Philosopher
Henri Bergson
1859–1941
French philosopher of time and life, famous in his day, who contrasted lived duration with measured time and explained evolution by a 'vital impulse'.
Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.
Bergson was born in Paris in 1859 to Jewish parents, a Polish father and an English mother. A brilliant mathematician at school, he chose philosophy instead, studied at the École Normale alongside Jean Jaurès and Émile Durkheim, and taught in the provinces before his doctoral thesis appeared in 1889 as Time and Free Will, the book that Sartre said drew him to philosophy.
Appointed to the Collège de France, he became famous: his lectures were packed with students, society figures and poets such as T. S. Eliot, his first lecture in New York caused a traffic jam on Broadway, and in 1914 he became the first Jewish member of the Académie Française. During the First World War he went to Washington as a diplomatic envoy to President Wilson, and he later presided over the forerunner of UNESCO. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 and died in 1941. His influence faded after the Second World War until Gilles Deleuze revived interest in him in 1966.
Key ideas
- Duration
- Kant confused time with space. Lived time, duration (la durée), is not a series of separate moments set side by side but a qualitative multiplicity in which conscious states permeate one another; in it there is no mechanical causality, and so there is room for freedom.
- Intuition
- Our everyday intelligence is guided by practical needs and divides things up by analysis, giving only relative knowledge. Intuition rises above the divisions between rationalism and empiricism, idealism and realism, and restores the possibility of absolute knowledge and of metaphysics.
- Matter and memory
- Bergson’s Matter and Memory is “frankly dualistic”, affirming the reality of both matter and spirit, but its aim is to overcome the difficulties that have always beset dualism.
- The vital impulse
- Evolution needs two principles: a single original impulse shared by all life, the élan vital, from which every species arises, and a tendency to diverge, which accounts for their variety.
- Closed and open morality
- Closed morality and static religion serve the survival and cohesion of one society, excluding others; Bergson counted Kant’s categorical imperative among them. Open morality and dynamic religion include everyone, aim at peace and spring from creative emotion.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- France
- Period
- Late modern
Influences
Influenced by
Henri Bergson1859–1941
Influenced
Influenced by
Henri Bergson1859–1941
Influenced
Where these links come from
- Henri Bergson argued against Immanuel Kant. Source: Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Henri Bergson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- William James drew on Henri Bergson. Source: Russell Goodman, William James, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Alfred North Whitehead drew on Henri Bergson. Source: Ronald Desmet and Andrew David Irvine, Alfred North Whitehead, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Jean-Paul Sartre drew on Henri Bergson. Source: Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Henri Bergson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew on and argued against Henri Bergson. Source: Ted Toadvine, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), 1889
- Read free at Project Gutenberg (translated by F. L. Pogson)
- Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire), 1896
- Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice), 1907
- Read free at Project Gutenberg (translated by Arthur Mitchell)
- The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932
Sources
- Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Henri Bergson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy