Henri Bergson
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| birth_place = Paris, France
1941 | 4 | 10 | mf=y}}| death_place = Paris, France | Continental philosophy
{{awd>Nobel Prize in Literature|1927}}| main_interests = Metaphysics, Epistemology, philosophy of language, | philosophy of mathematicsSøren Kierkegaard>Kierkegaard, Baruch Spinoza | , Immanuel Kant>Kant, William James | , Charles Darwin>Darwin, Felix Ravaisson-Mollien | , Herbert Spencer>Spencer, Schelling, Maine de Biran | Gilles Deleuze>Deleuze, Jean Gebser | , Nikos Kazantzakis>Kazantzakis, Kuki Shūzō | , Maurice Merleau-Ponty>Merleau-Ponty, Marcel Proust | , Alfred North Whitehead>Whitehead, Vladimir Jankélévitch | Duration (Bergson)>Duration, Intuition, | Élan Vital,
Open Society}}
Henri-Louis Bergson ({{IPA-fr|bɛʁksɔn}} 18 October 1859–4 January 1941) was a
French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century.Bergson convinced many young people through his writing that immediate experience and intuition were as important as rational and scientific thinking for understanding reality.
Biography
Overview
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the
Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859 (the year in which France emerged as a victor in the
Second Italian War of Independence and over a month before the publication of
Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species). His father, the musician
Michał Bergson had a
Polish Jewish family background (originally bearing the name Bereksohn). His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and
Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called
Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and King
Stanisław August Poniatowski's protégé
(1)(2). His family lived in London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the
English language from his mother. Before he was nine, his parents crossed the
English Channel and settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized citizen of the Republic.Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of
Marcel Proust (1871–1922), in 1891. They had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896.Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson (also known as
Moina Mathers), married the English
occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris as well.Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works:
- in 1889, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience)
- in 1896, Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire)
- in 1907, Creative Evolution (L'Evolution créatrice)
- in 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion)
In 1900 the
College of France selected Bergson to a Chair of Greek and Latin Philosophy, which he held until 1904. He then replaced
Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy, which he held until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers.
Education and career
Bergson attended the
Lycée Fontaine (known as the
Lycée Condorcet 1870-1874 and 1883- ) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. Having received a Jewish religious education{{Citation needed|date=December 2008}}, he of course read the
Bible, including the
Genesis.{{Citation needed|date=November 2009}} Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the
theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares common ancestry with modern primates and was not necessarily created by a God or gods.
(3){{Verify source|date=September 2009}}While at the lycée Bergson won a prize for his scientific work and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen, for the solution of a mathematical problem. His solution was published the following year in
Annales de Mathématiques. It was his first published work. After some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the
humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, to the dismay of his teachers.
(4) When he was nineteen, he entered the famous
École Normale Supérieure. During this period, he read
Herbert Spencer.
(5)(6)In 1901 the
Académie des sciences morales et politiques elected Bergson as a member, and he became a member of the Institute. In 1903 he contributed to the
Revue de métaphysique et de morale a very important essay entitled
Introduction to Metaphysics (
Introduction à la metaphysique), which is useful as a preface to the study of his three large books. He detailed in this essay his philosophical program, realized in the
Creative Evolution (7).On the death of
Gabriel Tarde, the eminent sociologist and philosopher, in 1904, Bergson succeeded him in the Chair of Modern Philosophy. From 4 to 8 September of that year he visited
Geneva, attending the
Second International Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured on
The Mind and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion (Le cerveau et la pensée: une illusion philosophique). An illness prevented his visiting Germany to attend the
Third Congress held at
Heidelberg.His third major work,
Creative Evolution, undoubtedly{{Citation needed|date=November 2009}} the most widely known and most discussed of his books, appeared in 1907. It constitutes one of the most profound and original contributions to the philosophical consideration of evolution. Pierre Imbart de la Tour remarked that
Creative Evolution was a milestone of new direction in thought.{{Citation needed|date=November 2009}} By 1918,
Alcan, the publisher, had issued twenty-one editions, making an average of two editions
per annum for ten years. Following the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity increased enormously, not only in academic circles, but among the general reading public.At that time, Bergson had already made an extensive study of
biology, knowing of the theory of
fecundation (as shown by the first chapter of the
Creative Evolution), which had only recently emerged, ca. 1885 — no small feat for a philosopher specializing in the
history of philosophy, in particular of Greek and Latin philosophy.
