Henri-Louis Bergson (French: [bɛʁksɔn];
18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a
French-Jewish philosopher who was influential
in the tradition of continental philosophy,
especially during the first half of the 20th
century until World War II.Bergson is known
for his arguments that processes of immediate
experience and intuition are more significant
than abstract rationalism and science for
understanding reality.
He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature
"in recognition of his rich and vitalizing
ideas and the brilliant skill with which they
have been presented". In 1930 France awarded
him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de
la Legion d'honneur.
Bergson's great popularity created a controversy
in France where his views were seen as opposing
the secular and scientific attitude adopted
by the Republic's officials.
== Biography ==
=== Overview ===
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris,
not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris
opera house) in 1859. His father, the pianist
Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish background
(originally bearing the name Bereksohn). His
great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known
patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry,
especially those associated with the Hasidic
movement. His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter
of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English
and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns
were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family
of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather,
Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower,
was a prominent banker and a protégé of
Stanisław II Augustus,
King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
Henri Bergson's 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
settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized
French citizen.
Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a
cousin of Marcel Proust (1871–1922), in
1891. (The novelist served as best man at
Bergson's wedding.) Henri and Louise Bergson
had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896.
Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson (also known
as Moina Mathers), married the English occult
author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a
founder 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,
marked by 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'Évolution
créatrice)
in 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
(Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion)In
1900 the College of France selected Bergson
to a Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy,
which he held until 1904. He then replaced
Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy,
which he held until 1920. The public attended
his open courses in large numbers.
=== Education and career ===
Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known
as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present)
in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously
received a Jewish religious education. Between
14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According
to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied
to his discovery of the theory of evolution,
according to which humanity shares common
ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes
construed as not needing a creative deity.While
at the lycée Bergson 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 Nouvelles 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, to the dismay of his teachers.
When he was nineteen, he entered the École
Normale Supérieure. During this period, he
read Herbert Spencer. He obtained there the
degree of licence ès lettres, and this was
followed by that of agrégation de philosophie
in 1881 from the University of Paris.
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 (Clermont-Ferrand) in
Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the Puy-de-Dôme
département.
The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand
Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities
by the publication of an edition of extracts
from Lucretius, with a critical study of the
text and of the materialist cosmology of the
poet (1884), a work whose repeated editions
attest to its value in promoting Classics
among French youth. 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 (Quid
Aristoteles de loco senserit, "On the Concept
of Place in Aristotle"), for his doctoral
degree which was awarded by the University
of Paris in 1889. The work was published in
the same year by Félix Alcan. He also gave
courses in Clermont-Ferrand on the Pre-Socratics,
in particular on Heraclitus.Bergson dedicated
Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier (1832–1918),
then public education minister, a disciple
of Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) and the
author of a 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". (Bergson owed much
to both of these teachers of the École Normale
Supérieure. Compare his memorial address
on Ravaisson, who died in 1900.)
Bergson settled again in Paris in 1888, 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. There,
he read Darwin and gave a course on his theories.
Although Bergson had previously endorsed Lamarckism
and its theory of the heritability of acquired
characteristics, he came to prefer Darwin's
hypothesis of gradual variations, which were
more compatible with his continual vision
of life.In 1896 he published his second major
work, entitled Matter and Memory. This rather
difficult work investigates the function of
the brain and 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, École Normale Supérieure,
and later in the same year received a promotion
to a Professorship. The year 1900 saw him
installed as Professor at the Collège de
France, where he accepted the Chair of Greek
and Roman Philosophy in succession to Charles
Lévêque.
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 1900 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 stemmed from 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 the Académie des sciences
morales et politiques elected Bergson as a
member, and he became a member of the Institute.
In 1903 he contributed to the Revue de métaphysique
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.
He detailed in this essay his philosophical
program, realized in the Creative Evolution.On
the death of Gabriel Tarde, the sociologist
and philosopher, in 1904, Bergson succeeded
him in the Chair of Modern Philosophy. From
4 to 8 September of that year he visited 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
from attending the Third Congress held at
Heidelberg.
His third major work, Creative Evolution,
the most widely known and most discussed of
his books, appeared in 1907. Pierre 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.
