Henri Bergson

Based on Wikipedia: Henri Bergson

In the early 1900s, a philosophy professor in Paris became so popular that traffic jams formed outside his lectures. Students, artists, socialites, and curious members of the public crowded into the Collège de France to hear him speak. This was not a religious revival or a political rally. This was Henri Bergson, a mild-mannered academic who had somehow made metaphysics fashionable.

Bergson argued something that felt radical then and still does now: that our direct, lived experience of the world matters more than abstract scientific reasoning for understanding reality. In an age intoxicated by industrial progress and scientific certainty, he insisted that some of the most important things—time, consciousness, life itself—slip through the net of rational analysis. They can only be grasped through intuition.

The Making of a Philosopher

Henri-Louis Bergson was born in Paris in 1859, in a street not far from the old opera house. His background was cosmopolitan in the way that European Jewish families often were in that era. His father, Michał Bergson, was a Polish-Jewish composer and pianist whose family name had originally been Bereksohn. His mother, Katherine Levison, came from English and Irish Jewish stock—her father was a Yorkshire doctor. The family traced its lineage to some remarkable figures: Henri's great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a celebrated patroness of Polish Jewry, particularly those connected to the Hasidic movement. Going further back, his great-great-grandfather had been a prominent banker and protégé of Stanisław II Augustus, the last king of Poland.

The family lived briefly in London after Henri's birth, long enough for the young boy to absorb English from his mother. But before he turned nine, they settled permanently in France, and Henri became a naturalized French citizen.

At school, Bergson showed a talent that might have led him in an entirely different direction. He won prizes for scientific work and, at eighteen, solved a mathematical problem impressive enough to be published in a scholarly journal. His teachers assumed he would pursue science or mathematics. They were dismayed when he chose the humanities instead.

Something else happened during his school years that would shape his intellectual life. Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, Bergson lost his religious faith. The trigger, according to scholars who have studied this period, was his encounter with the theory of evolution. The idea that humans shared ancestry with other primates, through a process that seemed to require no divine creator, shattered his earlier Jewish religious convictions. This loss of faith did not make Bergson hostile to religion—far from it, as his later work would show—but it set him on a path of searching for meaning through philosophy rather than theology.

Time Is Not What You Think

Bergson's first major work, published in 1889 when he was thirty, bore a title that announced his ambition: Time and Free Will. The original French title was more technical—Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness—but both versions pointed to Bergson's central insight.

We think we know what time is. We look at clocks, measure seconds, divide the day into hours. But Bergson argued that this measured, spatialized time—what he called "clock time"—is fundamentally different from the time we actually experience. When you are bored, time crawls. When you are absorbed in something you love, hours vanish. When you recall your past, some moments feel vivid and recent while others that happened yesterday feel distant and vague.

This lived experience of time, which Bergson called duration, cannot be chopped into equal segments like a ruler. It flows. It interpenetrates. Each moment carries within it the whole of what came before, like a melody that only makes sense because each note contains the memory of previous notes and the anticipation of those to come.

The implications were profound. If our inner experience of time is fundamentally different from measurable clock time, then science—which relies entirely on measurement—cannot capture the most essential aspects of conscious life. And if each moment of consciousness flows into the next in this continuous way, then perhaps free will is real after all. The scientific determinism that seemed to reduce humans to predictable mechanisms might simply be looking at the wrong kind of time.

The physicist Louis de Broglie, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, would later remark that Bergson's ideas about time anticipated by forty years the insights of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about the limits of physical measurement. Bergson had glimpsed, through philosophical intuition, something that physics would only begin to grasp in the 1920s.

The Mystery of Memory

Seven years later, in 1896, Bergson published Matter and Memory, a book that even his admirers found difficult. It tackled one of philosophy's oldest puzzles: how does the mind relate to the body? How does consciousness connect to the brain?

The conventional view, then as now, was that memory must be stored somewhere in the brain, like files in a cabinet. Damage the right part of the brain, and you lose the corresponding memories. This seemed obvious.