(8)The most noteworthy tributes James paid to Bergson come in the
Hibbert Lectures (A Pluralistic Universe), which James gave at
Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London. He remarks on the encouragement he has received from Bergson's thought, and refers to the confidence he has in being "able to lean on Bergson's authority." (Also see James's reservations about Bergson below).The influence of Bergson had led James "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that
logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be". It had induced him, he continued, "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it".These remarks, which appeared in James's book
A Pluralistic Universe in 1909, impelled many English and American readers to an investigation of Bergson's philosophy for themselves, but no English translations of Bergson's major work had yet appeared. James, however, encouraged and assisted Dr.
Arthur Mitchell in his preparation of the English translation of
Creative Evolution. In August 1910 James died. It was his intention, had he lived to see the completion of the translation, to introduce it to the English reading public by a prefatory note of appreciation. In the following year the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work was the result. By a coincidence, in that same year (1911), Bergson penned a preface of sixteen pages entitled
Truth and Reality for the French translation of James's book, "Pragmatism". In it he expressed sympathetic appreciation of James's work, coupled with certain important reservations.In April (5th to 11th) Bergson attended the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at
Bologna, in Italy, where he gave an address on "Philosophical Intuition". In response to invitations he visited England in May of that year, and on several subsequent occasions. These visits were well received{{By whom|date=September 2009}}. His speeches offered new perspectives{{Which?|date=November 2009}} and elucidated many passages in his three major works:
Time and Free Will,
Matter and Memory, and
Creative Evolution. Although necessarily brief statements, they developed and enriched the ideas in his books and clarified for English audiences the fundamental principles of his philosophy.
The lectures on change
In May 1911 Bergson visited the
University of Oxford, where he delivered two lectures entitled
The Perception of Change (
La perception du changement), which the
Clarendon Press published in French in the same year.
(9)As he had a delightful gift of lucid and brief exposition, when the occasion demands such treatment, these lectures on change formed a most valuable synopsis or brief survey of the fundamental principles of his thought, and served the student or general reader alike as an excellent introduction to the study of the larger volumes. Oxford honoured its distinguished visitor by conferring upon him the degree of
Doctor of Science.Two days later he delivered the
Huxley Lecture at the
University of Birmingham, taking for his subject
Life and Consciousness. This subsequently appeared in
The Hibbert Journal (October, 1911), and since revised, forms the first essay in the collected volume
Mind-Energy (
L'Energie spirituelle). In October he again travelled to England, where he had an enthusiastic reception, and delivered at
University College London four lectures on
La Nature de l'Âme [The nature of the soul].In 1913 Bergson visited the United States of America at the invitation of
Columbia University, New York, and lectured in several American cities, where very large audiences welcomed him. In February, at Columbia University, he lectured both in French and English, taking as his subjects:
Spirituality and Freedom and
The Method of Philosophy. Being again in England in May of the same year, he accepted the Presidency of the
British Society for Psychical Research, and delivered to the Society an impressive address:
Phantoms of Life and Psychic Research (Fantômes des vivants et recherche psychique).Meanwhile, his popularity increased, and translations of his works began to appear in a number of languages: English, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. In 1914 Bergson's fellow-countrymen honoured him by his election as a member of the
Académie française. He was also made President of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, and in addition he became Officier de la
Légion d'honneur, and Officier de l'Instruction publique.Bergson found disciples of many varied types, and in France movements such as
Neo-Catholicism or
Modernism on the one hand and
Syndicalism on the other, endeavoured to absorb and to appropriate for their own immediate use and propaganda some of the central ideas of his teaching. That important continental organ of socialist and syndicalist theory,
Le Mouvement socialiste, portrayed the realism of
Karl Marx and
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as hostile to all forms of intellectualism, and that, therefore, supporters of Marxian socialism should welcome a philosophy such as that of Bergson.{{Citation needed|date=September 2009}} Other writers, in their eagerness, asserted the collaboration of the Chair of Philosophy at the College de France with the aims of the
Confédération Générale du Travail and the
