(1859-1941)
Henri Bergson was
born in Paris in 1859. His father was Jewish from Poland and his
mother was Anglo-Irish. He was gifted in mathematics, and at an early
age won an award for a unique solution to a mathematical problem, as
well as a solution to a complex problem that Pascal had claimed to
have solved (though he failed to have it published). At the age of
eighteen, Bergson attended the École Normale Supérieure for four
years, after which he began a career in teaching at Clermont-Ferrand
in 1883. In the following year at Clermont-Ferrand, he published a
critical study of the philosophy and poetry of Lucretius that has
continued to be influential to Classical studies in France to date.
Bergson was awarded his doctorate in 1889 for his Essai sur les
données immediates de la conscience (Time and Free Will) along with
a short Latin thesis. The essay was published the same year by Felix
Alcan in his series La Bibliothèque de philosophie contemporaine.
Bergson shifted his
focus away from mathematics and mechanics, preferring to develop his
thoughts, first presented in Time and Free Will, in the humanities
and philosophy, particularly to concepts of the mind, the intuition
and the experience of time, or duration. Matter and Memory, his next
publication in 1896, continues these investigations. For Bergson
duration involves the succession of conscious states in an
immeasurable flow, and real time therefore is the experience of
duration as apprehended by intuition, time perceived as indivisible.
He is led to a theory of mind-body relations, opposing the preference
of the separate operations of instinct and intellect. In 1903 he
wrote An Introduction to Metaphysics, which is a further elaboration
of the central role that the intuition plays on his theory of
knowledge.
Bergson was promoted
to a professorship in 1898, and became Maitre de conferences at his
Alma Mater, L'École Normale Superieure. Two years later he received
another professorship at the Collège de France, where he accepted
the Chair of Greek Philosophy in succession to Charles L'Eveque. At
this time his lectures began to draw students and academics as well
as a general public, leading some to name the college the "house
of Bergson." In 1891 Bergson married the cousin of Marcel Proust
and had a daughter.
Over the years,
Bergson wrote many articles for periodicals, and at the request of
his friends, he decided to allow the publication of these in a
two-volume edition. The second volume, published in 1919, L'Energie
spirituelle: Essais et Conferences (Spiritual Energy: Essays and
Lectures) was translated into English by Dr. Wildon Carr under the
title, Mind-Energy. It contains a series of Bergson's most
influential lectures, most notably Le paralogisme
psycho-physiologique (The Psycho-Physiolgical Paralogism), which now
appears as Le Cerveau et la Pensee: une illusion philosophique, the
lecture he delivered at the Congress of Philosophy at Geneva in 1904,
and the Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1911, Life and Consciousness,
L'Ame et le Corps, which contains the substance of the four London
lectures on the Soul. Bergson was awarded a Doctor of Letters by
Cambridge in 1920. In France, the College de France relieved him of
his duties as a lecturer while allowing him to hold his chair. This
permitted him time to devote to his new work on ethics, religion and
sociology.
The concept of
intuition was an on-going investigation for Bergson. He held that
intuition is stronger than intellect. He also sought to wed current
theories of biological science with those of consciousness, linking
his own idea of an intuitive method and the problem of biological
evolution as considered by Darwinism. Bergson posited an immaterial
force, élan vital, as a creative impulse that better explained the
expansive thrust of life than the ideas of Darwin. His ideas may have
anticipated theories of relativity and modern theories of the mind.
Due to these concepts, his ideas were greatly criticized by the
Catholic Church. However, Bergson himself converted to Christianity
in 1921.
In Duration and
Simultaneity (1921) Bergson describes a non-linear notion of time
linked to philosophical investigations of change. As he previously
argued in his lectures, unlike space, time is not measurable by an
objective standard, in particular, it cannot be divided into a linear
series of discrete instances. The experience of time requires
something of an understanding of a continuum of movement, perceptible
when two subjects are moving in a likewise fashion, which Bergson
explicates with the example of two people on separate trains. This
contention is tried out here against Einstein's theory of relativity.
Tracing the development of the theory from 'special' to 'general'
relativity, Bergson posits that a fundamental requirement of the
theory is an impossibility — it is based on the assumption that the
experiences of two observers moving at different speeds within two
different physical systems might be thought of as simultaneous. This
is to ignore the limits of possible experience of time (while
maintaining a disruption in the concept of space). Most academics
concede that his arguments in 1911 with Einstein were not thoroughly
grounded and therefore lost their credibility. Bergson would later
drop the debate.
Bergson's concepts
regarding time and duration have had a great influence on such
philosophers as Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, who
expanded Bergson's notions of duration and evolution from their
applications to organic life into the physical realm. Jean- Paul
Sartre also paid tribute to him as well as Martin Heidegger, who used
some of Bergson's concepts, such as "no-being".
Bergson won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 and maintained the status of
something of a cult figure in the years between World Wars. He
published only one book during the last two decades of his life, The
Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932; trans. 1935), in which he
aligned his own philosophy with Christianity. Although not a
practicing Jew, Bergson renounced all of the posts and honors
previously awarded him, rather than accept the Vichy government's
offers to excuse him from the scope of their anti-Semitic laws. He
decided to join the persecuted and registered himself at the end of
1940 as a Jew. For his last seventeen years he suffered from
crippling arthritis and died of bronchitis on January 3, 1941, at the
age of eighty-one.
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