Bergson is known for his arguments that processes ofimmediate experience andintuition are more significant than abstractrationalism and science for understanding reality. Bergson was awarded the 1927Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented".[5] In 1930, France awarded him its highest honour, theGrand-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 theRepublic's officials.[6]
in 1932,The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion)
In 1900, theCollège de France appointed Bergson Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy, which he remained until 1904. He then replacedGabriel Tarde as the Chair of Modern Philosophy until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers.[7]
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from thePalais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859. His father, the composer and pianistMichał Bergson, was ofPolish-Jewish background[8][9][10][11][12] (originally bearing the nameBereksohn). His great-grandmother,Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with theHasidic movement.[8][9] His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from anEnglish-Jewish andIrish-Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family[10] of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather,Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg called Zbytkower [pl], was a prominent banker and a protégé ofStanisław II Augustus,[11][12] king of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
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, and Henri became a naturalized French citizen.
Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Dissertation, 1889)Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit (Dissertation, 1889)
Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known as theLycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education,[14] but lost his faith between the ages of 14 and 16. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory ofevolution, according to which humanity shares a common ancestry with modernprimates, a process construed as needing no creative deity.[15]
The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand, Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts fromLucretius, with a critical study ofDe Rerum Natura, issued asExtraits de Lucrèce, and of Lucretius'smaterialistcosmology (1884), repeated editions of which attest to its value in promoting Classics among French youth. While teaching and lecturing in this part of his country (theAuvergne region), Bergson found time for private study and original work. He crafted his dissertation,Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a shortLatin thesis onAristotle (Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit, "On the Concept of Place in Aristotle") for hisdoctoral degree, which was awarded by theUniversity of Paris in 1889. The work was published in the same year byFélix Alcan. He also gave courses in Clermont-Ferrand on thePre-Socratics, in particularHeraclitus.[17]
Bergson dedicatedTime and Free Will toJules Lachelier (1832–1918), thenpublic education minister, a disciple ofFélix Ravaisson and the author ofOn the Founding ofInduction (Du fondement de l'induction, 1871). Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism". According toLouis de Broglie,Time and Free Will "antedates by forty years the ideas ofNiels Bohr andWerner Heisenberg on the physical interpretation of wave mechanics."[18]
Bergson settled again in Paris in 1888,[19] and after teaching for some months at themunicipal college, known as theCollege Rollin, he received an appointment at theLycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. There, he readDarwin and gave a course on his theories.[17] Although Bergson had previously endorsedLamarckism and its theory of theheritability of acquired characteristics, he came to prefer Darwin's hypothesis of gradual variation, which were more compatible with his continual vision of life.[17]
In 1896, Bergson published his second major work,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 relationship of body and mind. Bergson spent years of research in preparation for each of his three large works. This is especially obvious inMatter and Memory, which shows thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological investigations carried out during the period.
At the firstInternational Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August 1900, Bergson read a short 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 that had previously appeared in theRevue de Paris,Laughter (Le rire), one of the most important of Bergson's minor works. This essay on the meaning of comedy stemmed from a lecture he had given in his early days in Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, especially its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life. The paper's main thesis is that laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings. People laugh at those who fail to adapt to society's 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 "something mechanical encrusted on the living".[20][21]
On the death ofGabriel Tarde, the sociologist and philosopher, in 1904, Bergson succeeded him as Chair of Modern Philosophy. From 4 to 8 September of that year, he visitedGeneva, attending the Second International Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured onThe 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 atHeidelberg. In these years, Bergson strongly influencedJacques Maritain, perhaps even saving Maritain and his wife Raïssa from suicide.[22][23]
Bergson's third major work,Creative Evolution, the most widely known and most discussed of his books, appeared in 1907. Pierre Imbart de la Tour remarked thatCreative Evolution was a milestone of a new direction in thought.[24] By 1918,Alcan, the publisher, had issued 21 editions, making an average of two editionsper annum for ten years. Following the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity increased enormously, not only in academic circles but among the general public.