Industrial Workers of the World. It was claimed that there is harmony between the flute of personal philosophical meditation and the trumpet of social revolution.While social revolutionaries endeavoured to make the most out of Bergson, many
leaders of religious thought, particularly the more liberal-minded theologians of all creeds, e.g., the Modernists and Neo-Catholic Party in his own country, showed a keen interest in his writings, and many of them endeavoured to find encouragement and stimulus in his work. The
Roman Catholic Church however took the step of banning Bergson's three books, accused of
pantheism (that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his Creation and of being himself created in the process of the Creation
(10)In 1915 he was succeeded in the office of President of the
Académie des Sciences morales et politiques by
Alexandre Ribot, and then delivered a discourse on "The Evolution of German
Imperialism". Meanwhile he found time to issue at the request of the Minister of Public Instruction a brief summary of French Philosophy. Bergson did a large amount of travelling and lecturing in America during the war. He participated to the negotiations which led to the
entry of the United States in the war. He was there when the French Mission under
René Viviani paid a visit in April and May 1917, following upon America's entry into the conflict. Viviani's book
La Mission française en Amérique (1917), contains a preface by Bergson.Early in 1918 the
Académie française received Bergson officially when he took his seat among "The Select Forty" as successor to
Emile Ollivier (the author of the historical work
L'Empire libéral). A session was held in January in his honour at which he delivered an address on Ollivier. In the war, Bergson saw the conflict of Mind and Matter, or rather of Life and Mechanism; and thus he shows us the central idea of his own philosophy in action. To no other philosopher has it fallen, during his lifetime, to have his philosophical principles so vividly and so terribly tested.File:Bergson-Nobel-photo.jpg|thumb|left|Bergson in 1927.
He was awarded the
1927
Nobel Prize in LiteratureNobel Prize in LiteratureAs many of Bergson's contributions to French periodicals remained relatively inaccessible, he agreed to the request of his friends{{Which?|date=November 2009}} to have such works collected and published in two volumes. The first of these was being planned when war broke out. The conclusion of strife was marked by the appearance of a delayed volume in 1919 . It bears the title
Spiritual Energy: Essays and Lectures (L'Energie spirituelle: essais et conférences). The advocate of Bergson's philosophy in England, Dr.
Wildon Carr, prepared an English translation under the title
Mind-Energy. The volume opens with the Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1911, "Life and Consciousness", in a revised and developed form under the title "Consciousness and Life". Signs of Bergson's growing interest in social ethics and in the idea of a future life of personal survival are manifested. The lecture before the Society for Psychical Research is included, as is also the one given in France,
L'Âme et le Corps, which contains the substance of the four London lectures on the Soul. The seventh and last article is a reprint of Bergson's famous lecture to the Congress of Philosophy at Geneva in 1904,
The Psycho-Physiological Paralogism (Le paralogisme psycho-physiologique), which now appears as
Le cerveau et la pensée: une illusion philosophique. Other articles are on the False Recognition, on Dreams, and Intellectual Effort. The volume is a most welcome production and serves to bring together what Bergson wrote on the concept of mental force, and on his view of "tension" and "detension" as applied to the relation of matter and mind.In June 1920, the
University of Cambridge honoured him with the degree of
Doctor of Letters. In order that he might devote his full time to the great new work he was preparing on ethics, religion, and sociology, the Collège de France relieved Bergson of the duties attached to the Chair of Modern Philosophy there. He retained the chair, but no longer delivered lectures, his place being taken by his disciple, the mathematician and philosopher
Edouard Le Roy, who supported a
conventionalist stance on the
foundations of mathematics, which was adopted by Bergson.
(11) Le Roy, who also succeeded to Bergson at the
Académie française and was a fervent Catholic, extended to
revealed truth his conventionalism, leading him to privilege faith, heart and sentiment to
dogmas, speculative
theology and abstract reasonings. Like Bergson's, his writings were placed on the Index by the Vatican.Bergson then published
Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe (
Durée et simultanéité), a book on
physics, which he followed with a polemical conversation with
Albert Einstein at the French Society of Philosophy.
(12)Though wanting to convert to Catholicism, he held off in view of the travails inflicted on the Jewish people by the
Nazis and by their French collaborators, and showed solidarity with his fellow Jews by signing the registry books.
(13)A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request. Henri Bergson is buried in the Cimetière de Garches,
Hauts-de-Seine.
