Background
Berger was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, French West Africa (now Senegal).
Berger was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, French West Africa (now Senegal).
He then enrolled in the university of Aix-en-Provence where he studied philosophy under Maurice Blondel.
He received his primary and part of his secondary education in Perpignan, France, and had to take up a position in an industrial firm. After having performed his military duties in world war I, he became an associate of the owner of the firm. Berger decided to continue his studies.
He worked with Rene Le Senne and passed his baccalaureat.
Having passed his licence, he obtained a diploma d'Etudes Superieures with a thesis on the ‘Relations between the conditions of intelligibility on the one hand and the problem of contingency on the other hand’. In 1938 he organized the first Congress of French Language Societies of Philosophy.
In 1941 he submitted his two theses de doctorat d’Etat, the first entitled ‘Investigations on the conditions of Knowledge. Essay of Pure Knowledge’, the second ‘The ‘Cogito’ in Husserl’s philosophy’.
Berger then left his industrial firm and became first a "Chargé de Cours", then a "Maitre de Conferences" for philosophy at the University of Aix-en Provence.
In 1944 he became full professor In 1949 he became secretary general of the Fulbright Commission, in charge of the cultural relations between France and the United States. After managing a fertilizer plant during the 1930s, he created in Paris the Centre Universitaire International et des Centres de Prospective and directed the philosophical studies (Études philosophiques).
The term prospective, invented by Gaston Berger, is the study of the possible futures.
From 1953 to 1960 he was in charge of the tertiary education at the Minister of National Education and modernised the French universities system. He was elected at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1955.
In 1957 he founded the journal Prospective and the homonym centre with André Gros. This same year he created the Institut national des sciences appliquées (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées) of Lyon with the rector Capelle.
He was the father of the French choreographer Maurice Béjart (1927–2007).
The university of Saint-Louis, Senegal, where he was born is named after him.
In the period 1926 to 1960 Berger established himself as one of the most prominent figures of French philosophy. He founded three important philosophical journals, and was constantly active in organizing or directing many notable societies and institutions that promoted philosophy both nationally and internationally. He was also a pioneer, in France, of the study of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Berger’s own philosophy was an original synthesis of ideas drawn from Husserl's phenomenology. Maurice Blondel’s philosophy of action and René Le Senne’s ‘caractérologie’. That he was prepared to posit the difficult concept of a universal or collective transcendental subject as the centre of all significant reference reflected his deep conviction that the role of philosophy in the modern world is one of reconciling diverse standpoints in order to achieve a better cultural and intellectual integration.
Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.
