Henri Bergson

Summary

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was one of the most influential and famous French philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Renowned for his theories on time, consciousness, and evolution, Bergson convinced a generation of thinkers that reality is not a static machine, but a fluid, dynamic process. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature and famously caused the first recorded traffic jam on Broadway when people flocked to hear him lecture in New York.

Biography and Historical Context

Born in Paris to a Polish-Jewish father and an English-Jewish mother, Bergson excelled in both mathematics and the humanities. He eventually chose philosophy, climbing the ranks of French academia to secure a prestigious chair at the Collège de France in 1900 ^1.

During the zenith of his career before World War I, "Bergsonism" became a global cultural phenomenon. His lectures were treated as major society events, drawing artists, socialites, and writers alongside academics. In his later years, Bergson's health declined, and his prominence was somewhat overshadowed by the rise of existentialism and analytic philosophy. During the Nazi occupation of France, despite his failing health and fame, he chose to register as a Jew in solidarity against the Vichy regime, refusing exemptions offered to him ^2. He died of bronchitis in Paris in 1941.

Key Philosophical Concepts

Bergson's philosophy reacted against the dominant scientific materialism and determinism of his era. He argued that science provides a useful, mechanistic view of the world for practical survival, but misses the true, inner nature of reality.

Duration (La Durée)

Bergson’s most profound contribution is his distinction between mathematical time and true duration.

Mathematical/Spatialized Time: This is the time measured by clocks. Science treats time like a line or a series of distinct, frozen frames on a film strip. Bergson argued this turns time into space, stripping it of its essence.
Duration (La Durée): This is time as it is actually experienced by human consciousness. It is an indivisible, continuous flow where the past melts into the present, and no two moments are identical.

The Melted Sugar Analogy

To explain duration, Bergson used the example of waiting for a cube of sugar to dissolve in a glass of water. The physical process takes a measurable amount of clock time, but your internal experience of waiting is a qualitative, indivisible stretch of consciousness that cannot be neatly sliced into seconds ^3.

Intuition vs. Intellect

Bergson divided human cognition into two distinct faculties:

The Intellect: The tool of science and practical action. It analyzes, categorizes, and cuts reality up into static concepts so we can manipulate objects. It looks at life from the outside.
Intuition: The tool of philosophy and metaphysics. It is the faculty that allows us to place ourselves inside a process, experiencing its fluid reality directly. For Bergson, intuition is not a vague feeling, but a rigorous effort to think outside spatialized concepts.

Élan Vital (The Vital Impulse)

In his 1907 masterpiece Creative Evolution, Bergson took on Charles Darwin’s mechanistic view of evolution. While he accepted the fact of evolution, he rejected the idea that life evolves purely through blind, accidental mutations and mechanical adaptation.

Instead, he proposed the élan vital—a vital impetus or creative force driving life toward ever-greater complexity, unpredictability, and freedom ^4. Evolution, for Bergson, is an open-ended artistic creation, not a pre-programmed machine.

The Philosophy of Laughter

Bergson also wrote a highly influential essay on aesthetics titled Laughter (Le Rire, 1900). He argued that we laugh whenever we see "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." ^5

When a person acts like a rigid robot—slipping on a banana peel because they failed to adapt their stride, or repeating a phrase mindlessly—they trigger our collective sense of the comic. Laughter, therefore, acts as a social corrective, forcing humans to remain fluid, adaptive, and alive.

Legacy and Influence

Though his popularity waned mid-century, Bergson's influence on Western culture remains immense:

Literature: His concept of durée profoundly shaped the modernist literature of Marcel Proust (who was Bergson's cousin-in-law by marriage), Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, inspiring the "stream of consciousness" technique.
Philosophy: He laid the groundwork for French phenomenology and process philosophy. In the late 20th century, philosopher Gilles Deleuze spearheaded a major Bergsonian revival, utilizing his concepts of "the virtual" and "multiplicity" to reshape modern critical theory ^6.