At that time, Bergson had already extensively studied biology, including the theory offecundation (as shown in the first chapter of theCreative Evolution), which had only recently emerged, ca. 1885 – no small feat for a philosopher specializing in thehistory of philosophy, in particular Greek and Roman philosophy.[17] 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,[17] as well asHugo de Vries, from whom he quoted hismutation theory of evolution (which he opposed, preferring Darwin's gradualism).[17] He also quotedCharles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the successor ofClaude Bernard at the Chair of Experimental Medicine in the Collège de France.
Bergson served as a juror withFlorence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding thePrix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919 and 1954 to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.[25]
Bergson travelled to London in 1908 and met there withWilliam James, theHarvard University philosopher who was Bergson's senior by 17 years, and who was instrumental in calling Bergson's work to the attention of the Anglo-American public. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under the 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 periodicalLa Critique philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, titledLe Sentiment de l'effort. Four years later, a couple of articles by him appeared in the journalMind: "What is an Emotion?" and "On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology". Bergson quoted the first two of these inTime and Free Will. In 1890–91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental workThe Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon Bergson observed. Some writers[who?], taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking that James's investigations had been proceeding since 1870 (registered from time to time by various articles that culminated inThe Principles), have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.
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.[26]
The most noteworthy tributes James paid to Bergson come in theHibbert Lectures (A Pluralistic Universe), which James gave atManchester 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".
Bergson's influence 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 bookA Pluralistic Universe in 1909, impelled many English and American readers to investigate Bergson's philosophy, but no English translations of Bergson's major work had yet appeared. James encouraged and assistedArthur Mitchell in preparing an English translation ofCreative 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. The next year, the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work ensued. By coincidence, in that same year (1911), Bergson wrote a 16-page preface,Truth and Reality, to the French translation of James's bookPragmatism. 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 atBologna, 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, andCreative 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.
In May 1911, Bergson gave two lectures,The Perception of Change (La perception du changement), at theUniversity of Oxford. TheClarendon Press published these in French in the same year.[27] His talks were concise and lucid, leading students and the general reader to his other, longer writings. Oxford later conferred on him the degree ofDoctor of Science.
Two days later he delivered theHuxley Lecture at theUniversity of Birmingham, taking for his subjectLife and Consciousness. This subsequently appeared inThe Hibbert Journal (October 1911), and, revised, is the first essay in the collected volumeMind-Energy (L'Énergie spirituelle). In October he again travelled to England, where he had an enthusiastic reception, and delivered atUniversity College London four lectures onLa Nature de l'Âme (The Nature of the Soul).
In 1913, Bergson visited the United States of America at the invitation ofColumbia University and lectured in several American cities, where very large audiences welcomed him. In February, at Columbia, he lectured both in French and English, taking as his subjectsSpirituality and Freedom andThe Method of Philosophy. Being again in England in May of that year, he accepted the presidency of the BritishSociety for Psychical Research, and delivered to it an address,Phantoms of Life and Psychic Research (Fantômes des vivants et recherche psychique).
Meanwhile, his popularity increased, and translations of his work began to appear in a number of languages:English,German,Italian,Danish,Swedish,Hungarian,Polish, andRussian. In 1914 Bergson's countrymen honoured him by his election as a member of theAcadémie française. He was also made President of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques and became Officier de laLégion d'honneur and Officier de l'Instruction publique.
Bergson found disciples of many types. In France movements such asneo-Catholicism andModernism on the one hand andsyndicalism on the other endeavoured to absorb and appropriate for their own ends some of his central ideas. The continental organ of socialist and syndicalist theory,Le Mouvement socialiste,[28] portrayed the realism ofKarl Marx andPierre-Joseph Proudhon as hostile to all forms of intellectualism, and argued, therefore, that supporters of Marxist socialism should welcome a philosophy such as Bergson's.[citation needed] 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 theConfédération Générale du Travail and theIndustrial 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. TheRoman Catholic Church, however, banned Bergson's three books on the charge ofpantheism (that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his Creation and of being himself created in the process of the Creation).[17] They were placed on theIndex of prohibited books (Decree of 1 June 1914).
