"The body is a centre of action; it receives and returns movements."
– Henri Bergson
This great philosopher arrived on earth on October 18, 1859, in Paris. Henri Louis Bergson was a descendant of a wealthy Polish-Jew family – the sons of Berck, or Berck-son, from whom the name ‘Bergson’ is derived. His mother came from an English-Jew family. His father was a musician and Henri did inherit some of his musical wizardry.
His Early Days
Bergson was brought up in France, and most of his early years were spent growing up in Paris. Trained for a professional career, he displayed impeccable French manners. He received his early education at the Lycee Condorcet in Paris, where he successfully exhibited his natural gifts in sciences and humanities. In 1876 at the age of 17, he won a prize for providing an original solution to a mathematical problem. In the same year, he also solved a problem, which Pascal claimed to have solved, but which remained unpublished.
From 1878 to 1881, he spent 16 years studying at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the institution for training university teachers. There, he served as a teacher of philosophy in a succession of Lycees. The general training that he received there brought him closer to Greek and Latin classics, as also obtaining knowledge of science of his day, and in pursuing a career in philosophy, to which he turned upon graduation. His graduation thesis in Latin was on Aristotle’s theory on Lucretius.
Beginning of His Career
He began his career teaching at various places out of Paris, first at Angers between 1881 to 1883 and the next five years at Clermout-Ferrand. Here he had the intuition, which provided both the basis and inspiration for his early philosophical books. The first result of this was his Time and Free Will : An Essay on the immediate Data of Consciousness. For this he also received doctorate the same year. It was the publication of this essay that saw Bergson’s return to Paris, teaching at the Lycee Henri IV .
His Marriage
In 1891, he married Louise Neuburger, cousin of the French novelist Marcel Proust. By the time of his marriage, he had undertaken the study of the relation between ‘mind and body’. It was a doctrine of the so-called psycho-physiological parallelism. It means that for every psychological fact there is a corresponding physiological fact that strictly determines it – "Since the body conditions describe our attention to life, the normal work of the mind must depend on the wholeness of the sensorimotor system." He was convinced and had disproved the argument for determinism, yet in his doctoral dissertation, he did not attempt to explain how the mind and body were interrelated. The result of his research into this problem gave birth to his famous theory Matter and Memory, in 1896.
Matter and Memory is said to be the toughest and prime among his books. He approached typically by his method philosophy. He neither went on to general speculation nor was he concerned with elaborating a superfluous speculative system. Prior to scripting Matter and Memory, he devoted five years in studying the available literature on memory and especially the psychological phenomenon of ‘aphasia’ (loss of verbal understanding or expression). He later became professor at the College of France in 1900, and after World War I, got involved in international affairs. In 1914, he was elected to the Acadèmie Francaise.
Nobel Prize Winner
He formally retired from the chair of philosophy from Ecole Normale Superieure in 1921. He received the highest honor that France could offer him, including membership of Acadèmie Francaise, since 1915. Among the ‘40 immortals’ of the Acadèmie Francaise, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Professor Gosta Forssell made a brief comment, prior to the acceptance of Nobel Prize, "Henri Bergson has given us a philosophical system which could have served Nobel’s idea as a basis and support, the idea acknowledging with his prizes not human deeds but new ideas revealed through selected personalities. Bergson’s high-minded works strive to regain for man’s consciousness, the divine gift of intuition and to put reason in its proper place : serving and controlling ideas."
Bergson read his acceptance speech, "I wish I had been able to express my feelings in person. Permit me to do so through the French Minister, Mr. Armand Bernard, who has kindly consented to convey my message. I thank the Swedish Academy from the bottom of my heart. It has bestowed upon me an honor to which I should not have dared aspire. I recognize its value even more, and I am even more moved by it, when I consider that this distinction, given to a French writer, may be regarded as a sign of sympathy given to France.
The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its two-fold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for honoring works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of mind… The machines I build, being artificial organs that are added to our natural organs, extend their scope, and thus enlarge the body of humanity. If that body is to be kept entire and its movements regulated, the soul must expand in turn; otherwise its equilibrium will be threatened and grave difficulties will arise, social as well as political, which will reflect on another level the disproportion between the soul of mankind, hardly changed from its original state, and its enormously enlarged body…"
His Philosophy of Time
Bergson is well known for his two main doctrines – those for duration and the elan vital (time). In 1915, he wrote a letter which spoke of ‘the intuition of duration’ as ‘the core of the doctrine’ stating his views which must start from and constantly return to. Duration is time. Scientists consider time to be a homogeneous medium, which can be divided into periods of equal length, and treated for the purposes of the calculus as analyzable as the limit into an infinity of instants with no length. None of these situations holds on for duration. Duration is heterogeneous, ever-changing without repeating itself and cannot be divided into instants. Our consciousness, experiences of duration as time, is Bergson’s most important insight.
He says that we do not experience the world moment by moment but it has to be continuous, illustrated as we hear a melody, which cannot consist simply in hearing a succession of disjointed notes. Past, present and future cannot be separated, as it is impossible to know of the past because only the present is ever present to experience.
His Influence
Though he could not create a mass of followers who could carry forward Bergsonian School of Philosophy, his influence in the field has been considerable. His influence among French philosophers had been profound, but his followers are also found in the United States and Great Britain, especially in the works of George Santayana, William James and Alfred North Whitehead, the great process metaphysicians of the 20th century.
During his early days of youth he was deeply influenced by Spencer, Darwin and Mill. "The step of Spencer aimed at taking the print of the things and at being modeled on the details of the facts," writes Bergson who adds, "Today still I realize of what attracted me to Spencer, it was the concrete character of his spirit, his desire to always bring back the spirit on the ground of the facts." Bergson adopted the precise step of concerned facts from Spencer prolonging that of science.
His Last Period
During his later years Bergson turned to morality. As per his doctrine as duration could never be generated from time, which is considered as isolated moments, he claimed that universal benevolence could never be achieved by beginning with group loyalties and widening the groups. He believed that group loyalty always required a contrasting out group, and could be transcended only by a qualitative leap of the sort taken by mystics in their love of all mankind.
At the time of World War I and in his later years, he obtained several diplomatic orders and traveled to London, New York, Madrid delivering his philosophical thoughts. His lectures attracted large crowds, and he enjoyed the status of a cult figure.
Though he was not a practising Jew, he refused the Vichy government’s proposals to exclude him from the purview of their anti-Semitic laws. He decided to be registered as a Jew and join the persecuted at the end of 1940. Although his religious thinking had brought him closer to Catholicism, he came closer to orthodox religious notion of God, which he had described in Creative Evolution as creative impulse. He acknowledged in his will in 1937, "My reflections have led me closer and closer to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism."
Though declaring his moral adherence to Catholicism he never went beyond that. To explain that he wrote, "I would have become a convert, had I not foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted." A few weeks before his death, he arose from his sickbed to stand in line to register as a Jew, in accordance with the law just imposed by the Vichy government and from which he refused the exemption that God had offered him.
His Death
In his testament, it is stated that he wanted to die a Jew, to participate in the luck of which they were to be persecuted. He died on January 3, 1941 of bronchitis.
HENRI BERGSON
Among French philosophers, Henri Bergson can be considered someone that clearly stands out from the crowd. He was way above his contemporaries, as he sat on the pinnacle of achievements. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, for his brilliant and imaginative philosophical works. His versatility was seen in the sciences as well as in literature and philosophy. He was an equally gifted mathematician, an original thinker who turned to be a cult figure. His works are also looked up to as literary, suggestive and analogical rather than philosophical.
October 18, 1859
Henri Bergson was born in Paris, France.
1877
Began his career at Ecole Normale Superieure as a teacher of philosophy.
1889
Settled in Paris.
Obtained the doctorate in philosophy with his two thesis : Quid Aristoteles of crazy person senserit and Time And Free Will : An Essay On The Immediate Data Of Consciousness
1891
Married Louise Neuburger.
1896
Matter and Memory published.
1898
He became Professor at the College of France.
1900
Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic, the theory of laughter published.
From 1900 to 1921, held the chair of philosophy at the College of France.
1903
Published his An Introduction to Metaphysics.
1907
Creative Evolution his most popular work discussing theory of evolution and creative impulse.
