direction in thought. By
1918,
Alcan, the publisher, had issued twenty-one editions, making an average of two editions per annum for ten years. Following the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity increased enormously, not only in academic circles, but among the general reading public.
Education and career Bergson came to London in 1908 and visited
William James, the
Harvard philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of
October 4,
1908. "So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy."
As early as 1880 James had contributed an article in French to the periodical
La Critique philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, entitled
Le Sentiment de l'Effort. Four years later a couple of articles by him appeared in the journal
Mind: "What is an Emotion?" and "On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology." Of these articles the first two were quoted by Bergson in his 1889 work,
Time and Free Will. In the following years 1890-91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental work,
The Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon observed by Bergson. Some writers, taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking the fact that James's investigations had been proceeding since
1870 (registered from time to time by various articles which culminated in "The Principles"), have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.
It has been suggested that Bergson owes the root ideas of his first book to the 1884 article by James, "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology," which he neither refers to nor quotes. This article deals with the conception of thought as a
stream of consciousness, which
intellect distorts by framing into concepts. Bergson replied to this insinuation by denying that he had any knowledge of the article by James when he wrote
Les données immédiates de la conscience. The two thinkers appear to have developed independently until almost the close of the century. They are further apart in their intellectual position than is frequently supposed. Both have succeeded in appealing to audiences far beyond the purely academic sphere, but only in their mutual rejection of "intellectualism" as final is there real unanimity. Although James was slightly ahead in the development and enunciation of his ideas, he confessed that he was baffled by many of Bergson's notions. James certainly neglected many of the deeper metaphysical aspects of Bergson's thought, which did not harmonize with his own, and are even in direct contradiction. In addition to this, Bergson can hardly be considered a pragmatist. For him, "utility," far from being a test of truth, was in fact the reverse: a synonym for error.
Nevertheless, William James hailed Bergson as an ally. Early in the century (
1903) he wrote: "I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read since years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure that that philosophy has a great future, it breaks through old cadres and brings things into a solution from which new crystals can be got." The most noteworthy tributes paid by him to Bergson were those made in the
Hibbert Lectures (A Pluralistic Universe), which James gave at
Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London. He remarks on the encouragement he has received from Bergson's thought, and refers to the confidence he has in being "able to lean on Bergson's authority."
The influence of Bergson had led him "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that
logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be." It had induced him, he continued, "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it."
These remarks, which appeared in James's book
A Pluralistic Universe in
1909, impelled many English and American readers to an investigation of Bergson's philosophy for themselves. A certain handicap existed in that his greatest work had not then been translated into English. James, however, encouraged and assisted Dr.
Arthur Mitchell in his preparation of the English translation of
Creative Evolution. In August of 1910 James died. It was his intention, had he lived to see the completion of the translation, to introduce it to the English reading public by a prefatory note of appreciation. In the following year the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work was the result. By a coincidence, in that same year (
1911), Bergson penned a preface of sixteen pages entitled
Truth and Reality for the French translation of James's book, "Pragmatism". In it he expressed sympathetic appreciation of James's work, coupled with certain important reservations.
In April (5th to 11th) Bergson attended the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at
Bologna, in
Italy, where he gave an address on "Philosophical Intuition". In response to invitations he visited England in May of that year, and on several subsequent occasions. These visits were well received. His speeches offered new perspectives and elucidated many passages in his three major works:
Time and Free Will,
Matter and Memory, and
Creative Evolution. Although necessarily brief statements, they developed and enriched the ideas in his books and clarified for English audiences the fundamental principles of his philosophy.