At that time, Bergson had already made an
extensive study of biology including the theory
of fecundation (as shown in the first chapter
of the Creative Evolution), which had only
recently emerged, ca. 1885 – no small feat
for a philosopher specializing in the history
of philosophy, in particular Greek and Roman
philosophy. He also most certainly had read,
apart from Darwin, Haeckel, from whom he retained
his idea of a unity of life and of the ecological
solidarity between all living beings, as well
as Hugo de Vries, from whom he quoted his
mutation theory of evolution (which he opposed,
preferring Darwin's gradualism). He also quoted
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the successor
of Claude Bernard at the Chair of Experimental
Medicine in the Collège de France, etc.
Bergson served as a juror with Florence Meyer
Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal,
a grant given between 1919 and 1954 to painters,
sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers,
and musicians.
=== Relationship with James and pragmatism
===
Bergson traveled to London in 1908 and met
there with 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. The two became great
friends. James's impression of Bergson is
given in his Letters under date of 4 October
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".
Bergson quoted the first two of these articles
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 decisive
as their actual agreement. 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. In 1903, he wrote:
I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and
nothing that I have read for years has so
excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure
that his philosophy has a great future; it
breaks through old frameworks and brings things
to a solution from which new crystallizations
can be reached.
The most noteworthy tributes James paid to
Bergson come 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 gained from Bergson's thought, and refers
to his confidence in being "able to lean on
Bergson's authority." (See further James's
reservations about Bergson, below.)
The influence of Bergson had led James "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 investigate
Bergson's philosophy for themselves, but no
English translations of Bergson's major work
had yet appeared. James, however, encouraged
and assisted Dr. Arthur Mitchell in preparing
an English translation of Creative Evolution.
In August 1910, James died. It was his intention,
had he lived to see the translation finished,
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 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, together with
certain important reservations.
From 5 to 11 April, 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.
=== Lectures on change ===
In May 1911 Bergson gave two lectures entitled
The Perception of Change (La perception du
changement) at the University of Oxford. The
Clarendon Press published these in French
in the same year.
His talks were concise and lucid, leading
students and the general reader to his other,
longer writings. Oxford later conferred on
him the degree of Doctor of Science.
Two days later he delivered the Huxley Lecture
at the University of Birmingham, taking for
his subject Life and Consciousness. This subsequently
appeared in The Hibbert Journal (October 1911),
and since revised, is the first essay in the
collected volume Mind-Energy (L'Énergie spirituelle).
In October he again traveled to England, where
he had an enthusiastic reception, and delivered
at University College London four lectures
on La Nature de l'Âme [The nature of the
soul].
In 1913 Bergson visited the United States
of America at the invitation of Columbia University,
New York, and lectured in several American
cities, where very large audiences welcomed
him. In February, at Columbia University,
he lectured both in French and English, taking
as his subjects: Spirituality and Freedom
and The Method of Philosophy. Being again
in England in May of the same year, he accepted
the Presidency of the British Society for
Psychical Research, and delivered to the Society
an address on Phantoms of Life and Psychic
Research (Fantômes des vivants et recherche
psychique).
Meanwhile, his popularity increased, and translations
of his works began to appear in a number of
languages: English, German, Italian, Danish,
Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian. In
1914 Bergson's fellow-countrymen honoured
him by his election as a member of the Académie
française. He was also made President of
the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques,
and in addition, he became Officier de la
Légion d'honneur, and Officier de l'Instruction
publique.
Bergson found disciples of many types. In
France movements such as neo-Catholicism and
Modernism on the one hand and syndicalism
on the other endeavoured to absorb and appropriate
for their own ends some central ideas of his
teaching. The continental organ of socialist
and syndicalist theory, Le Mouvement socialiste,
portrayed the realism of Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon as hostile to all forms of intellectualism,
and argued, therefore, that supporters of
Marxist socialism should welcome a philosophy
such as that of Bergson. Other writers, in
their eagerness, claimed that the thought
of the holder of the Chair of Philosophy at
the Collège de France, and the aims of the
Confédération Générale du Travail and
the Industrial Workers of the World were in
essential agreement.
