Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson (Paris, 1859 – Paris, 1941) was a French philosopher of Jewish origin and one of the most influential thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century. His work belongs to the continental tradition and grew out of a reaction against the positivism that dominated late nineteenth-century France. His lasting contribution lies in arguing that immediate experience and intuition grasp aspects of reality that abstract rationalism and science cannot reach. In 1927 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his ideas.

He was born into a family of Polish-Jewish background: his father, Michał Bergson, was a musician, and his mother had English and Irish roots. He spent his first years in London, and as a child moved with his family to France, where he later became a French citizen. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet and at the École Normale Supérieure, where he trained in philosophy. After several years teaching in provincial lycées, in Angers and Clermont-Ferrand among them, he defended in 1889 his dissertation on the immediate data of consciousness. He returned to the École Normale in 1898 and in 1900 took a chair at the Collège de France, where his lectures drew large crowds. In 1914 he was elected to the Académie française.

His major books form a clear sequence. In the Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness he analysed lived time, or duration, which cannot be measured as a string of separate instants. Matter and Memory (1896) distinguished a mechanical memory, built on habit and repetition, from a memory that preserves the past in its singularity. Laughter (1900) treated the comic as a mechanical stiffness that society corrects through ridicule, since life demands flexibility. In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) he set out his method: intuition, which enters an object from within, as opposed to analysis, which breaks it up from outside and serves mainly practical action. Creative Evolution (1907) argued that life is an impulse, the élan vital, that produces new forms and cannot be explained by mechanisms alone. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) contrasted a closed morality, sustained by social pressure and habit, with an open morality driven by mysticism and love.

In his thought, the decisive opposition is not between subject and object but between space and time. Space is the measurable, stable realm useful for action; time is duration, a creative continuity grasped only from within. Bergson criticised what he saw as false problems, produced by treating time as a series of static snapshots. This led him to debate Einstein's theory of relativity: he recognised its physical value but held that simultaneity does not exhaust the experience of lived time. Though ill during the German occupation, he presented himself in person to be registered as a Jew, and he opposed the Vichy regime in several ways.

His influence was considerable in France and beyond. Marcel Proust, a relative of his wife, read him closely, and his ideas inspired writers such as Antonio Machado. In 1966 Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme, which revived interest in his work. His critique of rationalism and his defence of lived experience anticipated later debates about consciousness and time. Today he is read as a thinker of creativity and freedom who used images and metaphors to say what abstract concepts cannot.