In 1914, the Scottish universities arranged for Bergson to give the famousGifford Lectures, planning one course for the spring and another for the autumn. Bergson delivered the first course, consisting of 11 lectures, under the titleThe Problem of Personality, at theUniversity 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 silent during the conflict, and gave some inspiring addresses. As early as 4 November 1914, he wrote an article, "Wearing and Nonwearing Forces" (La force qui s'use et celle qui ne s'use pas), that appeared in a periodical of thepoilus,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 byThe Daily Telegraph in honour of KingAlbert I of Belgium,King Albert's Book (Christmas, 1914).[29] In 1915, he was succeeded in the office of President of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques byAlexandre Ribot, and then delivered a discourse on "The Evolution of German Imperialism". Meanwhile, he found time to issue at the Minister of Public Instruction's request 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 that led to theentry of the United States into the war. He was there when the French Mission underRené Viviani paid a visit in April and May 1917 after America's entry into the conflict. Viviani's bookLa Mission française en Amérique (1917) has a preface by Bergson.
Early in 1918, theAcadémie française received Bergson officially when he took his seat among "The Select Forty" as successor toEmile Ollivier (the author of the historical workL'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 showed his philosophy's central idea in action.
As many of Bergson's contributions to French periodicals remained relatively inaccessible, he had them 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 titleSpiritual Energy: Essays and Lectures (reprinted asMind-Energy –L'Énergie spirituelle : essais et conférences). The advocate of Bergson's philosophy in England,Wildon Carr, prepared an English translation under the titleMind-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 asLe 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, theUniversity of Cambridge honoured him with the degree ofDoctor 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 philosopherÉdouard Le Roy, who supported aconventionalist stance on thefoundations of mathematics, which was adopted by Bergson.[30] Le Roy, who also succeeded to Bergson at the Académie française and was a fervent Catholic, extended torevealed truth his conventionalism, leading him to privilege faith, heart and sentiment todogmas, speculative theology and abstract reasoning. Like Bergson's, his writings were placed on the Index by the Vatican.
In 1922, Bergson's bookDurée et simultanéité, à propos de la théorie d'Einstein (Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe) was published.[31] Earlier that year,Albert Einstein had come to the French Society of Philosophy and briefly replied to a short speech made by Bergson.[32] It has been alleged that Bergson's knowledge of physics was insufficient and that the book did not follow up contemporary developments on physics.[by whom?] On the other hand, 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.[33]Duration and Simultaneity was not published in the 1951Edition du Centenaire in French, which contained all of his other works, and was only published later in a work gathering different essays, titledMélanges. This work took advantage of Bergson's experience at theLeague of Nations, where he presided from 1920 to 1925 over theInternational Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (the ancestor ofUNESCO, and which included Einstein andMarie Curie).[34]
After his retirement from the Collège de France, Bergson began to fade into obscurity: he suffered from a degenerative illness (rheumatism, which left him half paralyzed[17]). 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 1932. It was respectfully received by the public and the philosophical community, but by that time Bergson's days as a philosophical luminary were past. He was, however, able to reiterate his core beliefs near the end of his life, by renouncing all the posts and honours previously awarded him rather than accept exemption from theantisemitic laws of theVichy 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."[36] Though wishing to convert to Catholicism, as stated in his will, he did not do so in view of the travails inflicted on the Jewish people by the rise ofNazism andantisemitism in Europe in the 1930s; he did not want to appear to want to leave the persecuted. After the fall of France in 1940, Jews in occupied France were required to register at police stations. When completing his police form, Bergson made the following entry: "Academic. Philosopher. Nobel Prize winner. Jew."[37] It was the position of the Archbishop of Paris,Emmanuel Célestin Suhard, that the public revelation of Bergson's conversion was too dangerous at the time, when the city was occupied by the Nazis, to both the Church and the Jewish population.[38]
On 3 January 1941, Bergson died in occupied Paris of bronchitis.[39] A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request. Bergson is buried in the Cimetière de Garches,Hauts-de-Seine.
Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly mechanistic predominant view of causality (as expressed in reductionism). He argued that free will must be allowed 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 ofduration, 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-personintuition.[40]
Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasizes pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as aprocess philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity,free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, thefoundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.[41]
CriticizingKant's theory of knowledge exposed in theCritique of Pure Reason and his conception of truth – which he compares toPlato'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 andintuition, 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 pureduration. Because of his (relative) criticism of intelligence, he makes frequent use of images and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use ofconcepts, which (he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things. For instance, he says inThe 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 himself in water, and only then can thought to 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.[42]
The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself againstHerbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transposeCharles Darwin's theory ofevolution in philosophy and to construct acosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.[43]
Bergson'sLebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) can be seen as a response to themechanistic philosophies of his time,[44] but also to the failure offinalism.[17] 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";[17] such a description of finalism was adopted, for instance, byLeibniz.[17]
Bergson regards planning for the future as impossible since time itself unravels unforeseen possibilities. Indeed, one can always explain a historical event retrospectively by its conditions of possibility. But, in the introduction to thePensée et le mouvant, he explains that such an event retrospectively created its causes, taking the example of the creation of a work of art, for example a symphony: it was impossible to predict a future symphony as if the composer knew what symphony would be best and wrote 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, theélan vital, in life, which disperses itself through evolution into contradictory tendencies (he substituted for the finalist notion of ateleological aim the notion of an original impulse).
The foundation of Henri Bergson's philosophy, his theory ofDuration, he discovered when trying to improve what he saw as the inadequacies ofHerbert Spencer's philosophy.[44] Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time andconsciousness in his doctoral thesisTime and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as a response to another of his influences:Immanuel Kant.[45]
Kant believed that free will could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of private existence in the universe, separate from water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, it could therefore not be ascertained whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.[45] Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation.[46] 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.[47] For Bergson, reality is composed of change.[48]
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 ofintuition. Two images from Henri Bergson'sAn 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 offer a model of the city through a construction of photographs taken from every possible point of view, yet it can never produce the dimensional value of walking in the city itself. One can only grasp this through intuition; likewise the experience of reading a line ofHomer. 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.[49]
Élan vital ranks as Bergson's third essential concept, after Duration and intuition. An idea with the goal of explaining evolution, theélan vital first appeared in 1907'sCreative Evolution. Bergson portraysélan 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 ofvitalism—although he criticized it explicitly inThe Creative Evolution, as he thought, againstDriesch andJohannes Reinke (whom he cited) that there is neither "purely internal finality nor clearly cut individuality in nature":[50]
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.[51]
InLaughter: 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).[17] He describes the process of laughter (refusing to give a conceptual definition which would not approach its reality[17]), used in particular by comics andclowns, 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).[17] However, Bergson warns 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'sself-esteem.[52] This essay made his opposition to theCartesian theory of the animal-machine obvious.
From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism from different quarters, although he also became very popular and durably influencedFrench philosophy. The mathematicianÉdouard 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".[53]
According to a 2024 article inDaily Nous, in 1910 Bergson was the most cited philosopher in English academic journals, cited more than Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel.[54]
Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged Bergson's influence on hisprocess philosophy in his 1929Process and Reality.[55] However,Bertrand Russell, Whitehead's collaborator onPrincipia 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.[56] TheepistemologistGaston Bachelard explicitly alluded to him in the last pages of his 1938 bookThe Formation of the Scientific Mind. Others influenced by Bergson includeVladimir Jankélévitch, who wrote a book on him in 1931,[57]Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, andGilles Deleuze who wroteLe bergsonisme in 1966.[58] The Greek philosopherHelle Lambridis developed an interest in Bergson early in her career, and after two publications in 1929 - a book that introduced Bergson's work to the Greek audience and a translation into Greek of Bergson's bookL'Énergie spirituelle (1919) - the second part of herIntroduction to Philosophy I & II (1965) included his philosophical work on the concept of 'time', although this part (II) was not published until 2004.[59][60] Bergson also influenced thephenomenology ofMaurice Merleau-Ponty andEmmanuel Levinas,[61] although Merleau-Ponty had reservations about Bergson's philosophy.[62] The Greek authorNikos Kazantzakis studied under Bergson in Paris and his writing and philosophy were profoundly influenced as a result.[63]
TheVatican accused Bergson ofpantheism, while others have characterized his philosophy as amaterialist emergentism –Samuel Alexander andC. Lloyd Morgan explicitly claimed Bergson as their forebear.[17] 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 amystical experience, roughly outlined at the end ofLes 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 their work, Peirce 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."[75] Peirce also comments on Bergson in respect to a proposed book on his semiotics (which he never wrote) saying: "I feel confident the book would make a serious impression much deeper and surer than Bergson's, which I find quite too vague."[76] Gilles Deleuze, however, saw much in common between Bergson's philosophy and that of Peirce - exploring the many connections between them inCinema 1: The Movement Image andCinema 2: The Time-Image. As the Deleuze scholar David Deamer writes: Deleuze sets about "aligning Bergson's sensory-motor schema [fromMatter and Memory] with the semiosis of Charles Sanders Peirce fromPragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903).[77]William James's students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson. See, for example,Horace Kallen's book on the subjectJames and Bergson. AsJean Wahl described the "ultimate disagreement" between James and Bergson in hisSystem 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".[page needed] 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 onHermann 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 ofTime and Free Will. According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor ("extended images") to describe the nature of mathematics as well aslogic in general. "Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number plausible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general", writes Russell.[78]
Suzanne Guerlac has argued that the more recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Bergson is related to the growing influence of his followerDeleuze withincontinental 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."[79]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, andduration 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 inCreative Evolution ... Thus Bergson became a resource in the criticism of theHegeliandialectic, the negative."[80] It is this aspect that Mark Sinclair focuses upon inBergson (2020). He writes that despite the philosopher and his philosophy being very popular during the early years of the twentieth century, his ideas had been critiqued and then rejected first byphenomenology, then byexistentialism, and finally bypost-structuralism.[81] As Sinclair goes on to explain, over series of publications includingBergsonism (1966) andDifference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze championed Bergson as a thinker of "difference that precedes any sense of negation".[82] In this way, "Deleuze's interpretation served to keep the flame of Bergson's philosophy alive and it has been a key motivation for the renewed scholarly attention to it."[82]
Ilya Prigogine acknowledged Bergson's influence at his Nobel Prize reception lecture: "Since my adolescence, I have read many philosophical texts, and I still remember the spellL'Évolution créatrice cast on me. More specifically, I felt that some essential message was embedded, still to be made explicit, in Bergson's remark: 'The more deeply we study the nature of time, the better we understand that duration means invention, creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new.'"[83]
Japanese philosopher Yasushi Hirai from Fukuoka University has led a collaborative and interdisciplinary project since 2007, bringing together Eastern and Western philosophers and scientists to discuss and promote Bergson's work.[84] This has influenced the development of specific artificial neural networks which incorporate features inspired by Bergson's philosophy of memory.[85][86]
InThe Matter with Things,Iain McGilchrist extensively cites Bergson. "'Bergson arrived', according to philosopher Peter Gunter, 'at insights closely resembling those of quantum physics.' Only Bergson got there first."[87]
SeveralHindu authors have found parallels to Hindu philosophy in Bergson's thought. The integrative evolutionism ofSri 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.[88] K Narayanaswami Aiyer, a member of theTheosophical 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.[89] 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.[90][91][92]
Bergson, H.;The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius (La Philosophie de la Poesie: le Génie de Lucrèce, 1884), Philosophical Library 1959:ISBN978-1-4976-7566-7
Bergson, H.;Mind-energy (L'Énergie spirituelle, 1919). McMillan 1920. – a collection of essays and lectures. OnArchive.org.
Bergson, H.;Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe (Durée et simultanéité, 1922). Clinamen Press Ltd 1999.ISBN1-903083-01-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.ISBN0-268-01835-9. OnArchive.org.
Bergson, H.;The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (La Pensée et le mouvant, 1934). Citadel Press 1946:ISBN0-8065-2326-3 – essay collection, sequel toMind-Energy, including 1903's "An Introduction to Metaphysics."