While social revolutionaries endeavoured to
make the most out of Bergson, many religious
leaders, particularly the more liberal-minded
theologians of all creeds, e.g., the Modernists
and Neo-Catholic Party in his own country,
showed a keen interest in his writings, and
many of them found encouragement and stimulus
in his work. The Roman Catholic Church, however,
banned Bergson's three books on the charge
of pantheism (that is, of conceiving of God
as immanent to his Creation and of being himself
created in the process of the Creation). They
were placed on the Index of prohibited books
(Decree of 1 June 1914).
=== Later years ===
In 1914 the Scottish universities arranged
for Bergson to give the famous Gifford Lectures,
planning one course for the spring and another
for the autumn. Bergson delivered the first
course, consisting of eleven lectures, under
the title of The Problem of Personality, at
the University of Edinburgh in the spring
of that year. The course of lectures planned
for the autumn months had to be abandoned
because of the outbreak of war. Bergson was
not, however, silent during the conflict,
and he gave some inspiring addresses. As early
as 4 November 1914, he wrote an article entitled
Wearing and Nonwearing forces (La force qui
s'use et celle qui ne s'use pas), which appeared
in that unique and interesting periodical
of the poilus, Le Bulletin des Armées de
la République Française. A presidential
address, The Meaning of the War, was delivered
in December 1914, to the Académie des sciences
morales et politiques.
Bergson contributed also to the publication
arranged by The Daily Telegraph in honour
of King Albert I of the Belgians, King Albert's
Book (Christmas, 1914).
In 1915 he was succeeded in the office of
President of the Académie des Sciences morales
et politiques by Alexandre Ribot, and then
delivered a discourse on "The Evolution of
German Imperialism". Meanwhile, he found time
to issue at the request of the Minister of
Public Instruction a brief summary of French
Philosophy. Bergson did a large amount of
traveling and lecturing in America during
the war. He participated in the negotiations
which led to the entry of the United States
in the war. He was there when the French Mission
under René Viviani paid a visit in April
and May 1917, following upon America's entry
into the conflict. Viviani's book La Mission
française en Amérique (1917), contains a
preface by Bergson.
Early in 1918 the Académie française received
Bergson officially when he took his seat among
"The Select Forty" as successor to Emile Ollivier
(the author of the historical work L'Empire
libéral). A session was held in January in
his honour at which he delivered an address
on Ollivier. In the war, Bergson saw the conflict
of Mind and Matter, or rather of Life and
Mechanism; and thus he shows us the central
idea of his own philosophy in action. To no
other philosopher has it fallen, during his
lifetime, to have his philosophical principles
so vividly and so terribly tested.
As many of Bergson's contributions to French
periodicals remained relatively inaccessible,
he agreed to the request of his friends to
have such works collected and published in
two volumes. The first of these was being
planned when war broke out. The conclusion
of strife was marked by the appearance of
a delayed volume in 1919. It bears the title
Spiritual Energy: Essays and Lectures (reprinted
as Mind-Energy – L'Énergie spirituelle:
essais et conférences). The advocate of Bergson's
philosophy in England, Dr. Wildon Carr, prepared
an English translation under the title Mind-Energy.
The volume opens with the Huxley Memorial
Lecture of 1911, "Life and Consciousness",
in a revised and developed form under the
title "Consciousness and Life". Signs of Bergson's
growing interest in social ethics and in the
idea of a future life of personal survival
are manifested. The lecture before the Society
for Psychical Research is included, as is
also the one given in France, L'Âme et le
Corps, which contains the substance of the
four London lectures on the Soul. The seventh
and last article is a reprint of Bergson's
famous lecture to the Congress of Philosophy
at Geneva in 1904, The Psycho-Physiological
Paralogism (Le paralogisme psycho-physiologique),
which now appears as Le cerveau et la pensée:
une illusion philosophique. Other articles
are on the False Recognition, on Dreams, and
Intellectual Effort. The volume is a most
welcome production and serves to bring together
what Bergson wrote on the concept of mental
force, and on his view of "tension" and "detension"
as applied to the relation of matter and mind.
