The French philosopher whose Time and Free Will distinguished spatialized clock-time from lived duration, whose Creative Evolution offered a vitalist alternative to mechanistic Darwinism, and whose 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature recognized the philosophical prose that shaped French literary and intellectual culture for a generation.
bergson
French philosopher (1859–1941), professor at the Collège de France and Nobel laureate in Literature (1928), whose major works — Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion — elaborated a philosophy of duration, intuition, and creative evolution that shaped early twentieth-century French thought and was the dominant philosophical reference in French intellectual life before being eclipsed by phenomenology and existentialism.
Life
Henri-Louis Bergson was born on 18 October 1859 in Paris to a Polish Jewish father (Michal Bergson, a pianist and composer of some note) and an English Jewish mother (Katherine Levison). The family moved between Paris and London during Bergson's childhood; he received the first part of his education in French and English in parallel, and remained bilingual throughout his life.
The family settled in Paris, and Bergson entered the Lycée Condorcet, then the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. The intellectual gifts were extraordinary; he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1878 (in mathematics, his presumed specialization at the time) but switched to philosophy. He took his agrégation in philosophy in 1881 — the highest French academic credential for secondary teaching — alongside Jean Jaurès and Émile Durkheim, classmates with whom he would maintain lifelong (if eventually politically distant) relations.
The early career was as a lycée philosophy teacher in the French provincial school system — Angers (1881–83), Clermont-Ferrand (1883–88), then Paris (1888–97) at the Lycée Henri-IV and other lycées. Provincial teaching gave Bergson time for reading and writing; the doctoral dissertation defended at the Sorbonne in 1889, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (translated into English as Time and Free Will), inaugurated his major philosophical project.
In 1900 Bergson was elected to the chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy at the Collège de France, transferring in 1904 to the chair of Modern Philosophy. The Collège de France lectures, which were open to the public, became one of the cultural phenomena of belle époque Paris. Audiences of several hundred filled the largest available halls; the lectures attracted not only academic philosophers but Marcel Proust (Bergson's distant cousin by marriage), Charles Du Bos, Jacques Maritain, Charles Péguy, T. S. Eliot (visiting from England), the leading intellectual figures of two generations.
The major works followed at intervals: Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory, 1896), the first work to integrate Bergson's philosophy of mind with his philosophy of time; Le rire (Laughter, 1900), the short and widely-translated essay on the comic; L'évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution, 1907), the work that brought him international fame; L'énergie spirituelle (Mind-Energy, 1919), a collection; Durée et simultanéité (Duration and Simultaneity, 1922), Bergson's controversial engagement with Einstein's relativity; Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932), Bergson's last major work, integrating his earlier thought with a new philosophical theology.
The public honors were extensive. The French Academy elected him in 1914; he was given the presidency of the new Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in 1922; the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded in 1928. During the First World War he undertook diplomatic missions to the United States (1917) to argue for American entry into the war.
The last years were shadowed by the rise of National Socialism and the Vichy regime. Bergson had been moving toward Catholicism in his late thinking but refused conversion as the political situation deteriorated, on the ground that he would not abandon his fellow Jews at the moment of their persecution. The Vichy government offered him honorary exemption from the anti-Jewish Statut des Juifs of October 1940; Bergson refused, stood in the cold queue outside the police prefecture to register as a Jew, and died of pulmonary congestion the following January (4 January 1941) at his Paris home.
The Philosophical Project
Bergson's central project was the recovery of the experience of time — the lived continuous duration that the spatialized clock-time of natural science had displaced — as the philosophical foundation for an account of consciousness, life, and being.
Duration and the Critique of Spatialized Time
Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) develops the central distinction between durée (duration, lived time) and temps (the spatialized time of clocks and physics). Lived duration is the continuous flow of consciousness, in which past states persist into present ones and the future is not yet determined. The duration of consciousness is qualitative, irreversible, and continuous; it cannot be quantified without distortion, since to quantify it is already to spatialize it (to represent it as a line of discrete units), to translate the qualitative continuity into a quantitative juxtaposition.
The philosophical traditions of empiricism and rationalism alike, Bergson argues, have spatialized time. They have treated mental states as separable units that succeed one another like beads on a string, when in fact the states interpenetrate and continuously transform one another in a flowing duration. The free will of the actor is genuine because the deliberation that precedes it is itself a temporal duration in which the available options are continuously modified by the act of considering them; the free act is one that expresses the actor's whole accumulated duration up to that point.
The critique of spatialized time and the philosophy of duration runs through all the major Bergsonian works.
Matter and Memory
Matière et mémoire (1896) extends the philosophy of duration to the philosophy of mind. The work argues for an account of perception and memory that resists both the materialist reduction of mind to brain and the idealist reduction of matter to mental construct.
The central distinction is between two forms of memory: habit-memory (the bodily acquired skills and dispositions) and pure memory (the surviving record of the past, retained in consciousness in its qualitative concreteness). Habit-memory is a bodily disposition that can be reactivated; pure memory is the accumulated past itself, continuously available to consciousness and continuously informing present perception.
The theory of perception that Bergson develops on this basis is striking. Perception is not the production of an internal image of external reality; it is the selective filter by which the body, in the interests of practical action, attends to particular aspects of the surrounding material reality. The brain is not the producer of consciousness but its instrument of practical engagement with the world. The brain damages that abolish particular memories, in the standard psychiatric framework Bergson rejects, do not destroy the memories themselves but disable the bodily organ of access to them.