Bergson disagreed. He had spent years studying the medical literature on brain injuries and memory disorders—an unusual approach for a philosopher specializing in Greek and Roman thought. What he found was more complicated than the simple storage model suggested. People with brain damage often lost the ability to recall memories on command, but the memories themselves seemed to remain, surfacing unexpectedly in dreams or moments of relaxation. The brain, Bergson concluded, was not a storage device but a kind of filter or focusing mechanism. Its job was not to create or store consciousness but to narrow it down, to limit the vast flood of memory and perception to what was useful for action in the present moment.

This had startling implications. If consciousness was not produced by the brain but merely channeled through it, then perhaps consciousness was not dependent on physical matter in the way materialists assumed. Bergson did not use this argument to make claims about life after death—he was too careful a philosopher for that—but he had opened a door that many others would walk through.

The Vital Impulse

Bergson's most famous work arrived in 1907: Creative Evolution. By this point, he had been studying biology for years, not as a dilettante but with the rigor of a serious scholar. He had absorbed not only Darwin but also Ernst Haeckel, who emphasized the unity and ecological interconnection of all living things, and Hugo de Vries, whose mutation theory of evolution was then challenging Darwinian gradualism. Bergson had even studied the recent work on fertilization and embryology that was revolutionizing the life sciences.

The question that drove the book was this: can the mechanical, deterministic framework of natural science really explain life?

Bergson's answer was no. Not because science was wrong, but because it was incomplete. The method of science is to break things down into parts and study their interactions. This works brilliantly for machines, for planetary orbits, for chemistry. But life, Bergson argued, is not a machine. It does not merely rearrange existing parts according to fixed laws. It creates genuinely new forms that could not have been predicted from what came before.

To capture this creative dimension of life, Bergson introduced a concept that would become famous: the élan vital, usually translated as "vital impulse" or "life force." This was not a mystical substance or a supernatural entity. It was Bergson's name for the creative, forward-moving quality of life that distinguishes living things from mere matter. Evolution, in this view, is not just the mechanical sifting of random variations by natural selection. It is a genuine creative process, an ongoing explosion of novelty that produces ever more complex and unpredictable forms.

The book was an immediate sensation. The publisher issued twenty-one editions in the first ten years—more than two per year. Bergson became an intellectual celebrity. His lectures filled to overflowing. Writers, artists, and thinkers across Europe and America debated his ideas. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw would build an entire philosophy of "creative evolution" on Bergsonian foundations. The American philosopher William James declared himself an ally and predicted that Bergson's approach would prevail.

What Makes Us Laugh

Between these major works, Bergson published a shorter study that reveals a different side of his thinking: Laughter, which appeared in 1900.

Why do we laugh? What makes something funny? Bergson's answer was characteristically original. Laughter, he proposed, is a social corrective. It is how society punishes those who fail to adapt, who become rigid and mechanical when they should be flexible and alive.

Think about what makes you laugh. A pompous person slipping on a banana peel. A bureaucrat repeating the same phrase no matter what question is asked. A robot attempting to act human. In each case, Bergson argued, we are laughing at "something mechanical encrusted on the living." Laughter is society's way of saying: be more supple, more human, more alive.

This sounds abstract, but Bergson showed how it illuminated everything from slapstick comedy to the most sophisticated wit. Comic authors throughout history have exploited this principle in countless ways, but the underlying mechanism is always the same: we laugh when we see the mechanical pretending to be alive, or when life becomes mechanical.

A Friendship Across the Atlantic

In 1908, Bergson traveled to London and met William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist. James was seventeen years Bergson's senior and already famous for his work on pragmatism and the psychology of religious experience. The two had been aware of each other's work for years—Bergson had quoted James in his earliest book—but this was their first meeting.

They became immediate friends. James wrote to a colleague afterward:

So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy.

James had already been moving away from the rigid rationalism that dominated academic philosophy. Bergson gave him intellectual permission to go further. In his lectures at Oxford, later published as A Pluralistic Universe, James declared that Bergson had led him "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be." He continued: Bergson had induced him "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it."