^abHenri Bergson. 2014. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 13 August 2014
^ab"Z ziemi polskiej do Nobla" [From the Polish lands to the Nobel Prize].Wprost (in Polish). Warsaw: Agencja Wydawniczo-Reklamowa Wprost. 4 January 2008. Retrieved10 May 2010.Polskie korzenie ma Henri Bergson, jeden z najwybitniejszych pisarzy, fizyk i filozof francuski żydowskiego pochodzenia. Jego ojcem był Michał Bergson z Warszawy, prawnuk Szmula Jakubowicza Sonnenberga, zwanego Zbytkowerem (1756–1801), żydowskiego kupca i bankiera. [Translation: Henri Bergson, one of the greatest French writers, physicists and philosophers of Jewish ancestry, had Polish roots. His father was Michael Bergson from Warsaw, the great-grandson of Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg – known as Zbytkower – (1756–1801), a Jewish merchant and banker.]
^Henri Hude,Bergson, Paris, Editions Universitaires, 1990, 2 volumes, quoted by Anne Fagot-Largeau in her21 December 2006 course at the College of France
^Gerono, Camille Christopher; Terquem, Oiry; Laisant, Charles-Ange; Bricard, Raoul; Boulanger, Auguste (1878).Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques. 2. Paris. p. 268. Retrieved15 March 2018.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Louis de Broglie, (1969[1947])The concept of contemporary physics and Bergson’s Ideas on Time and Motion, in Bergson and the evolution of physics, Pete A.Y. Gunter (Ed. and trans.) Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, p47.
^Henri Bergson: Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey. London: Continuum, 2002, p. ix.
^Reberioux, M. (January–March 1964). "La gauche socialiste française:La Guerre Sociale etLe Mouvement Socialiste face au problème colonial" [French right-wing socialism:La Guerre Sociale andLe Mouvement Socialiste in the face of the colonial problem].Le Mouvement Social (in French) (46). Editions l'Atelier/Association Le Mouvement Social:91–103.doi:10.2307/3777267.JSTOR3777267.... deux organes, d'ailleurs si dissembables, ou s'exprime l'extrême-gauche du courant socialiste français: leMouvement socialiste d'Hubert Lagardelle et laGuerre sociale de Gustave Hervé. Jeune publications – leMouvement socialiste est fondé en janvier 1899, laGuerre sociale en décembre 1906 –, dirigées par de jeunes équipes qui faisaient profession de rejeter le chauvinisme, d'être attentives au nouveau et de ne pas reculer devant les prises de position les plus véhémentes, ...
^Canales J.,The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton, Princeton Press, 2015.
^Lawlor, Leonard; Moulard Leonard, Valentine (2016),"Henri Bergson", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.),The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved10 December 2019
^Bergson explores these topics inTime and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, inMatter and Memory, inCreative Evolution, and inThe Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics.
^The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 11 to 14
^abHenri Bergson,The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 11 to 13.
^abThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Henri Bergson": "'Time and Free Will' has to be seen as an attack on Kant, for whom freedom belongs to a realm outside of space and time."
^Henri Bergson,Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Author's Preface.
^Lambridis, Helle (2004).Introduction to PhilosophyΕισαγωγή στη Φιλοσοφία. Athens: Academy of Athens.ISBN9604040480.
^Karapanou, Anna, ed. (2017).In Memory of Helle LambridisΈλλη Λαμπρίδη: αφιέρωμα στη μνήμη της. Athens: Hellenic Parliament Foundation. p. 55.ISBN9786185154189.
^Dermot Moran,Introduction to Phenomenology, 2000, pp. 322 and 393.
^see his early bookImagination – although Sartre also appropriated himself Bergsonian thesis on novelty as pure creation – seeSituations I Gallimard 1947, p. 314
^see the latter's two books on the subject:Le Bergsonisme, une Mystification Philosophique andLa fin d'une parade philosophique: le Bergsonisme both of which had a tremendous effect on Frenchexistential phenomenology
^Perry, Ralph Barton (1935).The thought and character of William James, as revealed in unpublished correspondence and notes, together with his published writings. Boston, Little, Brown, and company.
^Charles Sanders Peirce,Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Volume VII & VIII, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966, p. 428.
^Deamer, David (2014).Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility. Bloomsbury. p. 27.ISBN9781441145895.
Alfaro Altamirano, Adriana (2021).The Belief in Intuition : Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.ISBN9780812297911.
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.