The argument has been widely contested; subsequent neuroscience has provided strong evidence against the strict separation of brain from memory Bergson required. The framework has nevertheless continued to inform philosophy of mind through its absorption into the phenomenological tradition and through its recent re-engagement by Gilles Deleuze (Bergsonism, 1966) and others.
Creative Evolution
L'évolution créatrice (1907), the book that made Bergson internationally famous, applies the philosophy of duration to the philosophy of life. The argument: Darwinian natural selection, conceived mechanistically, cannot account for the actual fact of biological evolution — the production of genuinely novel forms over time. Mechanism, with its juxtaposition of pre-existing parts, cannot generate novelty; the new is genuinely new only if it emerges from a process that is itself temporal and creative, irreducible to its prior conditions.
Bergson posits an élan vital — a vital impulse — as the principle that drives the creative evolution of life. The vital impulse is not a substance distinct from matter but a tendency that works in and through matter, encountering resistance, branching in different directions in response to different resistances, producing the major divisions of biological evolution (vegetable, animal, the various animal phyla) as different solutions to the problem of organizing matter in service of life.
The metaphysics that emerges is a kind of process philosophy with strong affinities to the Whitehead of Process and Reality. Reality is fundamentally temporal, creative, and self-differentiating; the static categories of substance metaphysics distort it; intuition (rather than analytical concept) is the mode of cognition appropriate to genuine duration.
Creative Evolution was the philosophical event of pre-war Paris. The book sold in the tens of thousands; translated immediately into English, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish; treated as the major philosophical statement of the era. The English biological evolutionist Lloyd Morgan, the American biologist H. F. Osborn, the South African Jan Smuts, and the entire vitalist movement of early twentieth-century biology engaged with it directly.
Duration and Simultaneity
Durée et simultanéité (1922) was Bergson's attempt to engage with Einstein's relativity theory, which had become the public scientific event of the period after the British eclipse expedition's confirmation of the bending of light in 1919. Bergson's argument was that Einstein's framework, which treats time as a fourth coordinate of a four-dimensional spacetime, illegitimately spatializes time — just as Bergson had been arguing the older Newtonian physics did. Bergson did not deny the experimental results but argued that the philosophical interpretation of those results in terms of multiple time systems was a category mistake.
The work was widely judged — by Einstein himself, by Hans Reichenbach and the broader philosophy-of-science community — as a misunderstanding of relativity theory. Bergson's reputation in scientific circles, which had been high, declined sharply. The recent recovery of Durée et simultanéité by scholars including Jimena Canales (The Physicist and the Philosopher, Princeton University Press, 2015) and others has complicated this verdict somewhat, arguing that Bergson was making a defensible philosophical point about the relation between physical theory and lived experience even if he misread the technical details.
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Bergson's last major work (1932) develops his philosophy of life into a philosophy of society and religion. Two sources of morality and religion: the closed form (the social pressure of an enclosed community on its members, expressing itself in obligation, conformity, and the static religions of social cohesion), and the open form (the appeal of exemplary moral and religious geniuses, mystics and prophets, whose lives manifest the creative élan vital in its most concentrated form and call others to a wider human community).
The distinction allowed Bergson to integrate the sociological tradition (Durkheim's account of religion as social fact, Levy-Bruhl on primitive mentality) with his earlier vitalist metaphysics. The closed forms are the static products of the élan vital at rest; the open forms are the élan vital breaking through in particular individuals to advance the creative evolution of humanity itself.
The text was widely read as moving Bergson toward Catholic theology — a reading he himself never explicitly affirmed but which the public formal evidence of his late years (the conversations with the Catholic intellectual Jacques Chevalier, the late readings of mystical theology, the deathbed considerations) does not contradict.
Reception
The Bergsonian moment in French intellectual life ended in the 1930s with the rise of phenomenology (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty studied Husserl during their German exchange year of 1933–34) and the existentialist generation that displaced Bergson as the dominant French philosophical reference. The Vichy years and the silence around Bergson's posthumous reputation in the early postwar period (when Sartre dominated French intellectual life and treated Bergson as obsolete) further reduced his standing.
The Bergsonian recovery in the second half of the twentieth century came principally through Gilles Deleuze, whose Bergsonism (1966) and treatment of the cinema in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) reactivated Bergson as a resource for contemporary thought. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's last lectures (collected as The Visible and the Invisible, posthumously) returned to Bergson with appreciation. The English-speaking recovery has been more recent, driven by Suzanne Guerlac (Thinking in Time, Cornell University Press, 2006), Mark Sinclair, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and others.
Significance
Bergson's importance has three dimensions. As philosopher of time, his distinction between duration and spatialized time supplied the conceptual framework within which much twentieth-century philosophical and literary engagement with temporality unfolded — from Proust and Joyce in literature to phenomenology and process philosophy in academic thought. As philosopher of life, the élan vital of Creative Evolution gave the most influential early twentieth-century philosophical alternative to mechanistic biology and shaped the broader vitalist movement and its successors. As philosopher of religion, the Two Sources offered a distinctive integration of sociological and mystical perspectives on religion that has remained a reference point for philosophical reflection on the religious dimension of human life.