Philosophy
Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly mechanistic predominant view of causality (as expressed in, say,
finalism). He argued that we must allow space for free will to unfold in an autonomous and unpredictable fashion. While Kant saw free will as something beyond time and space and therefore ultimately a matter of faith, Bergson attempted to redefine the modern conceptions of time, space, and causality in his concept of
Duration, making room for a tangible marriage of free will with causality. Seeing Duration as a mobile and fluid concept, Bergson argued that one cannot understand Duration through "immobile" analysis, but only through experiential, first-person
intuition.Bergson's other philosophical concepts include
Élan vital, or the living, creative force that he saw as driving evolution and also as showing up in mankind's impulse to create{{Citation needed|date=January 2010}}. Bergson also discussed the nature and mechanism of laughter.
Creativity
Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasises pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a
process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity,
free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the
foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.
(14)Criticizing
Kant's theory of knowledge exposed in the
Critique of Pure Reason and his conception of truth — which he compares to
Plato's conception of truth as its symmetrical inversion (order of nature/order of thought) — Bergson attempted to redefine the relations between science and metaphysics, intelligence and
intuition, and insisted on the necessity of increasing thought's possibility through the use of intuition, which, according to him, alone approached a knowledge of the absolute and of real life, understood as pure
duration. Because of his (relative) criticism of intelligence, he makes a frequent use of images and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use of
concepts, which (he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things. For instance, he says in
The Creative Evolution (chap.III) that thought in itself would never have thought it possible for the human being to swim, as it cannot deduce swimming from walking. For swimming to be possible, man must throw itself in water, and only then can thought consider swimming as possible. Intelligence, for Bergson, is a practical faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty, a product of evolution used by man to survive. If metaphysics is to avoid "false problems", it should not extend to pure speculation the abstract concepts of intelligence, but rather use intuition.
(15)The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against
Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy — Spencer had attempted to transpose
Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a
cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "
survival of the fittest"). Although Spencer is considered{{By whom|date=February 2010}} as an important influence of Bergson, some{{Who|date=February 2010}} have downplayed such influence, as it seems{{Or|date=February 2010}} that Bergson would have very early criticized Spencer.
(16) but also to the failure of
finalism.
(17)Kant believed that free will could only exist outside of time and space, that we could therefore not know whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith.
(18) In reality, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. This made determinism an impossibility and freewill pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration.
(19) Intuition
{{See also|Intuition (Bergson)}}Duration then is a unity and a multiplicity, but, being mobile, it cannot be grasped through immobile concepts. Hence one can grasp it only through Bergson’s method of
intuition. Two images from Henri Bergson’s
An Introduction to Metaphysics may help one to grasp intuition, the limits of concepts, and the ability of intuition to grasp the absolute. The first image is that of a city. Analysis, or the creation of concepts through the divisions of points of view, can only ever give us a model of the city through a construction of photographs taken from every possible point of view, yet it can never give us the dimensional value of walking in the city itself. One can only grasp this through intuition; likewise the experience of reading a line of
Homer. One may translate the line and pile commentary upon commentary, but this commentary too shall never grasp the simple dimensional value of experiencing the poem in its originality itself. The method of intuition, then, is that of getting back to the things themselves.
(20) Élan vital
{{See also|Élan vital}}Élan vital ranks as Bergson's third essential concept, after Duration and intuition. An idea with the goal of explaining evolution, the Élan vital first appeared in 1907’s
Creative Evolution. Bergson portrays Élan vital as a kind of vital impetus which explains evolution in a less mechanical and more lively manner, as well as accounting for the creative impulse of mankind. This concept led several authors to characterize Bergson as a supporter of
vitalism—although he criticized it explicitly in
The Creative Evolution, as he thought, against
Driesch and
Johannes Reinke (whom he cited) that there is neither "purely internal finality nor clearly cut individuality in nature":
(21)Hereby lies the stumbling block of vitalist theories (...) It is thus in vain that one pretends to reduce finality to the individuality of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it encompasses the whole of life in one indivisible embrace.(22)
Laughter
In the idiosyncratic
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Bergson develops a theory not of laughter itself, but of how laughter can be provoked (see his objection to Delage, published in the 23rd edition of the essay).
(23) This essay made his opposition to the
Cartesian theory of the animal-machine obvious.
(24)) and
Emmanuel Lévinas.
(25) The Greek author
Nikos Kazantzakis studied under Bergson in Paris and his writing and philosophy were profoundly influenced as a result.
