Bergson, Henri
BERGSON, HENRI (1859–1941), French philosopher. Born in Paris and educated at Lycée Condorcet and École Normale Supérieure, Bergson taught at three lycées and the École Normale Supérieure before he was invited to the Collège de France in 1900, where he lectured until 1914, formally retiring in 1921. His popular lectures influenced listeners from a wide variety of disciplines. He served as the first president of the Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. In 1927, already awarded France's highest honors, Bergson received the Nobel Prize for lit-erature.
Although born Jewish, Bergson was increasingly attracted to Roman Catholicism. While declaring his "moral adherence" to Catholicism and requesting that a priest pray at his funeral, Bergson refused to abandon his fellow Jews in the face of Nazi anti-Semitism.
Bergson began his career as a disciple of Herbert Spencer, whose evolutionism exalted science and the individual. In the 1880s, however, Bergson decided that science provided an incomplete worldview, for its concept of time could not account for the experience of duration. From this disagreement came his first book, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889; translated as Time and Free Will, 1910). He next examined the relationship of mind to body in Matière et mémoire (1896; Matter and Memory, 1911). L'évolution créatrice, his most famous work, appeared in 1907 (Creative Evolution, 1911). In it he expounded a nonmechanistic portrait of biological evolution, propelled toward higher levels of organization by an inner vital impulse (élan vital). Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion appeared in 1932 (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1935). These four books constitute his major works.
In Two Sources Bergson distinguished between static and dynamic morality. The first, a morality of obligation, sanctions behavior consistent with an ordered community. The second, a morality of attraction, issues from mystical experience. The vital impulse, communicated from God through the mystic to others, generates a dynamic morality guided by a vision of humanity as a whole. Whatever his earlier views, by 1932 Bergson was affirming a transcendent God of love who is creatively involved in human existence.
Because many found Bergson's thought liberating, his influence in the early twentieth century was important and widespread. Although he regarded science very seriously, there was still room in Bergson's universe for intuition as well as reason, for morality and religion as well as mechanics, for organic communities as well as isolated individuals. A gifted writer, he bridged the worlds of literature, philosophy, and science.
Bergson was a seminal thinker, prompting others to move beyond his own conclusions. There were few disciples and no one to transform his essays into a polished system. The American philosopher William James and the Jesuit philosopher of science and religion Pierre Teilhard de Chardin borrowed much and yet departed from him at significant points.
Bergson's influence continues among existentialists who borrow his distinction between conventional and "higher" morality and continues within various process theologies that abandon classical theism to find both divine and human creativity at work in an evolving world.
Bibliography
The best introduction to Bergson's philosophy is the volume edited and introduced by Harold A. Larrabee, Selections from Bergson (New York, 1949). In addition to excerpts from Bergson's major works, it contains all but ten pages of his brief Introduction to Metaphysics (Introduction à la métaphysique, Paris, 1903). Translated by T. E. Hulme in 1913, this work, perhaps the best place to begin reading Bergson himself, has also been published separately with an introduction by Thomas Goudge (New York, 1955). Bergson's complete writings are available in one volume, Œuvres (Paris, 1959), introduced by Henri Gouhier and edited by André Robinet. P. A. Y. Gunter's Henri Bergson: A Bibliography (Bowling Green, Ohio, 1974) lists 4,377 entries: 470 refer to letters, articles, and books by Bergson himself, while 3,907 entries, some annotated, refer to essays on Bergson by various other authors. A brief introduction to Bergson's thought can be found on pages 49–83 of French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century by Gary Gutting (Cambridge, U. K., 2001).Three studies of his philosophy are Vladimir Jankélévitch's Henri Bergson (Paris, 1959; in French), Daniel Herman's The Philosophy of Henri Bergson (Washington, D.C., 1980), and A. R. Lacey, Bergson (London, 1989). Jankélévitch's book contains a chapter entitled "Bergson et le judaïsme." Herman's relatively brief interpretive essay surveys major topic in Bergson's thought while focusing on the role of finality in his philosophy. Lacey's purpose is to state and assess Bergson's main arguments. The New Bergson (Manchester, England, 1999), edited by John Mullarkey, gives evidence of a renewed engagement with Bergson's philosophic ideas.
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