BERGSON, HENRI (1859–1941)

Henri Bergson was the foremost European philosopher of his age. While his ideas have lost favour today, especially among Anglo-American philosophers, in the era immediately before the First World War he enjoyed a huge public renown and an intellectual reach of the kind few technical philosophers can command. He was one of the philosophical leaders of the fin de siècle revolt against rationalism, and sought to construct a philosophical rationale for the rehabilitation of instinct and intuition as sources of knowledge of the world.

Bergson was born in Paris, the son of a Polish Jewish musician and an Anglo-Irish woman. He was educated at the Lycée Condorcet and the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy and graduated top of his year. He held various posts teaching philosophy in lycées before being appointed to a post at the école Normale Supérieure in 1898. From 1900 to 1921 he held the chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, where his public lectures became hugely popular society events, especially for

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Catholics. He was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1901 and to the Académie Française in 1914. By no means an ivory-tower philosopher, he played a minor role in the negotiations that brought the USA into the war in 1917, and from 1921 to 1926 was president of UNESCO’s fore-runner, the Commission for Intellectual Co- operation of the League of Nations. Shortly before his death from bronchitis in 1941, Bergson expressed in several ways his opposition to the Vichy regime: notably, he refused the regime’s offers to exempt him from the operation of its anti-Semitic laws. Bergson, who was not a practising Jew and was strongly attracted to Catholicism, declined to convert at the end of his life chiefly because he wished to show his solidarity with French Jews at a time of persecution. One of the great literary stylists among major philosophers, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. His major works included Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889); Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire, 1896); Creative Evolution (L’Evolution créatrice, 1907); and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932).

Bergson once said that each great philosopher has only one thing to say. For Bergson, that one thing, which he restated in a whole series of influential works over half a century, was summed up in the proposition that time is real. What did this mean?

Bergson thought that the great conundrums of the Western philosophical tradition— free will versus determinism, for example, or idealism versus realism—were unsolved and unsolvable because they had been misstated. His distinctive method was to juxtapose the rival solutions that had been offered to a particular problem, to identify where they overlapped, and then to expose that overlap to expose a confusing misstatement of the problem. Specifically, he argued that a whole range of philosophical conundrums were rooted in a basic confusion of time and space; or, to put it differently, a tendency to think about time as if it were simply another dimension of space. For Bergson real time or duration—‘la durée’ was the French term he used—cannot be grasped by abstract reason, but only directly, by intuition, as one of the ‘immediate data of consciousness’. Crucially, once we take seriously the proposition that time is real, we can see that the future does not yet exist. This may seem obvious, but to Bergson it was fundamentally at odds with philosophical determinism, which rested, he thought, on the assumption that events simply unfold a reality that already exists. For the philosophical determinist, Bergson thought, the future exists in the same sense as China exists for someone who has never been there. Bergson maintained that this was a fundamental error. Determinism was radically incompatible with freedom, and yet we know that we are free.

Bergson’s aim was to combat scientific determinism and to liberate our understanding of the world from the grip of a mechanical and analytical mode of reasoning. Bergson was no crude exponent of the ‘bankruptcy of science’: he had a close knowledge of the scientific thought of his day, making a particularly close study of the technical literature on the brain in connection with aphasia, and took on Einstein in public debate on the implications of the theory of relativity. But he questioned the capacity of the analytical intellect to gain a comprehensive understanding of the world. He thought that mechanistic thinking exercised a stultifying influence. So in his most famous work, Creative Evolution,

he engaged with Darwinism (see DARWIN, CHARLES) and evolutionary ideas more generally, but rejected what he saw as positivist or deterministic theories such as the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Instead, he saw

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the evolution of the universe as a creative process pervaded by a ‘life force’ that ensured (as natural selection did not) that evolution entailed progress.

Bergson’s works had a wide and deep impact on the European intellectual world of his time; and his impact on literary culture was probably greater than his influence on philosophical circles narrowly defined. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past derived its central concern, the unseizable nature of time, from Bergson; while GEORGES SOREL, who like Proust attended Bergson’s lectures and on Bergson’s own admission understood his ideas ‘perfectly’, was profoundly influenced by his critique of determinism in the name of freedom and creativity. Finally, while Bergson’s works were placed on the Index by the Vatican in 1914, he had a notable influence on the Catholic modernists.

BERGSON, HENRI (1859–1941)