(26)Many writers of the early 20th century criticized Bergson's
intuitionism, indeterminism,
psychologism and interpretation of the scientific impulse. Those who explicitly criticized Bergson (either in published articles or in letters) included
Bertrand Russell (see his short book
(27)on the subject),
George Santayana (see his study on the author in "Winds of Doctrine"),
G. E. Moore,
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Julien Benda (see his two books on the subject),
T. S. Eliot,
Paul Valéry (despite some recent claims otherwise),
Andre Gide (see below),
Jean Piaget (see his book
Insights and Illusions of Philosophy 1972), Marxist philosophers such as
Theodor W. Adorno (see "Against Epistemology"),
Lucio Colletti (see "Hegel and Marxism"), ,
Jean-Paul Sartre (see his early book
Imagination — although Sartre also appropriated himself Bergsonian thesis on novelty as pure creation - see
Situations I, Gallimard 1947, p. 314) and
Georges Politzer (see the latter's two books on the subject:
Le Bergsonisme, une Mystification Philosophique and
La fin d'une parade philosophique: le Bergsonisme both of which had a tremendous effect on French
existential phenomenology), as well as (the non-Marxist)
Maurice Blanchot (see
Bergson and Symbolism), American philosophers such as
Irving Babbitt,
Arthur Lovejoy,
Josiah Royce,
The New Realists (
Ralph B. Perry,
E. B. Holt, and
William P. Montague), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake,
Roy W. Sellars, C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers),
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
Roger Fry (see his letters),
Julian Huxley (in
(Evolution: The Modern Synthesis)) and
Virginia Woolf (for the latter, see
Ann Banfield,
The Phantom Table).The
Vatican accused Bergson of
pantheism, while
free-thinkers{{Who|date=September 2009}} (who formed a large part of the teachers and professors of the
French Third Republic) accused him of
spiritualism. Still others have characterized his philosophy as a
materialist emergentism —
Samuel Alexander and
C. Lloyd Morgan explicitly claimed Bergson as their forebear.
[ According to Henri Hude (1990, II, p. 142), who supports himself on the whole of Bergson's works as well as his now published courses, accusing him of pantheism is a "counter-sense". Hude alleges that a mystical experience, roughly outlined at the end of Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, is the inner principle of his whole philosophy, although this has been contested by other commentators.Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception to those who associated him with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing his work with that of Bergson he wrote, “a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his utmost to muddle all distinctions.” William James’s students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson. See, for example, Horace Kallen’s book on the subject James and Bergson. As Jean Wahl described the “ultimate disagreement” between James and Bergson in his System of Metaphysics: “for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action...must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth”{{Page needed}}. Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will over-estimate Bergson’s influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for “the spirit of the age”.As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked certain key concepts in Bergson’s philosophy, above all his view of the New and the indeterminate:]the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time,” he writes in his book on Lotze, “does not practically affect the method of investigation;...the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. This is no great renunciation; for that consummation of science...is by no one really expected.
According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, claims which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson’s understanding of number in chapter two of Time and Free-will. According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor (“extended images”) to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. “Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number possible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general”, writes Russell (see The Philosophy of Bergson{{page number}} and A History of Western Philosophy{{page number}}).Furthermore, writers such as Russell, Wittgenstein, and James saw élan vital as a projection of subjectivity onto the world. The external world, according to certain{{Which?|date=November 2009}} theories of probability, provides less and less indeterminism with further refinement of scientific method. In brief, one should not confuse the moral, psychological, subjective demand for the new, the underivable and the unexplained with the universe.{{Citation needed|date=January 2010}} One's subjective sense of duration differs the (non-human) world, a difference which, according to the ancient materialist Lucretius should not be characterized as either one of becoming or being, creation or destruction (De Rerum Natura). See also
Bergson's concepts:
Related themes:
Related theorists:
Notes
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[WEB, Zbigniew Wojtasiński,weblink Polish language, Wprost.pl, 2010-02-17, ]
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[Testament starozakonnego Berka Szmula Sonnenberga z 1818 roku]
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[Henri Hude, Bergson, Paris, Editions universitaires, 1990, 2 volumes, quoted by Anne Fagot-Largeau in her 21 December 2006 course at the College of France]
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[Anne Fagot-Largeau, 21 December 2006 course at the College of France (audio file of the course)]
