Henri-Louis Bergson (18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopher who had a major influence on two areas of philosophy—analytic philosophy and continental philosophy—especially during the first half of the 20th century until World War II. His ideas remained important after 1966 when another philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, wrote a book about Bergson’s work called Le Bergsonisme.

Bergson believed that understanding reality depends more on direct experiences and intuition than on abstract reasoning or science. In 1927, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his creative ideas and the skillful way he presented them. In 1930, France gave him its highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur. His widespread popularity caused debate in France, as some people believed his ideas challenged the Republic’s focus on secular and scientific views.

Biography

Henri Bergson lived a quiet life as a French professor. He published four important works:

• In 1889, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience)
• In 1896, Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire)
• In 1907, Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice)
• In 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion)

In 1900, the Collège de France appointed Bergson to the Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy, a position he held until 1904. He later replaced Gabriel Tarde as the Chair of Modern Philosophy, a role he kept until 1920. Many people attended his public lectures.

Bergson was born in 1859 on the Rue Lamartine in Paris, near the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house). His father, Michał Bergson, was a composer and pianist of Polish-Jewish heritage. His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was known for helping Polish Jews, especially those connected to the Hasidic movement. His mother, Katherine Levison, was from an English-Jewish and Irish-Jewish background. The Bereksohn family, from which Bergson descended, was a well-known Jewish family in Poland. Bergson’s great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, was a banker who worked closely with King Stanisław II Augustus of Poland.

Bergson’s family lived in London for a few years after his birth. He learned English from his mother. By the age of nine, his family moved to France, and he became a French citizen.

In 1891, Bergson married Louise Neuberger, who was related to Marcel Proust (Proust was the best man at the wedding). The couple had a daughter named Jeanne, who was born deaf in 1896. Bergson’s sister, Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers), married Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, an English writer who helped create the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The couple later moved to Paris.

Bergson studied at the Lycée Fontanes (now called the Lycée Condorcet) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had received a Jewish religious education but lost his faith between the ages of 14 and 16. This change was linked to his study of the theory of evolution, which suggested that humans share a common ancestor with primates without needing a creative god.

At the lycée, Bergson won a prize for his science work and another for solving a math problem in 1877. His solution was published in Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques the next year. This was his first published work. After considering whether to study science or the humanities, Bergson chose the humanities, which surprised his teachers. At 19, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he read the works of Herbert Spencer. He earned a degree in letters and a philosophy qualification in 1881 from the University of Paris.

That same year, Bergson began teaching at the Lycée in Angers, the former capital of Anjou. Two years later, he moved to the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the Puy-de-Dôme region.

In 1884, Bergson published a collection of excerpts from the Roman poet Lucretius, along with a study of Lucretius’s ideas about the universe. This work was widely read and helped promote classical studies in France. While teaching in Clermont-Ferrand, Bergson also studied privately and worked on his dissertation, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), and a short Latin thesis on Aristotle. He earned his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1889, and the work was published the same year by Félix Alcan. Bergson also taught courses on the Pre-Socratics, especially the philosopher Heraclitus.

Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier, a public education minister and writer who believed in the importance of freedom over fate. According to Louis de Broglie, Time and Free Will introduced ideas that were similar to those later developed by scientists like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

In 1888, Bergson returned to Paris. After teaching briefly at the municipal college, College Rollin, he was appointed to the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he taught for eight years. There, he studied Darwin’s theories and taught courses on them. Bergson had previously supported Lamarckism, which suggested that traits acquired during a lifetime could be passed to offspring, but he later favored Darwin’s theory of gradual change, which better fit his view of life.

In 1896, Bergson published his second major work, Matter and Memory. This complex book examined how the brain works, how people perceive and remember things, and the connection between the body and mind. Bergson spent many years researching for each of his major works, and this effort is especially clear in Matter and Memory, which shows a deep understanding of scientific studies from the time.

In 1898, Bergson became a professor at his former school, the École Normale Supérieure. That same year, he was promoted to a professorship. In 1900, he became a professor at the Collège de France, taking over the Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy from Charles Lévêque.

At the first International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in August 1900, Bergson gave a short speech titled Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality (Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance à la loi de causalité). In 1900, Félix Alcan published Laughter (Le rire), one of Bergson’s shorter works. This essay, based on a lecture he gave in Auvergne, explored the meaning of comedy. It argued that laughter evolved as a way to help people adapt to society. Bergson’s ideas about comedy are important for understanding his views on life, especially how art fits into human experience.

In 1901, Bergson was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. In 1903, he wrote an essay titled Introduction to Metaphysics (Introduction à la métaphysique), which explained his philosophical ideas and served as a guide to his major works. This essay outlined his approach, which was later developed in Creative Evolution.

After the death of Gabriel

Philosophy

Henri Bergson disagreed with the idea that causes and effects are strictly determined, as seen in reductionism. He believed free will must act in a way that is independent and unpredictable. While Kant thought free will existed outside of time and space and could only be understood through faith, Bergson redefined modern ideas about time, space, and causality through his concept of duration. He saw duration as a flexible and flowing idea, arguing that it cannot be understood through fixed analysis but only through personal, experiential understanding.

Bergson believed that new things appear because of uncontrolled creation, not because of strict, mechanical forces. His philosophy focuses on movement, unexpected change, creativity, and freedom, which makes it a type of process philosophy. It covers topics such as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the basis of mathematics, and the limits of reason.

