Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was one of the most influential philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, best known for his original metaphysics of time, consciousness, and life. His work challenged mechanistic and deterministic accounts of reality, emphasising intuition, creativity, and lived experience. Bergson’s philosophy exerted a wide influence across philosophy, literature, psychology, biology, and theology, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 for the clarity and vitality of his ideas.

Background and Intellectual Formation

Henri Bergson was born in 1859 in Paris, France, into an intellectually distinguished family. He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, where he excelled in mathematics and philosophy. Although initially drawn towards mathematics, Bergson gradually turned to philosophy, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with abstract, spatialised modes of thought that, in his view, distorted the nature of lived experience.
Bergson began his academic career as a teacher and later became a professor at the Collège de France, where his lectures attracted large and diverse audiences. His intellectual formation combined rigorous scientific knowledge with deep engagement in metaphysics, enabling him to critique both positivism and mechanistic science from within.

Intellectual Context and Philosophical Orientation

Bergson’s philosophy emerged during a period dominated by scientific materialism, Darwinian biology, and deterministic conceptions of nature. While deeply respectful of science, he argued that scientific methods were limited in scope and incapable of capturing the full reality of consciousness and life.
He opposed reductionist explanations that treated time as a series of discrete moments and life as a mechanical process. Instead, Bergson developed a philosophy that emphasised continuity, creativity, and becoming, positioning him as a key figure in vitalism and process-oriented thought.

Duration and the Philosophy of Time

The central concept in Bergson’s philosophy is duration (la durée), which refers to lived, qualitative time as experienced by consciousness. Bergson distinguished sharply between duration and clock time, arguing that scientific time spatialises experience and breaks it into measurable units.
Duration is characterised by:

• Continuous flow rather than discrete moments.
• Qualitative change rather than quantitative measurement.
• The interpenetration of past and present within consciousness.

For Bergson, real time is not something that can be measured externally but must be lived internally. This rethinking of time challenged dominant scientific and philosophical models and became foundational for later phenomenological and existential approaches.

Consciousness, Memory, and the Self

Bergson’s analysis of consciousness places memory at the centre of personal identity. In his work Matter and Memory, he argued that memory is not merely a storehouse of past images but an active dimension of consciousness that shapes perception and action.
He distinguished between:

• Habit memory, which is automatic and bodily.
• Pure memory, which preserves the past in its original form.

The self, according to Bergson, is not a fixed substance but a dynamic continuity of memory and experience. Personal identity emerges through duration, not through static psychological states.

Intuition as a Method

To grasp duration and the true nature of reality, Bergson proposed intuition as a philosophical method. Intuition is not irrational or anti-intellectual but a form of direct insight that allows one to enter into the flow of experience rather than analysing it from the outside.
Intuition involves:

• Immersing oneself in lived experience.
• Suspending spatial and conceptual abstractions.
• Grasping reality from within rather than through representation.

Bergson contrasted intuition with analysis, which he argued was useful for practical and scientific purposes but inadequate for metaphysical understanding.

Creative Evolution and the Nature of Life

In Creative Evolution, Bergson extended his philosophy of duration to biology. He rejected mechanistic and purely Darwinian explanations of life, arguing that they failed to account for novelty and creativity in evolution.
He introduced the concept of élan vital, a vital impulse driving the creative development of life. This force is not a mystical substance but a metaphor for the unpredictable and inventive character of evolutionary processes.
Key ideas in Bergson’s philosophy of life include:

• Evolution as creative and open-ended.
• The emergence of genuine novelty.
• Life as a continuous process of differentiation.

Although criticised by later biologists, Bergson’s ideas stimulated important debates about creativity, emergence, and the limits of mechanistic explanation.

Freedom and Determinism

Bergson offered a distinctive account of human freedom rooted in duration. He argued that free actions emerge from the whole personality rather than from isolated causes. Deterministic explanations, he claimed, impose artificial structures on the fluid reality of lived decision-making.
Freedom, for Bergson, is not the absence of causation but the expression of one’s inner continuity. A free act is one that reflects the entire history and character of the self as it unfolds in time.

Social Philosophy and Morality

In his later work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson distinguished between closed and open societies. Closed societies are governed by habit, obligation, and social pressure, while open societies are driven by creative moral aspiration and universal love.
He argued that moral progress depends on exceptional individuals who break through static social norms and inspire creative transformation. This dynamic account of morality reflects his broader philosophy of creativity and becoming.

Influence and Reception

Bergson was one of the most widely read philosophers of his time, influencing writers, artists, and thinkers across Europe and beyond. His ideas impacted modernist literature, psychology, religious thought, and early phenomenology.
Despite his popularity, Bergson also faced strong criticism, particularly from analytic philosophers and proponents of scientific naturalism, who accused his work of vagueness and anti-intellectualism. Nevertheless, many of his core insights have been rediscovered in contemporary debates on time, consciousness, and process philosophy.

Writing Style and Method

Bergson’s writing is noted for its clarity, elegance, and use of metaphor. Unlike highly technical philosophical systems, his work sought to communicate complex ideas through accessible language and vivid illustrations.
This literary quality contributed to his broad influence and distinguished him from many of his contemporaries.