In June 1920, the University of Cambridge
honoured him with the degree of Doctor of
Letters. In order that he might devote his
full-time to the great new work he was preparing
on ethics, religion, and sociology, the Collège
de France relieved Bergson of the duties attached
to the Chair of Modern Philosophy there. He
retained the chair, but no longer delivered
lectures, his place being taken by his disciple,
the mathematician and philosopher Édouard
Le Roy, who supported a conventionalist stance
on the foundations of mathematics, which was
adopted by Bergson. Le Roy, who also succeeded
to Bergson at the Académie française and
was a fervent Catholic, extended to revealed
truth his conventionalism, leading him to
privilege faith, heart and sentiment to dogmas,
speculative theology and abstract reasoning.
Like Bergson's, his writings were placed on
the Index by the Vatican.
=== Debate with Albert Einstein ===
In the fall of 1922 Bergson's book Durée
et simultanéité, a propos de la theorie
d'Einstein (Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson
and the Einsteinian Universe) was published.
Earlier in the spring Einstein had come to
the French Society of Philosophy and briefly
replied to a short speech made by Bergson.
The book has been often considered as one
of his worst, many alleging that his knowledge
of physics was insufficient, and that the
book did not follow up contemporary developments
on physics. (But in "Einstein and the Crisis
of Reason", a leading French philosopher,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, accused Einstein of
failing to grasp Bergson's argument. This
argument, Merleau-Ponty says, which concerns
not the physics of special relativity but
its philosophical foundations, addresses paradoxes
caused by popular interpretations and misconceptions
about the theory, including Einstein's own.)
It was not published in the 1951 Edition du
Centenaire in French, which contained all
of his other works, and was only published
later in a work gathering different essays,
titled Mélanges. Duration and simultaneity
took advantage of Bergson's experience at
the League of Nations, where he presided from
1920 to 1925 the International Committee on
Intellectual Cooperation (the ancestor of
the UNESCO, which included Einstein, Marie
Curie, etc.)..
=== Later years and death ===
While living with his wife and daughter in
a modest house in a quiet street near the
Porte d'Auteuil in Paris, Bergson won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 for having
written The Creative Evolution. Because of
serious rheumatics ailments, he could not
travel to Stockholm, and sent instead a text
subsequently published in La Pensée et le
mouvant. He was elected a Foreign Honorary
Member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1928.After his retirement from
the Collège, Bergson began to fade into obscurity:
he suffered from a degenerative illness (rheumatism,
which left him half paralyzed). He completed
his new work, The Two Sources of Morality
and Religion, which extended his philosophical
theories to the realms of morality, religion,
and art, in 1935. It was respectfully received
by the public and the philosophical community,
but all by that time realized that Bergson's
days as a philosophical luminary were passed.
He was, however, able to reiterate his core
beliefs near the end of his life, by renouncing
all of the posts and honours previously awarded
him, rather than accept exemption from the
antisemitic laws imposed by the Vichy government.
Bergson inclined to convert to Catholicism,
writing in his will on 7 February 1937: "My
thinking has always brought me nearer to Catholicism,
in which I saw the perfect complement to Judaism."
Though wishing to convert to Catholicism,
as stated in his will, he did not convert
in view of the travails inflicted on the Jewish
people by the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism
in Europe in the 1930s; he did not want to
appear to want to leave the persecuted. On
3 January 1941 Bergson died in occupied Paris
from bronchitis.
A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his
funeral per his request. Bergson is buried
in the Cimetière de Garches, Hauts-de-Seine.
== Philosophy ==
Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly
mechanistic predominant view of causality
(as expressed in, say, finalism). He argued
that we must allow space for free will to
unfold in an autonomous and unpredictable
fashion. While Kant saw free will as something
beyond time and space and therefore ultimately
a matter of faith, Bergson attempted to redefine
the modern conceptions of time, space, and
causality in his concept of Duration, making
room for a tangible marriage of free will
with causality. Seeing Duration as a mobile
and fluid concept, Bergson argued that one
cannot understand Duration through "immobile"
analysis, but only through experiential, first-person
intuition.
