Background

Ethnicity: His father was of a Polish Jewish background (originally bearing the name Bereksohn), and his mother, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background.

Henri Bergson was born on October 18, 1859, in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house), the son of a Polish musician and composer, Michał Bergson, and of an English mother Katherine Levison.

Education

The family settled in Paris, and in 1868 Bergson was admitted to Lycée Condorcet in Paris and studied there till 1878. At school, he was much appreciated for his knowledge of science and mathematics and won several prizes.

After graduating from school in 1878, Bergson enrolled at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and to his teachers’ dismay opted for humanities. During this period, he came under the influence of philosophers like Spencer, Mill and Darwin. In addition, he also learned to appreciate Latin and Greek literature. Henri Bergson passed out from École Normale Supérieure in 1881.

In 1889, Henri Bergson was awarded his doctoral degree by University of Paris.

Career

In 1881, Bergson was appointed as a teacher at the lycée in Angers. Two years later, he joined Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand and taught there for five years.

Along with teaching, Bergson continued with his studies and research work. His first work, "On Unconscious Simulation in States of Hypnosis" was published in the Revue Philosophique in 1886. In this article, he had put down his observations at hypnosis session. For his doctoral degree, he submitted a thesis on Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience along with another short thesis on Aristotle, Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit, in Latin.

In 1888, Bergson went back to Paris and for few months and taught at College Rollin. Later he joined Lycée Henri-IV as a teacher and taught there for eight years. In 1889, he was awarded his doctoral degree by University of Paris. His thesis Time and Will was first published as a book in the same year. His second major work, Matière et mémoire was published in 1896. The book was the result of a detailed research undertaken over a period of time.

In 1898, Bergson joined his alma mater, École Normale Supérieure, as Maître de conférences (associate professor). Very shortly, he was promoted to the post of Professeur des universities and became a full professor.

In 1900, he was recruited as a Professor at Collège de France, a renowned educational and research center in Paris. Very soon, he was appointed to the Chair of Greek and Latin Philosophy of the college. In 1900, he attended first International Congress of Philosophy held in Paris and read a short but important paper titled Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality. This was also the year when his well-known book Le rire, Essai sur la signification du comique was published.

In 1904, Bergson held the Chair of Modern Philosophy. Meanwhile, he continued publishing many papers, out of which Introduction à la Métaphysique (1903) is most important.

In 1907, he published his third major work, titled, L'Évolution créatrice. The book, which provides a different explanation for Darwin’s theory, became so popular that within 10 years it sold 21 editions.

In 1908, Bergson travelled to England. There he met William James, an American philosopher and psychologist. It was James who introduced Bergson to the English as well as American public. He next went to Italy to attend International Congress of Philosophy. He also made several visits to England. His lectures offered new perspective and were generally short and lucid, which propelled the audience to go through his more detailed works.

In early 1913, he went to America on the invitation of the University of Columbia. There he visited number of cities and at each place, his lectures were well received. In May 1913, he went back to England and accepted the post of the President of British Society for Psychical Research.

In 1914, Bergson retired from the active duty from Collège de France so that he could concentrate on his academic works. At the same time, he continued to give lectures on various issues and did not stop even when the World War I erupted.

Later in 1919, he published a collection of these lecture in a book form. Titled L'Énergie spirituelle, the book became highly popular. Later it was translated into English as Mind Energy. Meanwhile, all his major works had started being translated into various European languages such as English, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. At the same time, the Roman Catholic Church banned three of his books on the charge of pantheism.

In 1932, Bergson published his next major work, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion. In this book, however, Bergson had come closer to the conventional notion of God as propagated by the Roman Catholic Church.

By 1937 Bergson began toying with the idea of converting to the Catholic faith. In the same year, his last book, La Pensée et le mouvant was published. Henri Bergson died on January 4, 1941, in Paris, City of Paris, France, from bronchitis. A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request. Bergson is buried in the Cimetière de Garches, Garches, France.

Achievements

• Henri Bergson is remembered as a philosopher, the first to elaborate what came to be called a process philosophy, which rejected static values in favour of values of motion, change, and evolution. He was also a master literary stylist, of both academic and popular appeal.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

    (Henri Bergson inquires into the nature of moral obligatio...)

  • Creative Evolution

    (The most famous and influential work of distinguished Fre...)

    1998
  • An Introduction to Metaphysics

    ("With its signal distinction between "intuition" and "ana...)

    1999
  • Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe

    (Bergson's central contention is that time is not measurab...)

    1999
  • The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics

    (The final published book by author and philosopher Henri ...)

    2010
  • Mind-Energy

    (Henri Bergson is one of the truly great philosophers of t...)

    2007
  • Matter and Memory

    (Bergson's most significant book, Matter and Memory is ess...)

    1990
  • Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

    (In Time and Free Will, written as his doctoral thesis, He...)

    2001
  • Laughter: An Essay On The Meaning Of The Comic

    ("Laughter" is a collection of three essays by French phil...)

    2014
  • The Henri Bergson Megapack: 5 Classic Non-Fiction Works

    (This volume collects five of Bergson’s works, including h...)

