Bergson, Henri (1859—1941)
French philosopher of science interested principally in the operations of consciousness, particularly with regard to time. One of the most famous and influential writers of his age, he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. He is acknowledged as an important influence by writers as diverse as Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry and Charles Péguy, as well as psychologists like William James (who claimed that like Kant, Bergson had induced yet another Copernican turn in philosophy), Pierre Janet and Jean Piaget. The rise of existentialism in France saw his work fall into disfavour only to be revived again by Deleuze, Gilles who, in his books on cinema particularly, manages to make what others have perceived as Bergson’s weaknesses appear as strengths. Born in Paris, to Jewish parents, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, where his classmates were Jean Jaurès (anti-war activist and socialist leader assassinated in 1914) and Durkheim, Émile. He received his doctorate in 1889 for a thesis entitled: Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, translated as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1919), a work that continues to be studied to this day. For the next decade he taught in various lycées, including the prestigious Henri IV. In 1900 he was offered the Chair in Philosophy at the Collège de France, where he remained until his retirement in 1921. Suffering from acute arthritis, he had to give up teaching in 1914. This did not prevent him from joining a diplomatic mission to the US in 1917 in a bid to persuade America to join the war. After the war he chaired a section of the League of Nations devoted to international intellectual cooperation. Bergson’s most influential and best known conceptual invention is the notion of élan vital (vital impulse). Ironically, it is used as much by his detractors to deride his work as it is by his supporters to explain what is significant about his work. Bergson’s so-called vitalism is in this respect a double-edged sword. The most straightforward way of thinking about élan vital is that it encompasses the gap in mechanistic explanations of evolution and names those aspects of evolutionary change scientific theory cannot explain. It could thus be seen as a virtual power of differentiation, or adaptation to use the Darwinian term, namely a creative force able to respond to obstacles and develop creative but ‘unthought’ solutions. Species development can be thought then in terms of an arresting or stabilizing of this flow of creative energy and thus as much a matter of involution as evolution. This idea has lately caught the attention of complexity theory. Further Reading: G. Deleuze Bergsonisme (1965), translated as Bergsonism (1988). S. Guerlac Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (2006). J. Mullarkey Bergson and Philosophy (1999).