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[ He obtained there the degree of Licence-ès-Lettres, and this was followed by that of Agrégation de philosophie in 1881.The same year he received a teaching appointment at the lycée in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou. Two years later he settled at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the Puy-de-Dôme département.The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of the text and of the materialist cosmology of the poet (1884), a work whose repeated editions{{Which?|date=November 2009}} give sufficient evidence of its useful place in the promotion of classical study among the youth of France. While teaching and lecturing in this part of his country (the Auvergne region), Bergson found time for private study and original work. He crafted his dissertation Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle (Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit), for his doctoral degree which was awarded by the University of Paris in 1889. The work was published in the same year by Félix Alcan. He also gave courses in Clermont-Ferrand on the Pre-Socratics, in particular on Heraclitus.][Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier (1832–1918), then public education minister, a disciple of Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) and the author of a philosophical work On the Founding of Induction (Du fondement de l'induction, 1871). Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism". (Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the École Normale Supérieure. Compare his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in 1900.)Bergson settled again in Paris{{When|date=November 2009}}, and after teaching for some months at the municipal college, known as the College Rollin, he received an appointment at the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. There, he read Charles Darwin and gave a course on him.][ Although Bergson had previously endorsed Lamarckism and its theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics, he came to prefer Darwin's hypothesis of gradual variations, which were more compatible with his continuist vision of life.][In 1896 he published his second major work, entitled Matter and Memory. This rather difficult, but brilliant, work investigates the function of the brain and undertakes an analysis of perception and memory, leading up to a careful consideration of the problems of the relation of body and mind. Bergson had spent years of research in preparation for each of his three large works. This is especially obvious in Matter and Memory, where he showed a thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological investigations which had been carried out during the period.In 1898 Bergson became Maître de conférences at his alma mater, l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, and later in the same year received promotion to a Professorship. The year 1900 saw him installed as Professor at the Collège de France, where he accepted the Chair of Greek and Latin Philosophy in succession to Charles L'Eveque.At the First International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August, 1900, Bergson read a short, but important, paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality" (Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance à la loi de causalité). In 1900 Felix Alcan published a work which had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris, entitled Laughter (Le rire), one of the most important of Bergson's minor productions. This essay on the meaning of comedy stemmed from a lecture which he had given in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. The main thesis of the work is that laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings. We laugh at people who fail to adapt to the demands of society, if it seems their failure is akin to an inflexible mechanism. Comic authors have exploited this human tendency to laugh in various ways, and what is common to them is the idea that the comic consists in there being "something mechanical encrusted on the living".][p.39]
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[Seth Benedict Graham A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSO-SOVIET ANEKDOT 2003 p.2]
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[Anne Fagot-Largeau, 21 December 2006 course at the College of France (audio file of the course)]
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[ He also most certainly had read, apart from Darwin, Haeckel, from whom he retained his idea of a unity of life and of the ecological solidarity between all living beings,][ as well as Hugo de Vries, whom he quoted his mutation theory of evolution (which he opposed, preferring Darwin's gradualism).][ He also quoted Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the successor of Claude Bernard at the Chair of Experimental Medicine in the College of France, etc.] Relationship with James and Pragmatism
Bergson travelled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:"So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy."
As early as 1880 James had contributed an article in French to the periodical La Critique philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, entitled Le Sentiment de l'Effort. Four years later a couple of articles by him appeared in the journal Mind: "What is an Emotion?" and "On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology". Bergson quoted the first two of these articles in his 1889 work, Time and Free Will. In the following years 1890-91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon observed by Bergson. Some writers, taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking the fact that James's investigations had been proceeding since 1870 (registered from time to time by various articles which culminated in "The Principles"), have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.It has been suggested{{By whom|date=September 2009}} that Bergson owes the root ideas of his first book to the 1884 article by James, "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology," which he neither refers to nor quotes. This article deals with the conception of thought as a stream of consciousness, which intellect distorts by framing into concepts. Bergson replied to this insinuation by denying that he had any knowledge of the article by James when he wrote Les données immédiates de la conscience.{{Citation needed|date=October 2009}} The two thinkers appear to have developed independently until almost the close of the century. They are further apart in their intellectual position than is frequently supposed. Both have succeeded in appealing to audiences far beyond the purely academic sphere, but only in their mutual rejection of "intellectualism" as final is their real unanimity. Although James was slightly ahead in the development and enunciation of his ideas, he confessed that he was baffled by many of Bergson's notions. James certainly neglected many of the deeper metaphysical aspects of Bergson's thought, which did not harmonize with his own, and are even in direct contradiction. In addition to this, Bergson can hardly be considered a pragmatist. For him, "utility," far from being a test of truth, was in fact the reverse: a synonym for error.Nevertheless, William James hailed Bergson as an ally. Early in the century (1903) he wrote:I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read since years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure that that philosophy has a great future, it breaks through old cadres and brings things into a solution from which new crystals can be got.