1919
Mind Energy was published.
1921
Duration simultaneous a proposal of a theory of Einstein.
He resigned from the post of professor at the College of France.
1927
Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1932
The two sources of morality and religion was published.
1934
The Creative mind was published.
January 4, 1941
He died in Paris, which was also his birthplace.
1957
The Philosophy of Poetry was published.
Henri Bergson as a philosopher aimed to show how pseudo problems about the will and its freedom had arisen from a false phenomenology of mental states, a tendency to conceive and describe them in spatial terms. Human beings do not experience or perceive real life as a succession of demarcated conscious states, progressing along some imaginary line, or rather a continuous flow. Describing these theories, came his first major work, Time and Free Will (1889).
Time And Free Will
Bergson made the distinction between the concept and experience of time. Physicists observe objects and events in succession, time is presented to consciousness as duration, which is a endlessly flowing process. He believed that the ‘real time’ was experienced as duration and apprehended by intuition, not through separate operations of instinct and the intellect. Time and free will : An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, for which he received the doctorate in the same year, was primarily an attempt to establish the notion of duration, or lived time as opposed to the specialized conception of time, measured by a clock, that is employed by science.
He further analyzed the awareness that man had in his inner self to show that psychological facts are qualitatively different from any other, charging psychologists in particular with falsifying the facts by trying to quantify and number them. Fechner’s Law of claiming to
establish a calculable relation between the intensity of the stimulus and of the corresponding sensation was especially criticized.
He maintained the objections to human liberty made in the name of scientific determinism to be seen as baseless when the confusions were cleared away that confounded duration with extension, succession with simultaneity and quality with quantity. Bergson offered an interpretation of consciousness as existing on two levels, the first to be reached by deep introspection, the second on external projection of the first. The deeper self is creative becoming of free will. The method of intuitive introspection first employed in this, was later developed in his work : An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903).
"Memory is something other than a function of the brain, and there is not merely a difference of degree, but of kind, between perception and recollection." This statement appeared in Matter and Memory (1896), originally written in French, which was later on translated into English. He once again took up the study of consciousness, turning his attention to the relation of mind and body.
Mind and Body
Mind and Body had the so-called psycho-physiological parallelism, which held that for every psychological fact there is a corresponding physiological fact that strictly determines it. According to the theory of psycho-physiological parallelisms, a lesson in the brain should also affect the very basis of psychological power. Bergson stated that the occurrence of aphasia (loss of memory of words) showed that this is not the case. The person affected understands what is to be said and how, suffers no paralysis of the speech organs and yet is unable to speak. He mentioned that it was not memory that was lost, but the bodily mechanism was damaged which was used for expression. He therefore concluded that memory and mind and soul are independent of body and were used to carry out their own purposes. This fact attracted the attention of a wider audience.
The limiting concept of matter was interpreted as a momentary mind, completely deprived of memory that helps make possible freedom of choice. This was the bedrock of Bergsonism. As a resentment of the mind–object problems it was a work of the highest significance, the full richness and novelty of whose content is only now being realized when the contemporary writers comprehended its light in phenomenology and existentialism.
He contended that the memory gathers and concerns all the aspects of mind and body and brain allows to remove the data giving rise to memories of concomitant form of perception or of freer form in the dreams. For him, the conception of memory was radically new; "We do not go from the present to the past; from the perception to the memory but from the past to the present, the memory to the perception. The brain was not the organ of the thought and memory only, but it also was an instrument that allowed to translate the memories in moments, and to connect the psychic thing with the corporal thing."
Laughter Needs No Echo
In 1903, he came up with a theory on Laughter : An Essay on the Meaning of The Comic. He wrote, "A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings; it seems that laughter needs an echo. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group." He saw laughter as the corrective punishment inflicted by society upon the unsociable individual. He defined the comic as the result of the sense of relief when we feel free ourselves from the mechanistic and materialistic world. He gave the example of a robot as the puppet on strings.
In Laughter, he explored the comic phenomenon, at the same time in Creative Evolution, he opposed life, which is of spontaneous incentive and a free mechanical jerk of repetitive and uncontrolled processes.
