 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) |
|
French philosopher who was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Henri Bergson argued that the
intuition is deeper than the intellect. His Creative Evolution (1907) and Matter and Memory
(1896) attempted to integrate the findings of biological science with a
theory of consciousness. Bergson's work was considered the main
challenge to the mechanistic view of nature. He is sometimes claimed to
have anticipated features of relativity theory and modern scientific
theories of the mind. "Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon past goes on without relaxion, In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside." (from Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson, authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell, Macmillan and Co., 1922, p. 5) Henri Bergson was born in Paris, the son of Michel, a prosperous musician from Poland and Katherine Levinson, a woman of Anglo-Irish descent; both were Jewish. Part of his childhood Bergson spent in London, learning English so well that in later life he checked the English translations of his books. When Bergson was eight, the family returned to France. While still at the Lycée Concordet (then the Fontane), Bergson won an open prize for an original solution to a mathematical problem, which was in published in Annales de Mathematiques in 1878. Bergson studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and after earning his degree in 1881, he spent the following years as a teacher in a succession of lycées. One of his pupils was the journalist Charles Péguy, who established the journal Cahiers de la quinzaine. In
1900 Bergson became a professor at the Collège de France. His lectures
were highly popular, drawing students, academics, general public and
tourists; students referred to the collège as "the house of Bergson." Charles Péguy,
one of his most devoted students, attended almost all the courses,
except the Friday sessions during a period of four years. So he hired
stenographers, who wrote down the lectures verbatim. On his visit to the United States in 1913, Bergson got stuck
in one of New York City's first traffic jams. From 1914 until 1921
Édouard
Le Roy functioned as Bergson's "permanent substitute" while the
philosopher served on French diplomatic missions. Bergson resigned in
1921 in order to dedicate himself to his writing and to his work on
behalf of the League of Nations. From 1921 to 1926 he acted as
president of the committee on international cooperation of the League
of Nations. Its other members included Paul Valéry, Thomas Mann, and
Albert Einstein. Ill heath forced Bergson to retire from public duties.
He never published a book engaged explicitly with political or economic
questions but in Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion)
he criticized economic liberalism, and called for "brotherhood, human
solidarity, and peace among men." Before World War I, Péguy
and George Sorel had urged him to turn his attention in the
direction of politics and social movements. Between the World Wars, Bergson enjoyed the status of a cult figure. Although not a practicing Jew, Bergson refused 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. However, his religious thinking had brought him closer to Catholicism. Bergson died of bronchitis on January 3, 1941. For the last seventeen years of his life he had suffered from crippling arthritis. The popularity of Bergson's philosophy faded in the 1920s. Gilles Deleuze's study Le bergsonisme (1966), re-introduced Bergson to contemporary philosophy and analyzed Bergsonian intuition as a fundamental method of his philosophy. "There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language," Bergson told once in an interview. ('Bergson, Henri-Louis' by A. R. Lacey, Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, edited by Stuart Brown, Diané Collinson and Robert Wilkinson, Routledge, 1997, p. 69) But when speaking of aesthetic experience he said that "our language is ill-suited to render the sublleties of psychological analysis." (Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, authorized translation by F. L. Pogson, George Allen & Unwin, 1910, p. 13) In spite of Bergson's good intentions, his ideas were often high-flown and difficult to follow. In his first major work, Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson aimed to show how pseudoproblems about the will and its freedom have arisen from a false phenomenology of mental states – essentially, a tendency to conceive and describe them in spatial terms. Human experience does not perceive real life as a succession of demarcated conscious states, progressing along some imaginary line, but rather a continuous flow. Bergson made the distinction between the concept and experience of time. While the physicist observes objects and events in succession, time is presented to consciousness as duration – an endlessly flowing process, which resists simple mathematization. Bergson argued that the 'real time' is experienced as duration and apprehended by intuition, not through separate operations of instinct and the intellect. In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) Bergson saw that the intuition, the direct apprehension of process, as the discoverer of truth – intuition, not analysis, reveals the real world. Sometimes intuition in Bergson referred to getting bright ideas, sometimes it was the method of philosophy like intellect is of mathematics. His concept of élan vital, "creative impulse" or "living energy", was developed in Creative Evolution, his most famous book. Élan vital is an immaterial force, whose existence cannot be scientifically verified, but it provides the vital impulse that continuously shapes all life. Bergson questioned the Darwinist theories that evolution occurs in great leaps or alternatively through the gradual accumulation of slight mutations and explained by élan vital the creative course of evolution. In 1914 all of Bergson's writings, but most especially Creative Evolution, were placed upon the list of books devout Catholics were forbidden to read. After its appearance twenty-five years elapsed before Bergson published another major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, his final statement of his philosophy which also reflected the threats of nationalist-racist politics and hinted at the coming of mechanized warfare. The Creative Mind, published two years later, was a collection of essays and other writings. "In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and
consequently to correct our neighbour, if not in his will, at least in
his deed," Bergson stated in Le Rire: essai sur la signification du comique (1900, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic).
"This is the reason a comedy is far more like real life than a drama.