This endorsement from America's most prominent philosopher helped launch Bergson into the English-speaking world. James encouraged a translation of Creative Evolution and planned to write an introduction for it. He died in 1910, before the translation was complete, but his enthusiasm had done its work. When the English edition appeared in 1911, it found an eager audience.

The Opposite of Living

To understand Bergson, it helps to understand what he was arguing against. The dominant intellectual mood of his era was mechanistic materialism: the view that everything in the universe, including human consciousness, could be explained by the same physical laws that govern machines. This view had enormous explanatory power. It had given us steam engines and electric lights, germ theory and vaccination. But Bergson thought it had overreached. Applied to life and consciousness, mechanism became a kind of intellectual prison that excluded the most important features of experience.

The opposite of mechanism, for Bergson, was not vitalism in the mystical sense—not a belief in supernatural forces animating dead matter. The opposite of mechanism was creativity, spontaneity, duration. It was the recognition that time is not just another dimension like space, to be measured and mapped, but the medium in which novelty becomes possible. It was the insight that consciousness is not a passive mirror reflecting an external world but an active, creative process constantly bringing new perspectives into being.

This put Bergson at odds with both the materialist scientists of his day and with the rationalist philosophers who dominated academic philosophy. But it made him enormously appealing to artists, writers, and anyone who felt that the modern world, for all its progress, was somehow leaving out what mattered most.

Intuition as Method

How do we know things? The standard philosophical answer, going back centuries, emphasized reason and analysis. Break complex things into simple parts. Define your terms precisely. Construct logical arguments. This was the method of science and of most academic philosophy.

Bergson did not reject this method. He was too serious a scholar for that. But he insisted it had limits. Some things—especially the flow of time, the nature of consciousness, and the creative quality of life—cannot be captured by analysis. Analysis breaks things into static parts, but time and consciousness are precisely characterized by their flowing, interpenetrating, dynamic quality. To analyze them is to falsify them.

The alternative was intuition. Bergson did not mean by this a vague feeling or a lucky guess. He meant a disciplined effort to place oneself within the flow of experience, to grasp things from the inside rather than from the outside. The geometer studies a circle by defining its properties and deriving theorems. The intuitive philosopher tries to imagine what it would be like to be the circle, to experience the continuous curve from within.

This sounds mystical, but Bergson insisted it was rigorous. It required training, effort, and a willingness to let go of the comfortable abstractions that normally structure our thinking. In his 1903 essay "Introduction to Metaphysics," Bergson laid out this program in detail. Analysis gives us knowledge that is relative, abstract, and external. Intuition, properly practiced, can give us knowledge that is absolute, concrete, and internal—knowledge of things as they really are, not as they appear when filtered through the categories of practical life.

A Mind at the Center of Its Age

By 1910, Bergson stood at the center of European intellectual life. His influence extended far beyond professional philosophy. The writers Marcel Proust (who was related to Bergson by marriage—Bergson's wife was Proust's cousin, and Proust served as best man at their wedding) and Virginia Woolf were exploring the stream of consciousness in ways that echoed Bergsonian themes. The Cubist painters were breaking apart spatial representation in ways that some linked to Bergson's critique of static analysis. Theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, were finding in Bergson resources for rethinking the relationship between science and faith.

His influence on younger philosophers was profound. Jacques Maritain, who would become one of the most important Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century, credited Bergson with saving him from despair. Maritain and his wife Raïssa had made a pact to commit suicide if they could not find a philosophy that gave meaning to life. Bergson's lectures convinced them that such a philosophy was possible.

Not everyone was happy about Bergson's popularity. The French Republic had committed itself to a secular, scientific worldview, and many officials saw Bergson's philosophy as a threat. His emphasis on intuition over reason, on creativity over mechanism, seemed to open doors that rationalist secularism had worked hard to close. The Catholic Church, too, had mixed feelings. While some Catholic thinkers embraced Bergson, the Vatican placed several of his works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1914, concerned about his unorthodox metaphysics.