An Introduction to Metaphysics
Again in 1903, he came up with An Introduction to Metaphysics. It provided the best introduction to his philosophy by offering the clearest account of his method. To know his method needed two ways of knowing it : (1) that which reaches its furthest development in science, analytical, spatializing, and conceptualizing, tending to see things as solid and discontinuous and (2) an intuition that is global, immediate, reaching to the heart of a thing by sympathy.
He considered intuition as the direct apprehension of process, as he discovers truth through intuition and not analysis, which reveals the real world. His treatment of intuition was not coherent at times. It was stated as bright ideas, which could be stated as intellectual – hard work. While, at times, intuition is the method of philosophy as intellect is to mathematics.
Creative Evolution (1907)
Creative Evolution was a constant dialogue with the biology of his time. Here, he argued that the creative urge was not the Darwinian concept of natural selection but was at the heart of evolution. Man’s intellect had grown in the course of evolution as an instrument of survival. It came as in geometrical terms that were inadequate to hold the ultimate living process. But infusion reached the heart of reality and failed to reveal the philosophical truth. Creative impulse is immaterial force, whose existence cannot be scientifically verified, but it provides the vital impulse that continuously shapes all life. He became popular with the conflict between evolutionism and religion.
Creative impulse is a sort of life force, owed its popularity, backed by scientific as well as philosophical arguments to develop a non-Darwinian evolutionism that made room for religion, undoubtedly not for orthodox Christianity. Bergson envisaged a process of constant change and development irreversible and unrepeatable and governed by impulse, which uses efforts and subtlety to overcome the resistance of matter, but is not drawn by some pre-envisaged end, which would be a mere invested mechanism.
Nature seems to hesitate between several solutions. He concluded that the universe was not like the realization of a plan. It was as the negotiable instrument of a push, which was different more as confronted with the matter : it is theory of the vital dash. The unit of this dash is not to seek the end but the beginning, before the dash does not split up under the negotiable instrument of the matter it raises from.
This was the best of his books, the most popular that reveals most clearly his philosophies of process, at the same time his thoughts were seen to be highly influenced by biology. He accepted evolution as a scientifically established fact. He also criticized the philosophical interpretation that had been given of it for failing to see the importance of duration and therefore missing the uniqueness of life. He proposed the evolutionary process to be in endurance of vital impulse that was continuously developing and generating new forms. This meant that evolution is creative and not mechanistic.
The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion is the last chapter of his book. Here he presented the whole history of philosophical thought with the aim of showing that it failed everywhere to appreciate the nature and importance of becoming, falsifying the nature of reality by the imposition of static and discrete concepts. He desired two major lines while describing the developing process – one through instinct, leading to the life of insects and the other through the evolution of intelligence, resulting in man, both are seen as the work of one vital impulse that is at work everywhere in the world.
In Two Sources of Morals and the Religion (1932), he explores the religious prolongation to his philosophy. It applies to these new fields of reflection, the distinctions established in the creative evolution. He compared it with duration, the creative dash and its dead repercussions. In the same way there is a closed company and an open company. Closed morals which are made of obligations, expression of the social pressure, and open morals are that of the saint and the hero. In the same way, a static religion is with the service of the cohesion of group and a dynamic religion is that of the mystics.
• There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
• The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
• Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
• Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
• Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted everything in fact, which marks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.
• Think like a man of action and act like a man of thought.
• To perceive means to immobilize… he seizes, in the act of perception something which outruns perception itself.
• To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
• The universe is a machine for creating gods.
• Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
• Action, not sensation, should be the starting point.
• Our present is the materiality of our life. It is unique for each moment of duration.
• If there are any real movements, there cannot be merely changes of position.
• Homogeneous space and time are the mental diagrams of our eventual action upon matter; they are not properties of things.
• Every movement, in as much as it is a passage from rest to rest, is absolutely indivisible.
• Moment is indivisible; it is only the trajectory of a moving body that is divisible.
•Memory when actualized in an image, borrows something from perception.
• Consciousness is the note of the present; therefore pure memory is latent and unconscious.
• Habits formed by repeated actions are amassed in the body; these do not represent the past, they merely act it.
• To learn by heart is to create a cerebral mechanism, a habit of the body