    2014

Religion

Henri Bergson’s parents were Jewish, but he himself had no formal religious affiliation, although toward the end of his life he expressed sympathy for Roman Catholicism.

Though wishing to convert to Catholicism, as stated in his will, Bergson did not convert in view of the travails inflicted on the Jewish people by the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s; he did not want to appear to want to leave the persecuted.

Views

Henri Bergson began studying science, but was soon captivated by the idea that science couldn’t provide all the answers he was interested in. Bergson realized that the scope of science is limited to quantifiable knowledge. It occurred to Bergson that there are many experiences that cannot be quantified, such as thoughts, perceptions, conscience, creativity, freedom, and life. These are qualitative, rather than quantitative concepts. One way to think of this is by considering time. Scientifically, time is a series of instances, each no different from the other. But daily experience proves otherwise: sometimes, time seems to pass quickly. At other times it drags. Each moment seems distinct from the other.

To understand the qualitative side of life, Bergson proposed that people use intuition rather than science. He understood intuition as the harmony between man and objects, which we perceive through their essence. Intuition, then, is an understanding of life through experience and not solely through intellectual efforts. In his most famous work, L'Évolution créatrice (1907), Bergson extended this analysis to the whole universe. He proposed that consciousness begins with a supreme élan vital, or vital impetus (élan vital = vital impetus). The fragmentation of this original impulse brought forth different forms of life. At the time, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories were beginning to catch on. Darwin asserted that evolution is brought about by natural selection, a process through which life forms adapt to their environment, survive and flourish. Bergson didn’t agree. For him, life did not follow an ordered, rational path. It was an explosive power based on a blind and irrational impetus which science alone could not explain.

It was difficult for Bergson’s theories to gain acceptance in the positivism-dominated academic world of the time. In later years his ideas gained more acceptance and he was in high demand as a lecturer worldwide.

Quotations: "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."

"The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality."

"The universe is a machine for the making of Gods."

"Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks."

"When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view."

Membership

• In 1901, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques elected Henri Bergson as a member, and he became a member of the Institute.

  Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques , France

  1901

• In 1901, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques elected Henri Bergson as a member, and he became a member of the Institute.

  Institut de France , France

  1901

• 

  In May 1913, Bergson went back to England and accepted the post of the President of British Society for Psychical Research.

  Society for Psychical Research , United Kingdom

  1913

• 

  Henri Bergson was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1928.

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

  1928

• 

  In 1914, Henri Bergson became a member of the Académie française.

  Académie française , Paris

  1914

Interests

• Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, studies of immediate experience

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill

Connections

In 1891, Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of French novelist Marcel Proust. They had a daughter named Jeanne. Unfortunately, she was born deaf.

Father:

Michał Bergson

Michał Bergson, or Michel Bergson was a Warsaw-born Polish composer and pianist, promoter of Frédéric Chopin.

Mother:

Katherine Bergson (Levinson)

Sister:

Moina Mathers

Moina Mathers, born Mina Bergson, was an artist and occultist at the turn of the 20th century.

Wife:

Louise Bergson (Neuberger)

Daughter:

Jeanne Adèle Bergson

References

• Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson Thinking in Time makes plain that it is well worth learning how to read Bergson effectively: his era and our own share important concerns. Bergson's insistence on the opposition between the automatic and the voluntary and his engagement with the notions of "the living," affect, and embodiment are especially germane to discussions of electronic culture.
  2006
• The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time The Physicist and the Philosopher is a magisterial and revealing account that shows how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.
  2006
• Bergson Ansell-Pearson introduces the work of Bergson and core aspects of his innovative modes of thinking; examines his interest in Epicureanism; explores his interest in the self and in time and memory; presents Bergson on ethics and on religion, and illuminates Bergson on the art of life.
  2018
• Henri Bergson Appearing here in English for the first time, Vladimir Jankélévitch's Henri Bergson is one of the two great commentaries written on Henri Bergson.
  2015
• Henri Bergson: An Account of His Life And Philosophy
  2011
• Bergsonism In this analysis of one major philosopher by another, Gilles Deleuze identifies three pivotal concepts ― duration, memory, and élan vital ― that are found throughout Bergson's writings and shows the relevance of Bergson's work to contemporary philosophical debates.
  1990
• William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life
  2018
• Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson Living Consciousness examines the brilliant, but now largely ignored, insights of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941).
  2012
• A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson The famous French philosopher Henri Bergson had but the highest praise for Edouard le Roy's presentation of Bergson's philosophy for the general public in a couple of articles that would form the core of this book, A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson.
  2018
• Bergson In this work, Leszek Kołakowski shows how Henri Bergson sought to reconcile Darwin`s theory with his own beliefs about the nature of the universe.
  2001
• Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence This is a book about evolution from a post-Darwinian perspective. It recounts the core ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson and his rediscovery and legacy in the poststructuralist critical philosophies of the 1960s, and explores the confluences of these ideas with those of complexity theory in environmental biology.
  2015