BERGSON, HENRI LOUIS

French philosopher who overthrew the exaggerated scientism and mechanistic evolutionism of the 19th century and advanced a new theory of evolution acknowledging the spiritual dimension of man; b. Paris, Oct. 18, 1859; d. Paris, Jan. 4, 1941. Educated at the Lycée Condorcet and the École Normale Supérieure, where he distinguished himself in mathematics and physics, Bergson turned to philosophy, receiving the agrégé in 1881. After

teaching at Angers and Clermont-Ferrand, he returned to Paris in 1888 to teach at the Lycée Henri Quatre and the École Normale Supérieure. At the Collège de France he held the chair of the history of philosophy from 1900 to 1921, attracting huge crowds to his lectures by the beauty and eloquence of his language and by the extraordinary appeal of his message. He became a member of the Académie Française in 1918, was elected president of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation after World War I, and received the Nobel prize for literature in 1927. Although born of Jewish parents, Bergson grew up without religion and began his philosophical career as an enthusiastic follower of Herbert spencer. However, his attempts to give a full and accurate account of reality led him to abandon Spencer's evolutionary theory, and the subsequent development of his thought brought him closer and closer to Catholicism. In his will he confessed his moral adhesion to the Catholic Church and revealed that he would have become a convert had he not felt obliged to remain with his Jewish brethren, then being persecuted under Hitler. Shortly before his death he arose from his sickbed to appear for the registration of Jews in Paris. A Catholic priest said the prayers at his funeral, as he had requested.

Philosophy. Although deeply influenced by evolutionism and empiricism, Bergson rejected the narrow conception of man and of the world characteristic of scientific positivism, and sought to continue the metaphysicospiritualist tradition of maine de biran and Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900). His philosophy constitues a defense of spirit against materialism, intuition against ra tionalism, freedom against determinism (both physical and biological), creativity against mechanism, and philosophy against scientism. Setting out from the "intuition of duration," which is the dominant idea in his philosophy, Bergson offered a renovated empiricism and a new and profoundly original doctrine of evolution.

In a thoroughgoing critique of science Bergson showed why, in his opinion, science does not and cannot give a true picture of life or of reality as a whole. Science is the product of intelligence, which evolved solely to assure man's physical survival and to make possible his dominion over nature. Intelligence views all reality as solid, timeless, and spatial. Since its function is the manipulation of matter for practical purposes, it seeks exact formulas for things and expresses them in ready-made concepts that serve as substitutes for the real. A mechanistic explanation of the universe results. All reality is described as static, homogeneous, discontinuous, and predictable; nothing vital, dynamic, novel, or unforeseeable is admitted. The very structure of intelligence renders it incapable of comprehending life, becoming, spirit, and free dom. The refusal to admit the existence of god, the human soul, or free will is the consequence of recognizing as real only what can be grasped by intelligence.

Although Bergson held that intelligence is man's natural mode of knowing, he believed that the human mind is also capable of intuition—a direct contact or coincidence with things. To think intuitively is to think in duration, thereby experiencing the inner dynamism of being. Bergson regarded intuition as the kind of knowledge proper to philosophy, and attributed the failures of most philosophers to their having ignored intuition and based their metaphysics on abstraction, generalization, and reasoning. The true philosophy dispenses with all ready-made concepts in order to achieve an inner view of being. To communicate his intuition the philosopher must invent new words and employ those images best suited to suggest the inexpressible. According to Bergson, philosophy must be both empirical and intuitive. Although he rejected the prevailing empiricism, it was not because it placed too high a value on experience. Bergson believed that all philosophical problems must be solved according to the experimental method, since it is only experience that can give one certitude. An integral empiricism, however, must admit not only the knowledge of matter, but also all that man knows through intro spection all the vague suggestions of consciousness, all that is revealed in the intuition of duration.

To start with the intellect's view of reality meant for Bergson to attempt a reconstruction of life and movement out of concepts appropriate only to inert matter. He sought to reverse the order and to start with life and movement grasped in intuition. Life (or consciousness) is then seen to be the primordial reality, and matter but its degradation or descending motion. From this fresh perspective reality appears to be ever moving and growing, a ceaseless flux. It is essentially dynamic, qualitative, creative, and unpredictable. To know existing things as they really are is to grasp them intuitively, that is, sub specie durationis. The implications of this approach to reality so impressed William james that he hailed it as a new Copernican revolution comparable in its significance for philosophy to that of G. berkeley or I. kant.