The lectures on Change, and Bergson's later life From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism. Many writers of the early 20th century criticized his intuitionism, indeterminism, psychologism and confused interpretation of the scientific impulse. Among those who explicitly criticized Bergson (either in published articles or letters) were
Bertrand Russell (see his short book on the subject),
George Santayana (see his study on the author in "Winds of Doctrine"),
G. E. Moore,
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Julien Benda (see his book on the subject),
T. S. Eliot,
Paul Valéry (despite some recent claims otherwise),
Andre Gide (see below), Marxists philosophers such as
Theodor W. Adorno (see "Against Epistemology"),
Lucio Colletti (see "Hegel and Marxism"),
Maurice Blanchot (see
Bergson and Symbolism),
Jean-Paul Sartre (see his early book
Imagination) and
Georges Politzer (see the latter's two books on the subject:
Le Bergsonisme, une Mystification Philosophique and
La fin d'une parade philosophique: le Bergsonisme both of which had a tremendous effect on French
existential phenomenology), American philosophers such as
Irving Babbitt,
Arthur Lovejoy,
Josiah Royce,
The New Realists (
Ralph B. Perry,
E. B. Holt, and
William P. Montague), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake,
Roy W. Sellars, C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers),
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
Roger Fry (see his letters), and
Virginia Woolf (for the latter, see Ann Banfield,
The Phantom Table).
C. S. Peirce took strong exception to being aligned with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing his work with that of Bergson he wrote, "a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his prettiest to muddle all distinctions." William James's students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson's. See, for example,
Horace Kallen's book on the subject
James and Bergson. As
Jean Wahl described the "ultimate disagreement" between James and Bergson in his
System of Metaphysics: "for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action...must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth." Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will over-estimate Bergson's influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for "the spirit of the age." As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked certain key concepts in Bergson's philosophy, above all his view of the New and the indeterminate: "the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time," he writes in his book on
Lotze, "does not practically affect the method of investigation;...the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. This is no great renunciation; for that consummation of science...is by no one really expected." According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson's understanding of number in chapter two of
Time and Free-will. According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor ("extended images") to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. "Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number possible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general," writes Russell (see
The Philosophy of Bergson and
A History of Western Philosophy). Further still, the élan vital was seen to be a projection of the inner life, a moral feeling, onto the world at large. The external world, according to certain theories of probability, provides less and less indeterminism with further refinement of scientific method. In brief, the moral, psychological, and aesthethic demand for the new, the underivable and the unexplained should not be confused with our imagination of the universe at large. A difference remains between our inner sense of becoming and the non-human character of the outer world, which, according to the ancient materialist
Lucretius should not be characterized as either one of becoming or being, creation or destruction (De Rerum Natura).
Criticisms Élan vital Philosophy of biology Process philosophy Alfred North Whitehead William James Gilles Deleuze Charles Peguy 
Notes Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness 1910. (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience 1889) Dover Publications 2001:
ISBN 0-486-41767-0 – Bergson's doctoral dissertation
Matter and Memory 1911. (Matière et mémoire 1896) Zone Books 1990:
ISBN 0-942299-05-1, Dover Publications 2004:
ISBN 0-486-43415-X Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic 1901. (Le rire) Green Integer 1998:
ISBN 1-892295-02-4, Dover Publications 2005:
ISBN 0-486-44380-9 Creative Evolution 1910. (L'Evolution créatrice 1907) University Press of America 1983:
ISBN 0-8191-3553-4, Dover Publications 1998:
ISBN 0-486-40036-0, Kessinger Publishing 2003:
ISBN 0-7661-4732-0, Cosimo 2005:
ISBN 1-59605-309-7 Mind-energy 1920. (L'Energie spirituelle 1919) McMillan. – a collection of essays and lectures
Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe 1922. Clinamen Press Ltd.
ISBN 1-903083-01-X The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 1932. {Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion) University of Notre Dame Press 1977:
ISBN 0-268-01835-9 The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics 1946. (La Pensée et le mouvant 1934) Citadel Press 2002:
ISBN 0-8065-2326-3 – essay collection, sequel to
Mind-Energy, including 1903's "An Introduction to Metaphysics"
Colleges and universities
See also
Indian Home Rule
The structure of Chinese characters
Ground and water conduction
