Henri Bergson Biography Quotes 32 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Henri-Louis Bergson was born on October 18, 1859, in Paris, into a family whose cosmopolitan rhythms never fully left his thought. His father, Micha Bergson, was a Polish Jewish musician; his mother, Katherine Levison, was English-Irish. Childhood moved between France and England before the family resettled in Paris, and the young Bergson grew up hearing multiple languages and sensing, early, the gap between lived time and its neat social labels.

France in Bergson's youth was rebuilding itself after the Franco-Prussian War and the trauma of the Paris Commune, and the Third Republic was betting its future on secular schools, scientific confidence, and civic discipline. Bergson matured inside that project while remaining temperamentally suspicious of anything that reduced life to a diagram. The tension between institutional clarity and inner flux became the private engine of his philosophy: the conviction that something essential in experience escapes measurement, yet must still be spoken responsibly.

Education and Formative Influences

Bergson excelled at the Lycee Condorcet and then entered the elite Ecole Normale Superieure in 1878, training in philosophy alongside rigorous mathematics. The era's dominant intellectual pressure came from positivism and mechanistic science, while psychology and neurology were rapidly professionalizing; Bergson absorbed this vocabulary without surrendering to it. After passing the agregation in philosophy (1881), he taught in provincial lycees, a period of solitude and discipline that sharpened his sense that ideas must answer to lived attention, not merely to academic systems.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

His first major book, "Time and Free Will" (1889), attacked the habit of treating inner duration as if it were space, arguing that consciousness is qualitative flow rather than countable units; it established him as a philosopher of time and freedom. In "Matter and Memory" (1896) he ventured into mind-body problems, reading clinical material to propose memory as a virtual dimension intersecting action. "Laughter" (1900) extended his method to social psychology, and "Creative Evolution" (1907) made him internationally famous by presenting life as inventive movement rather than predetermined mechanism. Appointed to the College de France (1900) and elected to the Academie francaise (1914), he became a public intellectual whose lectures drew crowds; he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. Late works, especially "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" (1932), widened his focus to ethics, mysticism, and political community. Though drawn toward Catholicism, he remained formally Jewish, and under the Vichy regime he refused exemptions offered to him, registering as a Jew; he died in occupied Paris on January 4, 1941, after standing in line in the cold to comply with the new rules.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Bergson's central claim is methodological: the deepest realities are grasped not by dissecting them into static parts, but by entering their movement. "An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis". Intuition for him was not a vague hunch but a disciplined sympathy with duration, a way of knowing that complements - and limits - analytical intelligence. This is why he insisted that philosophy should remain close to ordinary speech and experience, resisting technical jargon that hides its own metaphors.

His psychology is equally social. In "Laughter" he treats comedy as a corrective that a community applies when a person becomes rigid, performing like a thing rather than living like a mind. "Our laughter is always the laughter of a group". The line reveals his alertness to the pressure of collective norms and his suspicion of vanity and automatism - not as moral sins only, but as failures of flexibility. Against rigidity he set creativity as life's signature: "There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation". In his hands, creation is not merely artistic genius; it is the everyday capacity to introduce genuine novelty into action, to let freedom imprint itself on matter rather than be dictated by it.

Legacy and Influence

Bergson shaped early twentieth-century debates about time, consciousness, and life, influencing William James, modernist writers, and later French thought from Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze, even as analytic philosophy often treated him as a cautionary figure. His ideas traveled into literature (Proust's sensitivity to memory and time is frequently read alongside him), political theory (his distinction between "closed" and "open" morality), and the arts, where duration and movement became central problems. The long afterlife of Bergson lies in his wager that scientific explanation and lived experience need not be enemies - but that any culture that forgets the felt texture of time, the social intelligence of laughter, and the ethical demand of creative freedom risks mistaking a map for the terrain.