=== Creativity ===
Bergson considers the appearance of novelty
as a result of pure undetermined creation,
instead of as the predetermined result of
mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasises
pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity
and freedom; thus one can characterize his
system as a process philosophy. It touches
upon such topics as time and identity, free
will, perception, change, memory, consciousness,
language, the foundation of mathematics and
the limits of reason.Criticizing Kant's theory
of knowledge exposed in the Critique of Pure
Reason and his conception of truth – which
he compares to Plato's conception of truth
as its symmetrical inversion (order of nature/order
of thought) – Bergson attempted to redefine
the relations between science and metaphysics,
intelligence and intuition, and insisted on
the necessity of increasing thought's possibility
through the use of intuition, which, according
to him, alone approached a knowledge of the
absolute and of real life, understood as pure
duration. Because of his (relative) criticism
of intelligence, he makes a frequent use of
images and metaphors in his writings in order
to avoid the use of concepts, which (he considers)
fail to touch the whole of reality, being
only a sort of abstract net thrown on things.
For instance, he says in The Creative Evolution
(chap. III) that thought in itself would never
have thought it possible for the human being
to swim, as it cannot deduce swimming from
walking. For swimming to be possible, man
must throw itself in water, and only then
can thought consider swimming as possible.
Intelligence, for Bergson, is a practical
faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty,
a product of evolution used by man to survive.
If metaphysics is to avoid "false problems",
it should not extend the abstract concepts
of intelligence to pure speculation, but rather
use intuition.The Creative Evolution in particular
attempted to think through the continuous
creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself
against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy.
Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles
Darwin's theory of evolution in philosophy
and to construct a cosmology based on this
theory (Spencer also coined the expression
"survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed
what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.Bergson's
Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) can
be seen as a response to the mechanistic philosophies
of his time, but also to the failure of finalism.
Indeed, he considers that finalism is unable
to explain "duration" and the "continuous
creation of life", as it only explains life
as the progressive development of an initially
determined program – a notion which remains,
for example, in the expression of a "genetic
program"; such a description of finalism was
adopted, for instance, by Leibniz. It clearly
announces Alfred North Whitehead's.
Bergson regarded planning beforehand for the
future as impossible, since time itself unravels
unforeseen possibilities. Indeed, one could
always explain a historical event retrospectively
by its conditions of possibility. But, in
the introduction to the Pensée et le mouvant,
he explains that such an event created retrospectively
its causes, taking the example of the creation
of a work of art, for example a symphony:
it was impossible to predict what would be
the symphony of the future, as if the musician
knew what symphony would be the best for his
time, he would realize it. In his words, the
effect created its cause. Henceforth, he attempted
to find a third way between mechanism and
finalism, through the notion of an original
impulse, the élan vital, in life, which dispersed
itself through evolution into contradictory
tendencies (he substituted to the finalist
notion of a teleological aim a notion of an
original impulse).
=== Duration ===
The foundation of Henri Bergson's philosophy,
his theory of Duration, he discovered when
trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert
Spencer's philosophy. Bergson introduced Duration
as a theory of time and consciousness in his
doctoral thesis Time and Free Will: An Essay
on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as
a response to another of his influences: Immanuel
Kant.Kant believed that free will (better
perceived as The Will) could only exist outside
of time and space, indeed the only non-determined
aspect of our private existence in the universe,
separate to water cycles, mathematics and
mortality. However, we could therefore not
know whether or not it exists, and that it
is nothing but a pragmatic faith. Bergson
responded that Kant, along with many other
philosophers, had confused time with its spatial
representation. In reality, Bergson argued,
Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous,
and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a
succession of distinct parts, with one causing
the other. Based on this he concluded that
determinism is an impossibility and free will
pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified
as being the Duration.
=== Intuitionism ===
Duration, as defined by Bergson, then is a
unity and a multiplicity, but, being mobile,
it cannot be grasped through immobile concepts.
Bergson hence argues that one can grasp it
only through his method of intuition. Two
images from Henri Bergson's An Introduction
to Metaphysics may help one to grasp Bergson's
term intuition, the limits of concepts, and
the ability of intuition to grasp the absolute.