Bergson criticized Kant’s ideas about knowledge and truth, comparing them to Plato’s ideas in a similar but opposite way. He aimed to redefine the relationship between science and metaphysics, as well as between intelligence and intuition. He argued that intuition, not just abstract thinking, is needed to understand the true nature of reality and pure duration. He often used images and metaphors in his writing because he believed abstract concepts fail to capture the full reality of things. For example, he wrote that humans could not have predicted swimming from walking alone, and only by trying could they understand it. He saw intelligence as a practical tool for survival, not a purely theoretical one. Metaphysics, he argued, should avoid false questions by using intuition instead of abstract thinking.

In The Creative Evolution, Bergson explored the ongoing creation of life and opposed Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. Spencer tried to apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to philosophy and build a universe based on that idea. Bergson disagreed with Spencer’s rigid, mechanical view of life.

Bergson’s philosophy of life responded to the mechanical ideas of his time and also to the failure of finalism, which he believed could not explain the continuous creation of life or the idea of duration. Finalism, as seen in thinkers like Leibniz, explains life as following a predetermined plan, but Bergson argued this fails to capture the true, ongoing nature of life.

Bergson believed planning for the future is impossible because time itself creates new possibilities. While past events can be explained by looking back, he argued that events can create their own causes. For example, a symphony’s creation cannot be predicted in advance, as the composer must first experience the process. He proposed a third idea between mechanism and finalism: the élan vital, a creative force in life that spreads through evolution into different directions.

Bergson developed his theory of duration while trying to improve on Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. He introduced duration in his doctoral thesis Time and Free Will as a response to Kant’s ideas. Kant believed free will existed outside of time and space, making it unknowable and a matter of faith. Bergson argued that Kant confused time with its spatial representation. For Bergson, duration is not extended but filled with different parts that cannot be seen as separate causes and effects. He concluded that free will is not determined and is instead pure movement, which he called duration. He believed reality is made up of change.

Duration, as Bergson defined it, is both a single whole and many parts, but it cannot be understood through fixed ideas. He believed it can only be grasped through intuition, which he explained using two examples. First, a city can only be truly understood by walking through it, not by looking at photos from all angles. Second, reading a line of Homer cannot be fully captured by translations or commentary, only by experiencing the poem itself. Intuition, then, is about returning to the real experience of things.

The élan vital is Bergson’s third key idea, following duration and intuition. He introduced it in Creative Evolution as a force explaining evolution in a more lively way. Though some called him a vitalist, he criticized that idea, arguing nature has no strict final goals or clear individuality.

In Laughter, Bergson discussed how laughter is triggered, not laughter itself. He described how comics and clowns use exaggeration to highlight the mechanical, repetitive parts of human behavior, one of life’s two tendencies: moving toward inert matter or creating new forms. He warned that what is funny depends on context and cannot be defined simply.

Reception

Henri Bergson’s philosophy received both praise and criticism from the start. His ideas were widely popular and had a lasting impact on French philosophy. The mathematician Édouard Le Roy was Bergson’s main follower. However, Suzanne Guerlac suggested that Bergson’s role at the Collège de France, where he taught a general audience, might have slowed the serious study of his work. She explained that Bergson’s ideas were emotionally appealing and widely shared, but he lacked students who could carefully explain his philosophy. As a result, his ideas were often taken out of context and changed by admirers.

In 2024, an article in Daily Nous noted that in 1910, Bergson was the most frequently cited philosopher in English academic journals, more than Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged Bergson’s influence on his own philosophy in Process and Reality (1929). However, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead’s collaborator, did not agree with Bergson’s ideas. Russell admired Bergson’s writing style but believed his arguments were more emotional than logical. The scientist Gaston Bachelard mentioned Bergson in his 1938 book The Formation of the Scientific Mind. Others influenced by Bergson included Vladimir Jankélévitch, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Gilles Deleuze, who wrote Le bergsonisme in 1966. The Greek philosopher Helle Lambridis introduced Bergson’s work to Greece through translations and writings. Her later work included Bergson’s ideas about time, though it was published later. Bergson also influenced Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, though Merleau-Ponty had doubts about some of Bergson’s ideas. The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis studied under Bergson and was deeply influenced by him.

Many early 20th-century writers criticized Bergson’s ideas, including his views on intuition, indeterminism, and the scientific process. Critics included Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, T. S. Eliot, and others. The Vatican accused Bergson of pantheism, but some scholars, like Henri Hude, argued this was incorrect. Hude believed Bergson’s philosophy was based on a mystical experience described in his book Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion.

Charles Sanders Peirce disagreed with those who compared him to Bergson. Peirce believed Bergson’s work was too vague and did not use scientific terms accurately. However, Gilles Deleuze found similarities between Bergson and Peirce, exploring these connections in his books on cinema. William James’s students, like Horace Kallen, resisted linking James’s work to Bergson’s. Jean Wahl noted that James and Bergson disagreed on whether action was essential to understanding truth.

In the 1890s, George Santayana criticized Bergson’s ideas, especially his views on the new and the unknown. Santayana and Russell both argued that Bergson misrepresented scientific methods to support his belief in freedom. Russell specifically criticized Bergson’s explanation of numbers in Time and Free Will, saying Bergson used outdated ideas about space to describe mathematics.

Suzanne Guerlac argued that recent interest in Bergson is partly due to Gilles Deleuze’s work, which helped bring Bergson’s ideas back into focus. Scholars like Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard agree, noting that Deleuze’s philosophy is deeply connected to Bergson’s ideas about multiplicity and time. Mark Sinclair also highlights Bergson’s influence on criticism of the Hegelian dialectic. Despite his popularity in the early 20th century, Bergson’s ideas were later overlooked until Deleuze’s work revived interest in them.