Henri Bergson 1859 – 1941

Henri Bergson was a 19th and 20th-century French philosopher, one of the most influential thinkers of the early 20th century and a major figure of continental philosophy in the period between phenomenology's founding and the rise of existentialism. His works Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution developed an account of duration as the fundamental temporal experience and a vitalist philosophy of life as a creative force. He held that scientific intelligence is poorly equipped to grasp the dynamic, qualitative character of lived experience and that an alternative cognitive faculty, intuition, is needed. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His thought decisively influenced Whitehead, Deleuze, and many others, and his work has been the subject of renewed interest in recent decades.

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was the most prominent French philosopher of the early twentieth century and the figure through whom philosophical attention to lived time and to creative process was reintroduced into the philosophical mainstream. Born in Paris to a Polish-Jewish father and an English mother, he taught at the École Normale Supérieure and held the chair in modern philosophy at the Collège de France from 1900 to 1921.

Bergson's first book, Time and Free Will (1889), distinguished the spatialized time of measurement from the lived duration (durée) in which conscious life actually unfolds. Matter and Memory (1896) developed a distinctive philosophy of mind that rejected reductive physicalism while remaining naturalist. Creative Evolution (1907), his most popular work, presented a non-Darwinian philosophical account of evolution driven by the élan vital — a creative life force that produced the variety and direction of biological development.

Bergson's literary celebrity in the early twentieth century was extraordinary; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) was a major intellectual event. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. His public exchange with Einstein over relativity and lived time in 1922 went badly for his philosophical reputation, and the rise of phenomenology and analytic philosophy displaced him from the philosophical mainstream by his death in 1941. Deleuze's Bergsonism (1966) initiated his recovery as a major philosopher.