The more sublime the drama, the more profound the analysis to which the
poet has had to subject the raw materials of daily life in order to
obtain the tragic element in its unadulterated form." (Ibid., authorized translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, The Macmillan Company, 1914, p. 136) This essay is not among Bergson's best-known works, but Arthur Koestler considered it as important for his book The Act of Creation (1964) as Freud's classic Wit and its Relations to the Unconscious.
Bergson defined the comic as the result of the sense of relief we feel
when we feel ourselves from the mechanistic and materialistic –
his examples were the man-automaton, the puppet on strings, Jack-in-the
Box, etc. "A situation is invariably comic", he defined, "when
it belongs
simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is
capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the
same time." (Ibid., p. 96)
He saw laughter as the corrective punishment inflicted by
society upon the unsocial individual. "You would hardly apprecite the
comic if you felt yourself isolated from others. Laughter appears to
stand in need of an
echo. Listen to it cafefully: it is not an articulate." (Ibid., p. 5) Bergson had been interested in Spencerian evolutionism in his youth, but he later abandoned Spencer's view placing intuition as the highest human faculty. In Creative Evolution Bergson argued that the creative urge, not the Darwinian concept of natural selection, is at the heart of evolution. Man's intellect has developed in the course of evolution as an instrument of survival. It comes to think inevitably in geometrical or "spatializing" terms that are inadequate to lay hold of the ultimate living process. But intuition goes to the heart of reality, and enables us to find philosophic truth. Bergson's thinking and concept of time has influenced greatly Arnold Hauser, Claude Simon, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Santayana, and such authors as Péguy, Valéry, and John Dos Passos. Whitehead expanded Bergson's notions of duration and evolution from their applications to organic life into the phycial realm. It is said that for Marcel Proust, whose cousin Louise Neuberger the philosopher married in 1891, he gave the idea for the great novel of reminiscence, À la recherche de temps perdu (1913-27). Proust attended Bergson's lectures given at the Sorbonne from 1891 to 1893. However, there is only one recorded conversation between Proust and Bergson – the subject was the nature of sleep. Proust brought Bergson an excellent box of earplugs. Sartre also paid tribute to Bergson, and Martin Heidegger, whose ontology is echoed in existentialist writing, used some of Bergson's concepts, such as "no-being." Despite his fame, Bergson never produced a movement.
His influence on existentialism is not straight forward and in his own
time the philosopher was considered an empiricist. On the other hand,
Bergson's argumentation frustrated such philosophers as the empiricist
Bertrand Russell, who brought him down from his pedestal in the essay
'The Philosophy of Bergson' (1912), in which he stated that "Bergson
does not know what number is, and has himself no clear idea of it."
(The Monist, Vol. XXIL, No. 3, July 1912, p. 334)
It was a deliberate insult: Bergson was trained on mathematics, and as
a youg stundent., when he told the mathematics professor Adolphe
Desboves that he wanted to abandon mathematics for philosophy, Desboves
responded, "You could have been a mathematician, you will be merely a
philosopher." (Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson by Suzanne Guerlac, Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 30) In Sceptical Essays
(1924) Russell said: "A great part of Bergson's philosophy is merely
traditional mysticism expressed in slightly novel language." (Ibid., p. 65) And he later
returned to Bergsonism in the highly popular work History of Western Philosophy (1946). Russell argued in his analysis of
the doctrine of intuition that "instinct is seen at its best in ants,
bees, and Bergson." (Ibid., Routledge, 1972, p. 716) Albert Einstein found serious mistakes from Bergson's Durée et simultanéité. À propos de la théorie d'Einstein (1921), dealing with Einstein's theory of relativity, which Bergson subsequently tried to withdraw from circulation. He had opposed in 1911 Einstein's ideas, but then his view had changed and he introduced the concept of non-linear time. Nevertheless, Bergson was accused of rejecting the new physics of relativity because he had not understood it. Bergson was humiliated. He retreated from public view and devoted himself to his final work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. For further reading: The Philosophy of Bergson by Bertrand Russell (1914); Un Romantisme utilitaire by René Berthelot (1938); L'Intellectualisme de Bergson by Léon Husson (1947); Bergson:Philosopher of Reclection by Ian W. Alexander (1957); Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change by H.Wildon Carr (1970); Bergson by Joseph Solomon (1970); Bergson and Modern Physics by Milic Capec (1971); Bergson by Leszek Kolakowski (1985); Henri Bergson by P.A.Y Gunter (1986); Bergson and Modern Thought, edited by Andrew C. Papanicolaou and Pete A. Y. Gunter (1987); Bergsonism by Gilles Deleuze (1988); Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde by Mark Antliff (1993); The New Bergson, edited by John Mullarkey (1999); Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life by Keith Ansell-Pearson (2001); Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson by Suzanne Guerlac (2006); Bergson, Politics, and Religion by Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White (2012); The Physicist & the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time by Jimena Canales (2015); The Bergsonian Mind, edited by Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf (2021); Einstein vs. Bergson: an Enduring Quarrel on Time, edited by Alessandra Campo and Simone Gozzano (2022); Living in Time: The Philosophy of Henri Bergson by Barry Allen (2023); Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People by Emily Herring (2024); Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion: God, Freedom, and Duration by Matyáš Moravec (2024) Selected bibliography:
|