[Bergson and his philosophy Chapter 1: Life of Bergson]
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[BOOK, Bergson, Henri, La perception du changement; conférences faites à l'Université d'Oxford les 26 et 27 mai 1911, The perception of change: lectures delivered at the University of Oxford on 26 and 27 May 1911, 1911, Clarendon, Oxford, French, 37, ]
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[) by placing them upon the Index of prohibited books (Decree of 1 June 1914).] Later life
In 1914, the Scottish universities arranged for Bergson to deliver the famous Gifford Lectures, planning one course for the spring and another for the autumn. The first course, consisting of eleven lectures, under the title of The Problem of Personality, was delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the Spring of that year. The course of lectures planned for the autumn months had to be abandoned because of the outbreak of war. Bergson was not, however, silent during the conflict, and he gave some inspiring addresses. As early as 4 November 1914, he wrote an article entitled Wearing and Nonwearing forces (La force qui s'use et celle qui ne s'use pas), which appeared in that unique and interesting periodical of the poilus, Le Bulletin des Armées de la République Française. A presidential address, The Meaning of the War, was delivered in December, 1914, to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.Bergson contributed also to the publication arranged by The Daily Telegraph in honour of King Albert I of the Belgians, King Albert's Book (Christmas, 1914).[BOOK, King Albert’s book : a tribute to the Belgian king and people from representative men and women throughout the world, 1914, The Daily Telegraph, London, 187, ]
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[See Chapter III of The Creative Evolution]
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[ The latter book has been often considered as one of his worst, many alleging that his knowledge of physics was very insufficient, and that the book did not follow up contemporary developments on physics.][ It was not published in the 1951 Edition du Centenaire in French, which contained all of his other works, and was only published later in a work gathering different essays, titled Mélanges. Duration and simultaneity took advantage of Bergson's experience at the League of Nations, where he presided starting in 1920 the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation (the ancestor of the UNESCO, which included Einstein, Marie Curie, etc.).][Living with his wife and daughter in a modest house in a quiet street near the Porte d'Auteuil in Paris, Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 for having written The Creative Evolution. Because of serious rheumatics ailments, he could not travel to Stockholm, and sent instead a text subsequently published in La Pensée et le mouvant][.After his retirement from the Collège, Bergson began to fade into obscurity: he suffered from a degenerative illness (rheumatics, which left him half paralyzed][). He completed his new work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, which extended his philosophical theories to the realms of morality, religion and art, in 1935. It was respectfully received by the public and the philosophical community, but all by that time realized that Bergson's days as a philosophical luminary were past. He was, however, able to reiterate his core beliefs near the end of his life, by renouncing all of the posts and honours previously awarded him, rather than accept exemption from the antisemitic laws imposed by the Vichy government.Bergson inclined to convert to Catholicism, writing on February 7, 1937: My thinking has always brought me nearer to Catholicism, in which I saw the perfect complement to Judaism.][Quoted in: BOOK, Zolli, Eugenio, Israel Zolli, Before the Dawn,weblink 1954, 2008, Ignatius Press, 9781586172879, 89,weblink ]
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[WEB,weblink Henri Bergson - Philosopher - Biography, Egs.edu, 1941-01-03, 2010-02-17, ]
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[Bergson explores these topics in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, in Matter and Memory, in Creative Evolution, and in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics.]
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[Elie Duhring, « Fantômes de problèmes », published by the Centre International d'Etudes de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine (short version first published in Le magazine littéraire, n°386, April 2000 (issue dedicated to Bergson)]
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[ Henri Bergson’s Lebensphilosophie (Philosophy of Life) can be seen as a response to the mechanistic philosophies of his time,][Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 11 to 13.]