Principal Works. Bergson's leading ideas are encompassed in four principal works. In Time and Free Will he showed that free will is the most evident of facts and that its denial follows upon the confusion of succession with simultaneity, duration with intensity, and quality with quantity. In Matter and Memory he proved that spirit as well as matter exists. By demonstrating that consciousness is not identical with cerebral activity, he paved the way for a proof of the survival of the soul after death. In Creative Evolution, his most famous work, he showed that the mechanistic interpretation of evolution is not justified by the facts. Viewing the data of evolution in the light of his intuition of duration, he described the evolutionary process as the forward thrust of a great spiritual force, the life impulse (élan vital ), rushing through time, insinuating itself into matter, and producing the various living forms culminating in man. Its movement is not predetermined but creative, ever generating novel and unpredictable forms. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion represents the full flowering of Bergson's thought. Morality and religion are traced back to their double source in the evolutionary process. Bergson distinguished two separate moralities and religions—the open and closed moralities, the static and dynamic religions. Closed morality pertains to social cohesion. It is static and rooted in social pressure, the morality of a group enclosed upon itself. It represents a halt in the evolutionary process. Open morality transcends the group to unite all mankind in a common brotherhood. It is progressive and creative, a forward thrust of the élan vital. Whereas closed morality and static religion originate in the instinct for survival, open morality and dynamic religion are inspired by the moral heroes, saints and mystics, those superior representatives of the human race who, like a new species, foreshadow the future condition of man. They draw man upward to a higher spiritual level by their vision of human destiny and of God, the source of all love. It is in the experience of the mystics that Bergson found the most convincing evidence for the existence of God.

Influence and Critique. Bergson's manner of philosophizing—his repugnance for definition and for a technical vocabulary and his method of attacking each problem separately—did not lend itself to the formation of a Bergsonian school. Yet his influence on 20th-century thought has been profound. Among the philosophers whose works reflect a strong Bergsonism are Édouard le roy, Maurice blondel, Max scheler, and Maurice Pradines. Many Catholic scholars, notably Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and Gabriel Marcel, though voicing disagreement on certain points of doctrine, have acknowledged with gratitude his great inspiration. Bergson's influence is also discernible in the thought of numerous scientists, including Alexis carrel, Pierre lecomte du noÜy, and Pierre teilhard de chardin; in many literary works, including those of Marcel proust and Charles pÉguy; and in some schools of painting and music. From the start his books gained unprecedented fame. Appealing to a wide reading public, they were translated into many languages and have been reprinted again and again.

Acclaimed by many of his contemporaries as the long-awaited liberator from the tyranny of materialism, mechanism, and determinism, Bergson was criticized by some for stopping short of the Christian conception of God, creation, the human soul, and free choice. From the viewpoint of Christian doctrine, Bergson's philosophy remains at best—and in spite of his intentions perhaps— ambiguous and incomplete. For the primacy of being as a reality accessible to intellect, he substituted the primacy of becoming as a reality accessible only to intuition. His depreciation of reason necessitated the denial that the existence of God can be rationally demonstrated. Man's approach to God can be only through the intuitive experience of the mystic, he said. God is described as Love and Creative Energy; but since the relationship between Creative Energy and the élan vital is never clearly defined, the distinction between God and creatures remains blurred. The depreciation of rational knowledge also led Bergson to base morality on the infrarational faculty of instinct and the suprarational faculty of intuition. He allowed to reason no essential role in moral obligation; its function is merely to formulate and coordinate moral rules and to assure their logical consistency.

Furthermore, having identified being with becoming, Bergson was forced to deny the substantiality of the soul and to define soul as a duration or participation in the élan vital. While upholding the distinction between soul and body, he was unable to avoid a dualistic position in fixing their mutual relationship. A champion of free will, Bergson rejected all forms of determinism; yet he regarded freedom not as the rational determination of a human act but as the spontaneous bursting forth of vital energy from the depths of the self, a creative but nonrational act expressive of the total personality. To the Catholic philosopher or theologian such points of criticism, together with a misunderstanding of the supernatural character of Christian mysticism, represent important deficiencies in Bergson's thought. Yet no evaluation of his philosophy that is limited to pointing out its metaphysical inadequacies will render it full justice. It must also be seen as the sincere and arduous endeavor of a great soul to discover the truth, a spiritual itinerary from materialistic mechanism to the God known and loved by the Christian mystics.

See Also: time; life philosophies.

Bibliography: Works. Oeuvres, ed. h. gouhier and a. robinet (Paris 1959), critical ed. of Bergson's major works; Time and Free Will (Essais sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience 1889) tr. f. l. pogson (New York 1910; repr. 1950); Matter and Memory (Matière et Mémoire 1896), tr. n. m. paul and w. s. palmer (New York 1911); Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice 1907) tr. a. mitchell (New York 1911); Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays (L'Énergie Spirituelle 1920), tr. h. w. carr (New York 1920); The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris 1932), tr. r. a. audra and c. brereton (New York 1935); The Creative Mind (La Pensée et le Mouvant 1934), tr. m. l. andison (New York 1946), collected essays. Studies. i. w. alexander, Bergson: Philosopher of Reflection (New York 1957). j. chevalier, Henri Bergson, tr. l. a. clare (New York 1928). É. le roy, The New Philosophy of Henri Bergson, tr. v. benson (New York 1913). l. adolphe, La Philosophe religieuse de Bergson (Paris 1946). l. husson, L'Intellectualisme de Bergson (Paris 1947). r. m. mossÉbastide, Bergson éducateur (Thèse; Paris 1955), contains 90 pages of bibliog. m. t. l. penido, La Méthode intuitive de M. Bergson (Paris 1918). b. a. scharfstein, Roots of Bergson's Philosophy (New York 1943). For evaluation of Bergson's thought from the Catholic viewpoint, see esp. j. maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, tr. m. l. and j.g. andison (New York 1955) and É. h. gilson, The Philosopher and Theology, tr. c. gilson (New York 1962).

[i. j. gallagher]