The first image is that of a city. Analysis,
or the creation of concepts through the divisions
of points of view, can only ever give us a
model of the city through a construction of
photographs taken from every possible point
of view, yet it can never give us the dimensional
value of walking in the city itself. One can
only grasp this through intuition; likewise
the experience of reading a line of Homer.
One may translate the line and pile commentary
upon commentary, but this commentary too shall
never grasp the simple dimensional value of
experiencing the poem in its originality itself.
The method of intuition, then, is that of
getting back to the things themselves.
=== Élan vital ===
Élan vital ranks as Bergson's third essential
concept, after Duration and intuition. An
idea with the goal of explaining evolution,
the élan vital first appeared in 1907's Creative
Evolution. Bergson portrays élan vital as
a kind of vital impetus which explains evolution
in a less mechanical and more lively manner,
as well as accounting for the creative impulse
of mankind. This concept led several authors
to characterize Bergson as a supporter of
vitalism—although he criticized it explicitly
in The Creative Evolution, as he thought,
against Driesch and Johannes Reinke (whom
he cited) that there is neither "purely internal
finality nor clearly cut individuality in
nature":
Hereby lies the stumbling block of vitalist
theories ... It is thus in vain that one pretends
to reduce finality to the individuality of
the living being. If there is finality in
the world of life, it encompasses the whole
of life in one indivisible embrace.
=== Laughter ===
In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the
Comic, Bergson develops a theory not of laughter
itself but of how laughter can be provoked
(see his objection to Delage, published in
the 23rd edition of the essay). He describes
the process of laughter (refusing to give
a conceptual definition which would not approach
its reality), used in particular by comics
and clowns, as caricature of the mechanistic
nature of humans (habits, automatic acts,
etc.), one of the two tendencies of life (degradation
towards inert matter and mechanism, and continual
creation of new forms). However, Bergson warns
us that laughter's criterion of what should
be laughed at is not a moral criterion and
that it can in fact cause serious damage to
a person's self-esteem. This essay made his
opposition to the Cartesian theory of the
animal-machine obvious.
== Reception ==
From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy
attracted strong criticism from different
quarters, although he also became very popular
and durably influenced French philosophy.
The mathematician Édouard Le Roy became Bergson's
main disciple. Nonetheless, Suzanne Guerlac
has argued that his institutional position
at the Collège de France, delivering lectures
to a general audience, may have retarded the
systematic reception of his thought: "Bergson
achieved enormous popular success in this
context, often due to the emotional appeal
of his ideas. But he did not have the equivalent
of graduate students who might have become
rigorous interpreters of his thought. Thus
Bergson's philosophy—in principle open and
nonsystematic—was easily borrowed piecemeal
and altered by enthusiastic admirers".Alfred
North Whitehead acknowledged Bergson's influence
on his process philosophy in his 1929 Process
and Reality. However, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead's
collaborator on Principia Mathematica, was
not so entranced by Bergson's philosophy.
Although acknowledging Bergson's literary
skills, Russell saw Bergson's arguments at
best as persuasive or emotive speculation
but not at all as any worthwhile example of
sound reasoning or philosophical insight.
The epistemologist Gaston Bachelard explicitly
alluded to him in the last pages of his 1938
book The Formation of the Scientific Mind.
Others influenced by Bergson include Vladimir
Jankélévitch, who wrote a book on him in
1931, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Gilles
Deleuze who wrote Le bergsonisme in 1966.
Bergson also influenced the phenomenology
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas,
although Merleau-Ponty had reservations about
Bergson's philosophy. The Greek author Nikos
Kazantzakis studied under Bergson in Paris
and his writing and philosophy were profoundly
influenced as a result.Many writers of the
early 20th century criticized Bergson's intuitionism,
indeterminism, psychologism and interpretation
of the scientific impulse. Those who explicitly
criticized Bergson, either in published articles
or in letters, included Bertrand Russell George
Santayana, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Martin Heidegger, Julien Benda, T. S. Eliot,
Wyndham Lewis, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry,
André Gide, Jean Piaget, Marxist philosophers
Theodor W. Adorno, Lucio Colletti, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and Georges Politzer, as well as Maurice
Blanchot, American philosophers such as Irving
Babbitt, Arthur Lovejoy, Josiah Royce, The
New Realists (Ralph B. Perry, E. B. Holt,
and William Pepperell Montague), The Critical
Realists (Durant Drake, Roy W. Sellars, C.