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[ Indeed, he considers that finalism is unable to explain "duration" and the "continuous creation of life", as it only explains life as the progressive development of an initially determined program — a notion which remains, for example, in the expression of a "genetic program";][ such a description of finalism was adopted, for instance, by Leibniz.][Bergson regarded planning beforehand for the future as impossible, since time itself unravels unforeseen possibilities. Indeed, one could always explain a historical event retrospectively by its conditions of possibility. But, in the introduction to the Pensée et le mouvant, he explains that such an event created retrospectively its causes, taking the example of the creation of a work of art, for example a symphony: it was impossible to predict what would be the symphony of the future, as if the musician knew what symphony would be the best for his time, he would realize it. In his words, the effect created its cause. Henceforth, he attempted to find a third way between mechanism and finalism, through the notion of an original impulse, the élan vital, in life, which dispersed itself through evolution into contradictory tendencies (he substituted to the finalist notion of a teleological aim a notion of an original impulse).] Duration
{{See also|Duration (Bergson)}}The foundation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer’s philosophy.[The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy "'Time and Free Will' has to be seen as an attack on Kant, for whom freedom belongs to a realm outside of space and time."]
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[Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Author's Preface.]
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[The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy For Bergson — and perhaps this is his greatest insight — freedom is mobility.]
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[Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, pages 160 to 161.]
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[L'Evolution créatrice, pp. 42-44; pp. 226-227]
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[''L'Evolution créatrice, pp. 42-43]
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[ He describes the process of laughter (refusing to give a conceptual definition which would not approach its reality][), used in particular by comics and clowns, as the caricature of the mechanism nature of humans (habits, automatic acts, etc.), one of the two tendencies of life (degradation towards inert matter and mechanism, and continual creation of new forms).][ However, Bergson warns us that laughter’s criterion of what should be laughed at is not a moral criterion and that it can in fact cause serious damage to a person’s self-esteem.][Henri Bergson's theory of laughter. A brief summary.]
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Criticisms and reception
From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism from different quarters, although he also became very popular and durably influenced French philosophy — the epistemologist Gaston Bachelard, for example, explicitly alluded to him in the last pages of his 1938 book (The Formation of the Scientific Mind). The mathematician Edouard Le Roy became Bergson's main disciple. Others influenced by Bergson include Vladimir Jankélévitch, who wrote a book on him (Henri Bergson) in 1931, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Gilles Deleuze who wrote Le bergsonisme in 1966 (transl. 1988). Bergson is also often classified as an influence upon the process philosophy of (beside Deleuze) Alfred North Whitehead, as well as the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (although he{{Who|date=November 2009}} had enormous reservations about his philosophy, see the volume "The Incarnate Subject"[BOOK, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bjelland, Andrew G., Burke, Patrick, preface by Jacques Taminiaux ; translation by Paul B. Milan, The incarnate subject : Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the union of body and soul, 2001, Humanity Books, Amherst, N.Y., 1573929158, 152, ]
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[Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, pages 322 and 393.]
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[Peter Bien, Three Generations of Greek Writers, Published by Efstathiadis Group, Athens, 1983]
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[BOOK, Russell, Bertrand, Bertrand Russell, The philosophy of Bergson, 1977, Folcroft Library Editions, Folcroft, Pa., 0841473714, 36, ]
Bibliography
- (Time and Free Will|Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness) 1910. (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience 1889) Dover Publications 2001: ISBN 0-486-41767-0 – Bergson's doctoral dissertation
- Matter and Memory 1911. (Matière et mémoire 1896) Zone Books 1990: ISBN 0-942299-05-1, Dover Publications 2004: ISBN 0-486-43415-X
- Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic 1900. (Le rire) Green Integer 1998: ISBN 1-892295-02-4, Dover Publications 2005: ISBN 0-486-44380-9
- Creative Evolution 1910. (L'Evolution créatrice 1907) University Press of America 1983: ISBN 0-8191-3553-4, Dover Publications 1998: ISBN 0-486-40036-0, Kessinger Publishing 2003: ISBN 0-7661-4732-0, Cosimo 2005: ISBN 1-59605-309-7
- Mind-energy 1920. (L'Energie spirituelle 1919) McMillan. – a collection of essays and lectures
- Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe 1922. Clinamen Press Ltd. ISBN 1-903083-01-X
- The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 1932. (Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion) University of Notre Dame Press 1977: ISBN 0-268-01835-9
- The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics 1946. (La Pensée et le mouvant 1934) Citadel Press 2002: ISBN 0-8065-2326-3 – essay collection, sequel to Mind-Energy, including 1903's "An Introduction to Metaphysics"
External links
Works online
{{Wikisource author}}* Works by Henri Bergson in French at "La Philosophie"
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