Bergson Henri Louis (1859–1941), French philosopher, the most influential of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Paris and educated at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, he began his teaching career at Clermont-Ferrand in 1884 and was called in 1900 to the Collège de France, where his lectures enjoyed unparalleled success until his retirement in 1921. Ideally placed in la belle époque of prewar Paris, his ideas influenced a broad spectrum of artistic, literary, social, and political movements. In 1918 he received the Légion d’honneur and was admitted into the French Academy. From 1922 through 1925 he participated in the League of Nations, presiding over the creation of what was later to become UNESCO. Forced by crippling arthritis into virtual seclusion during his later years, Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928.
Initially a disciple of Spencer, Bergson broke with him after a careful examination of Spencer’s concept of time and mechanistic positivism. Following a deeply entrenched tradition in Western thought, Spencer treats time (on an analogy with space) as a series of discrete numerical units: instants, seconds, minutes. When confronted with experience, however – especially with that of our own psychological states – such concepts are, Bergson concludes, patently inadequate. Real duration, unlike clock time, is qualitative, dynamic, irreversible. It cannot be ‘spatialized’ without being deformed. It gives rise in us, moreover, to free acts, which, being qualitative and spontaneous, cannot be predicted. Bergson’s dramatic contrast of real duration and geometrical space, first developed in Time and Free Will (1890), was followed in 1896 by the mind – body theory of Matter and Memory. He argues here that the brain is not a locale for thought but a motor organ that, receiving stimuli from its environment, may respond with adaptive behavior. To his psychological and metaphysical distinction between duration and space Bergson adds, in An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), an important epistemological distinction between intuition and analysis. Intuition probes the flow of duration in its concreteness; analysis breaks up duration into static, fragmentary concepts. In Creative Evolution (1907), his best-known work, Bergson argues against both Lamarck and Darwin, urging that biological evolution is impelled by a vital impetus or élan vital that drives life to overcome the downward entropic drift of matter. Biological organisms, unlike dice, must compete and survive as they undergo permutations. Hence the unresolved dilemma of Darwinism. Either mutations occur one or a few at a time (in which case how can they be ‘saved up’ to constitute new organs?) or they occur all at once (in which case one has a ‘miracle’). Bergson’s vitalism, popular in literary circles, was not accepted by many scientists or philosophers. His most general contention, however – that biological evolution is not consistent with or even well served by a mechanistic philosophy – was broadly appreciated and to many seemed convincing. This aspect of Bergson’s writings influenced thinkers as diverse as Lloyd Morgan, Alexis Carrel, Sewall Wright, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and A. N. Whitehead. The contrasts in terms of which Bergson developed his thought (duration/space, intuition/ analysis, life/entropy) are replaced in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) by a new duality, that of the ‘open’ and the ‘closed.’ The Judeo-Christian tradition, he contends, if it has embraced in its history both the open society and the closed society, exhibits in its great saints and mystics a profound opening out of the human spirit toward all humanity. Bergson’s distinction between the open and the closed society was popularized by Karl Popper in his The Open Society and Its Enemies. While it has attracted serious criticism, Bergson’s philosophy has also significantly affected subsequent thinkers. Novelists as diverse as Nikos Kazantzakis, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner; poets as unlike as Charles Péguy, Robert Frost, and Antonio Machado; and psychologists as dissimilar as Pierre Janet and Jean Piaget were to profit significantly from his explorations of duration, conceptualization, and memory. Both French existentialism and American process philosophy bear the imprint of his thought.
See also SPENCER, TIME, WHITEHEAD. P.A.Y.G.