A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers), Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler, Roger Fry (see his letters), Julian
Huxley (in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis)
and Virginia Woolf (for the latter, see Ann
Banfield, The Phantom Table).The Vatican accused
Bergson of pantheism, while free-thinkers
(who formed a large part of the teachers and
professors of the French Third Republic) accused
him of spiritualism. Still others have characterized
his philosophy as a materialist emergentism
– Samuel Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan explicitly
claimed Bergson as their forebear. According
to Henri Hude (1990, II, p. 142), who supports
himself on the whole of Bergson's works as
well as his now published courses, accusing
him of pantheism is a "counter-sense". Hude
alleges that a mystical experience, roughly
outlined at the end of Les Deux sources de
la morale et de la religion, is the inner
principle of his whole philosophy, although
this has been contested by other commentators.
Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception
to those who associated him 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 utmost to
muddle all distinctions." William James's
students resisted the assimilation of his
work to that of Bergson. 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
overestimate 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 Hermann 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, claims 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).
Furthermore, writers such as Russell, Wittgenstein,
and James saw élan vital as a projection
of subjectivity onto the world. The external
world, according to certain theories of probability,
provides less and less indeterminism with
further refinement of scientific method. In
brief, one should not confuse the moral, psychological,
subjective demand for the new, the underivable
and the unexplained with the universe. One's
subjective sense of duration differs the (non-human)
world, a difference which, according to the
ancient materialist Lucretius should not be
characterized as either one of becoming or
being, creation or destruction (De Rerum Natura).
Suzanne Guerlac has argued that the more recent
resurgence of scholarly interest in Bergson
is related to the growing influence of his
follower Deleuze within continental philosophy:
"If there is a return to Bergson today, then,
it is largely due to Gilles Deleuze whose
own work has etched the contours of the New
Bergson. This is not only because Deleuze
wrote about Bergson; it is also because Deleuze's
own thought is deeply engaged with that of
his predecessor, even when Bergson is not
explicitly mentioned." Leonard Lawlor and
Valentine Moulard agree with Guerlac that
"the recent revitalization of Bergsonism ... is
almost entirely due to Deleuze." They explain
that Bergson's concept of multiplicity "is
at the very heart of Deleuze's thought, and
duration is the model for all of Deleuze's
'becomings.' The other aspect that attracted
Deleuze, which is indeed connected to the
first, is Bergson's criticism of the concept
of negation in Creative Evolution. ... Thus
Bergson became a resource in the criticism
of the Hegelian dialectic, the negative."
=== Comparison to Eastern philosophies ===
Several Hindu authors have found parallels
to Hindu philosophy in Bergson's thought.
The integrative evolutionism of Sri Aurobindo,
an Indian philosopher from the early 20th
century, has many similarities to Bergson's
philosophy. Whether this represents a direct
influence of Bergson is disputed, although
Aurobindo was familiar with many Western philosophers.
K Narayanaswami Aiyer, a member of the Theosophical
Society, published a pamphlet titled "Professor
Bergson and the Hindu Vedanta", where he argued
that Bergson's ideas on matter, consciousness,
and evolution were in agreement with Vedantic
and Puranic explanations. Nalini Kanta Brahma,
Marie Tudor Garland and Hope Fitz are other
authors who have comparatively evaluated Hindu
and Bergsonian philosophies, especially in
relation to intuition, consciousness and evolution.
== Bibliography ==
Bergson, H.; The Philosophy of Poetry: The
Genius of Lucretius (La Philosophie de la
Poesie: le Génie de Lucrèce, 1884), Philosophical
Library 1959: ISBN 978-1-4976-7566-7
Bergson, H.; Time and Free Will: An Essay
on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai
sur les données immédiates de la conscience,
1889). Allen & Unwin 1910, Dover Publications
2001: ISBN 0-486-41767-0 – Bergson's doctoral
dissertation.
