Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme.
Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality. Bergson was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". In 1930, France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur. Bergson's great popularity created a controversy in France, where his views were seen as opposing the "secular and scientific" attitude adopted by the Republic's officials.
Biography
Overview
Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works:- in 1889, Time and Free Will
- in 1896, Matter and Memory
- in 1907, Creative Evolution
- in 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Early years
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier in 1859. His father, the composer and pianist Michał Bergson, was of Polish-Jewish background. His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with the Hasidic movement. His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English-Jewish and Irish-Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather,, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław II Augustus, king of Poland from 1764 to 1795.Bergson's family lived in London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the English language from his mother. Before he was nine, his parents settled in France, and Henri became a naturalized French citizen.
Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891. Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896. Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson, married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris.
Education and career
Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education, but lost his faith between the ages of 14 and 16. According to Hude, this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares a common ancestry with modern primates, a process construed as needing no creative deity.At the lycée, Bergson won a prize for his scientific work and another, in 1877, when he was 18, for the solution of a mathematical problem. His solution was published the next year in Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques. It was his first published work. After some hesitation about whether to pursue the sciences or the humanities, he decided on the latter, to his teachers' dismay. When he was 19, he entered the École Normale Supérieure. He obtained there the degree of licence ès lettres, and then an agrégation de philosophie in 1881 from the University of Paris.
The same year, he received a teaching appointment at the lycée in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou. Two years later he settled at the in Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the Puy-de-Dôme département.
The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand, Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of De Rerum Natura, issued as Extraits de Lucrèce, and of Lucretius's materialist cosmology, repeated editions of which attest to its value in promoting Classics among French youth. While teaching and lecturing in this part of his country, Bergson found time for private study and original work. He crafted his dissertation, Time and Free Will, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle for his doctoral degree, which was awarded by the University of Paris in 1889. The work was published in the same year by Félix Alcan. He also gave courses in Clermont-Ferrand on the Pre-Socratics, in particular Heraclitus.
Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier, then public education minister, a disciple of Félix Ravaisson and the author of On the Foundations of Induction. Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism". According to Louis de Broglie, Time and Free Will "antedates by forty years the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg on the physical interpretation of wave mechanics."
Bergson settled again in Paris in 1888, and after teaching for some months at the municipal college, known as the College Rollin, he received an appointment at the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. There, he read Darwin and gave a course on his theories. Although Bergson had previously endorsed Lamarckism and its theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics, he came to prefer Darwin's hypothesis of gradual variation, which were more compatible with his continual vision of life.
In 1896, Bergson published his second major work, Matter and Memory. This rather difficult work investigates the function of the brain and undertakes an analysis of perception and memory, leading up to a careful consideration of the relationship of body and mind. Bergson spent years of research in preparation for each of his three large works. This is especially obvious in Matter and Memory, which shows thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological investigations carried out during the period.
In 1898, Bergson became maître de conférences at his alma mater, École Normale Supérieure, and later that year was promoted to a professorship. The year 1900 saw him installed as a professor at the Collège de France, where he accepted the Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy in succession to.
At the first International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August 1900, Bergson read a short paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality". In 1900, Felix Alcan published a work that had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris, Laughter, one of the most important of Bergson's minor works. This essay on the meaning of comedy stemmed from a lecture he had given in his early days in Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, especially its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life. The paper's main thesis is that laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings. People laugh at those who fail to adapt to society's demands of society if it seems their failure is akin to an inflexible mechanism. Comic authors have exploited this human tendency to laugh in various ways, and what is common to them is the idea that the comic consists in "something mechanical encrusted on the living".
In 1901, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques elected Bergson as a member. In 1903 he contributed to the Revue de métaphysique et de morale an essay, Introduction to Metaphysics, which is useful as a preface to the study of his three large books. He detailed in this essay his philosophical program, realized in the Creative Evolution.
On the death of Gabriel Tarde, the sociologist and philosopher, in 1904, Bergson succeeded him as Chair of Modern Philosophy. From 4 to 8 September of that year, he visited Geneva, attending the Second International Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured on The Mind and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion. An illness prevented his visiting Germany to attend the Third Congress held at Heidelberg. In these years, Bergson strongly influenced Jacques Maritain, perhaps even saving Maritain and his wife Raïssa from suicide.
Bergson's third major work, Creative Evolution, the most widely known and most discussed of his books, appeared in 1907. Pierre Imbart de la Tour remarked that Creative Evolution was a milestone of a new direction in thought. By 1918, Alcan, the publisher, had issued 21 editions, making an average of two editions per annum for ten years. Following the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity increased enormously, not only in academic circles but among the general public.
At that time, Bergson had already extensively studied biology, including the theory of fecundation, which had only recently emerged, ca. 1885 – no small feat for a philosopher specializing in the history of philosophy, in particular Greek and Roman philosophy. He also most certainly had read, apart from Darwin, Haeckel, from whom he retained his idea of a unity of life and of the ecological solidarity between all living beings, as well as Hugo de Vries, from whom he quoted his mutation theory of evolution. He also quoted Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the successor of Claude Bernard at the Chair of Experimental Medicine in the Collège de France.
Bergson served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919 and 1954 to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.
Relationship with James and pragmatism
Bergson travelled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the Harvard University philosopher who was Bergson's senior by 17 years, and who was instrumental in calling Bergson's work to the attention of the Anglo-American public. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under the date of 4 October 1908:So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy.
As early as 1880, James had contributed an article in French to the periodical La Critique philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, titled Le Sentiment de l'effort. Four years later, a couple of articles by him appeared in the journal Mind: "What is an Emotion?" and "On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology". Bergson quoted the first two of these in Time and Free Will. In 1890–91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental work The Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon Bergson observed. Some writers, taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking that James's investigations had been proceeding since 1870, have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.
William James hailed Bergson as an ally. In 1903, he wrote:
I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read for years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure that his philosophy has a great future; it breaks through old frameworks and brings things to a solution from which new crystallizations can be reached.
The most noteworthy tributes James paid to Bergson come in the Hibbert Lectures, which James gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London. He remarks on the encouragement he gained from Bergson's thought, and refers to his confidence in being "able to lean on Bergson's authority".
Bergson's influence had led James "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be". It had induced him, he continued, "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it".
These remarks, which appeared in James's book A Pluralistic Universe in 1909, impelled many English and American readers to investigate Bergson's philosophy, but no English translations of Bergson's major work had yet appeared. James encouraged and assisted Arthur Mitchell in preparing an English translation of Creative Evolution. In August 1910, James died. It was his intention, had he lived to see the translation finished, to introduce it to the English reading public by a prefatory note of appreciation. The next year, the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work ensued. By coincidence, in that same year, Bergson wrote a 16-page preface, Truth and Reality, to the French translation of James's book Pragmatism. In it, he expressed sympathetic appreciation of James's work, together with certain important reservations.
From 5 to 11 April, Bergson attended the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at Bologna, in Italy, where he gave an address on "Philosophical Intuition". In response to invitations he visited England in May of that year and on several subsequent occasions. These visits were well received. His speeches offered new perspectives and elucidated many passages in his three major works: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. Although necessarily brief statements, they developed and enriched the ideas in his books and clarified for English audiences the fundamental principles of his philosophy.