Bergson, Henri

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BERGSON, HENRI

BERGSON, HENRI (1859–1941), French philosopher.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity following the 1907 publication of Creative Evolution; elected to the French Academy in 1914, he received a Nobel prize in literature in 1927. His major books include Time and Free Will (1889), which described the temporal dimension of human consciousness as synonymous with creative freedom, and Matter and Memory (1896), a philosophical analysis of the relation of mind to body. In addition he published more specialized studies, the most notable being Duration and Simultaneity (1922) and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932); his complete writings and additional correspondence were later collected in his Oeuvres (1959) and Mélanges (1972).

Born in Paris on 18 October 1859, Bergson came from a Jewish background: his father, an accomplished musician, was Polish, while his mother hailed from northern England. After attending the École Normale Supérieure from 1878 to 1881, Bergson was appointed professor of philosophy, eventually gaining a post at the Lycée Clermont-Ferrand in 1883. In 1888 he moved back to Paris where he taught at the Lycée Henri IV (1890–1897) before being appointed senior lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure (1897–1900). In 1891 he married Louise Neuberger, and in 1893 they had a daughter, Jeanne, who would later become a painter. In 1900 Bergson was named professor of philosophy at the Collège de France, where he remained until his resignation in 1921 because of poor health. Before 1914 Bergson disseminated his ideas through public lectures at the Collège de France and speaking tours that took him to Italy (1911), England (1911), and the United States (1913). Aside from attracting such period luminaries as the writer Charles Péguy, the Catholic Thomist Jacques Maritain, and the anarchosyndicalist Georges Sorel, Bergson's weekly lectures drew an educated public, which further consolidated his international fame. By 1914 all his major works had been translated into English, German, Polish, and Russian.

Bergson's influence before 1914 was pervasive, in part because of the relation his philosophy had to the widespread "revolt against positivism" that typified the era. Central to Bergson's philosophy was an instrumental conception of the intellect and an attempt to define intuition as a mode of cognition able to grasp the creative essence of durée (duration), Bergson's term for time. The intellect reduced all temporal phenomena—the very essence of life—into quantative and deterministic schemas designed to suit the intellect's utilitarian ends. Intuition by contrast allow humans to enter into living things to grasp their unique character and creative potential. As a result intuition revealed the qualitative, rhythmic, and organic properties of the natural world. Bergson labeled all forms of life material manifestations of a vital impulse (élan vital) resulting in the rhythmic unfolding of temporality into extensity, Bergson's term for spatial form. Concrete extensity, argued Bergson, is composed of nothing more than changes in tension or energy, in short, qualitative movement. Bergson compared this movement to a melody and argued that all that distinguished the durational melody of matter from that of human consciousness is the faster rhythm of the latter when compared to the former. In Bergson's cosmology, matter itself possessed a latent consciousness, taking its place as the slowest rhythm on the scale of being whose degrees of rhythmic tension are a function of the degree of freedom inherent in their activity. Human beings, by virtue of their unique ability to intuit duration, are at the apex of the cosmological chain of being, and within the human species itself, artists, mystics, scientists, and metaphysicians are singled out as having developed their intuitive capacities to the utmost. Thus artists took up an exalted position in Bergson's metaphysics, which accounts for his widespread appeal among avant-garde artists of his generation.

Historians have charted the impact his concept of psychological durée had on the development of Anglo-American literature: authors as diverse as Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens all registered his influence. In France Bergson gained a widespread following among French symbolists and a younger generation that included Péguy, the novelist Marcel Proust, and the poet and essayist Paul Valéry. In Russia the pattern repeated itself, with symbolists such as Andrei Bely and postsymbolists such as Osip Mandelstam and the futurist Velimir Khlebnikov all falling under the sway of Bergsonism. Bergson's impact was just as central to European avant-gardists associated with the visual arts. The fauvist Henri Matisse, the French cubists Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, the Italian futurists Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini, the English vorticist Wyndham Lewis, and the Russians Mikhail Larionov and Kazimir Malevich were among those profoundly influenced by the philosopher.

Among contemporary scientists and philosophers, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, William James, Nishida Kitaro, Henri Poincaré, and Alfred North Whitehead all benefited from exposure to Bergson. Bergson's claim in Creative Evolution that durée found expression not only in art but also in an élan vital (vital impulse) was welcomed by occultists as support for their spiritualist critique of scientific and biological determinism. Bergson also influenced proponents of Catholic modernism, including Édouard Le Roy, and Alfred Firmin Loisy, who critiqued the rationalist assumptions underlying the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The rise of modernism provoked a backlash within the Catholic Church, which culminated in the placing of Bergson's book on the papal index of prohibited books in 1914. Bergson was caught up in other "culture wars": members of Charles Maurras's monarchist organization, Action Française, attacked Bergson in the name of French rationalism; Sorel conjured with Bergson's philosophy in formulating a voluntarist theory of revolution; and the writers Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde pitted Bergson against Émile Durkheim in their well-publicized attack on pedagogy at the Sorbonne. Prominent intellectuals even switched sides in the battle over Bergson: thus the former Bergsonian Jacques Maritain wrote a neo-Thomist diatribe against him in 1913, while the British critic T. E. Hulme rejected Bergson following his exposure to Action Française in 1911. The "Bergsonian controversy" came to an abrupt end, however, when the European intelligentsia was swept up in World War I, and Bergson temporarily suspended his philosophical pursuits while playing a diplomatic role in the French war effort.

See alsoAvant-Garde; Fin de Siècle; France; Modernism.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London, 1910. Translation of Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889).

——. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York, 1911. Reprint, Lanham, Md., 1984. Translation of L'Évolution créatrice (1907).

——. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London, 1911. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y., 2001. Translation of Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l'esprit (1896).

——. Oeuvres. Edited by André Robinet. Paris, 1959.

——. Mélanges. Edited by André Robinet. Paris, 1972.