Bergson, H.; Matter and Memory (Matière et
mémoire, 1896). Swan Sonnenschein 1911, Zone
Books 1990: ISBN 0-942299-05-1, Dover Publications
2004: ISBN 0-486-43415-X.
Bergson, H.; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning
of the Comic (Le rire, 1900). Green Integer
1998: ISBN 1-892295-02-4, Dover Publications
2005: ISBN 0-486-44380-9.
Bergson, H.; Creative Evolution (L'Évolution
créatrice, 1907). Henry Holt and Company
1911, 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.
Bergson, H.; Mind-energy (L'Énergie spirituelle,
1919). McMillan 1920. – a collection of
essays and lectures. On Archive.org.
Bergson, H.; Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson
and the Einsteinian Universe (Durée et simultanéité,
1922). Clinamen Press Ltd 1999. ISBN 1-903083-01-X.
Bergson, H.; The Two Sources of Morality and
Religion (Les Deux Sources de la Morale et
de la Religion, 1932). University of Notre
Dame Press 1977. ISBN 0-268-01835-9. On Archive.org.
Bergson, H.; The Creative Mind: An Introduction
to Metaphysics (La Pensée et le mouvant,
1934). Citadel Press 1946: ISBN 0-8065-2326-3
– essay collection, sequel to Mind-Energy,
including 1903's "An Introduction to Metaphysics."
== See also ==
Philosophy of biology
Psychosophy
Intuition (Bergson)
Duration (philosophy)
List of Jewish Nobel laureates
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Philosophy and the
Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the
Time of Life. London: Routledge, 2002.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Dialectic of Duration.
Trans. Mary Mcallester Jones. Manchester:
Clinamen Press, 2000.
Bianco, Giuseppe. Après Bergson. Portrait
de groupe avec philosophe. Paris, PUF, 2015.
Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher:
Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed
Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, Princeton
Press, 2015.
Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books,
1988.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.
Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre, Derrida-Bergson.
Sur l'immédiateté, Hermann, Paris, coll.
"Hermann Philosophie", 2014. ISBN 978-2-7056-8831-8
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics,
Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004.
Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction
to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006.
Horkheimer, Max. "On Bergson's Metaphysics
of Time." Trans. Peter Thomas, revised by
Stewart Martin. Radical Philosophy 131 (2005)
9–19.
James, William. "Bergson and his Critique
of Intellectualism." In A Pluralistic Universe.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
1996. 223–74.
Lawlor, Leonard. The Challenge of Bergsonism:
Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics. London: Continuum
Press, 2003.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Bergson." In In Praise
of Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. John
O'Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1963. 9–32.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Bergson in the Making."
In Signs. Trans. Richard McCleary. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 182–91.
Mullarkey, John. "Bergson and Philosophy."
Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Mullarkey, John, ed. The New Bergson. Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press,
1999.
Russell, Bertrand "The Philosophy of Bergson".
The Monist 22 (1912): 321–47.
== External links ==
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
Henri Bergson's theory of laughter. A brief
summary.
« 'A History of Problems' : Bergson and the
French Epistemological Tradition », by Elie
During
M. C. Sanchez Rey « The Bergsonian Philosophy
of the Intelligence » translation
Newspaper clippings about Henri Bergson in
the 20th Century Press Archives of the German
National Library of Economics (ZBW)
=== Works online ===
Works by Henri Bergson at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Henri Bergson at Internet
Archive
Works by Henri Bergson at LibriVox (public
domain audiobooks)
Works by Henri Bergson at Open Library
Works by Henri Bergson in French at "La Philosophie"
Complete works in French on the "Classiques
des sciences sociales" website
L'Évolution créatrice (in the original French,
1907)
1911 English translation at the Wayback Machine
(archived 23 April 2006) of Creative Evolution
(html)
multiple formats at Internet Archive
1910 English translation of Time and Free
Will at the Wayback Machine (archived 24 April
2006) (HTML)
multiple formats at Internet Archive
1911 English translation of Matter and Memory
at the Wayback Machine (archived 24 April
2006) (HTML)
multiple formats at Internet Archive