Bergson navigated these controversies with characteristic modesty. He lived what he called "the quiet life of a French professor," marked not by political controversy but by the steady production of scholarly work. He married Louise Neuberger in 1891, and they had a daughter, Jeanne, who was born deaf in 1896. Family life was quiet and private. His public role was as a teacher and writer, and in that role he achieved a fame unprecedented for a philosopher.

The Meaning of Comedy and Time

There is a connection between Bergson's theory of laughter and his deeper philosophy that is easy to miss. Why do we laugh at the mechanical encrusted on the living? Because mechanism is a kind of lie about life. Life is flow, creativity, novelty. When a person becomes rigid and predictable, they are pretending to be a thing when they are actually alive. Laughter punctures this pretense.

The same insight applies to time. Clock time pretends to capture the reality of temporal experience by dividing it into equal, measurable units. But this is mechanism applied to duration. It takes something flowing and continuous and turns it into something static and divisible. In a sense, the whole of modern scientific civilization is a vast exercise in treating duration as if it were spatial, treating life as if it were mechanical, treating consciousness as if it were computable.

Bergson was not calling for the rejection of science or modernity. He was calling for the recognition that there is more to reality than science can capture—that the methods which work so brilliantly for understanding matter may fail when applied to mind and life. This was not obscurantism or mysticism. It was a careful philosophical argument, grounded in close attention to experience and extensive knowledge of the sciences of his day.

The Weight of Recognition

In 1927, Bergson received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited "his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented." Three years later, France awarded him its highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Légion d'honneur.

By then, his health was failing. He suffered from severe arthritis that made it difficult to write or travel. He had to dictate his last major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, published in 1932. In this book, he turned to questions he had circled for decades: the nature of morality, the meaning of religious experience, the possibility of genuine human progress.

Bergson distinguished between two types of morality. The first, which he called "closed morality," is the morality of social pressure and convention. It binds groups together but also separates them from outsiders. Closed morality says: be loyal to your tribe. The second, "open morality," is something rarer and more demanding. It arises from moral exemplars—saints, prophets, heroes—who break through the limits of tribal loyalty to embrace humanity as a whole. Open morality says: everyone is your neighbor.

Religion, too, has these two aspects. Closed religion is myth and ritual that reinforces social bonds and provides comfort in the face of death. Open religion is mystical experience that touches something beyond the social—a creative force at the heart of reality that Bergson identified, tentatively, with love.

This last work brought Bergson closer to religious questions than he had ever ventured. He had lost his Jewish faith as a teenager, but he had never stopped searching. Late in life, he was drawn to Catholicism, finding in Christian mysticism echoes of his philosophical vision. He considered converting but ultimately chose not to, partly because of the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe. He did not want to seem to be abandoning his fellow Jews in their hour of persecution.

The Final Years

When Germany occupied France in 1940, Bergson was eighty years old, crippled by arthritis, and one of the most famous intellectuals in the world. The Vichy government offered to exempt him from the antisemitic laws that required Jews to register with the authorities. Bergson declined the exemption. Despite his ill health, he stood in line to register as a Jew.

He died on January 4, 1941, in occupied Paris. Some accounts say he caught pneumonia while waiting in that registration line. Others dispute this detail. What is certain is that he died as he had lived: with quiet dignity, refusing to accept special treatment that would separate him from those who shared his heritage.

A Philosophy of Waiting

What does any of this have to do with waiting?

Everything, in a sense. Bergson's central insight was that time as we live it is fundamentally different from time as we measure it. Clock time is homogeneous, divisible, spatial—each moment the same as every other. Lived time is heterogeneous, continuous, qualitative—each moment rich with the weight of all that came before and open to the novelty of what comes next.

Waiting is where this difference becomes most vivid. When you wait—really wait, without distraction or impatience—you experience time in its pure form. You feel duration. You notice how the present moment is not a dimensionless point between past and future but a thick, resonant experience that contains memory and anticipation, regret and hope. Waiting, in this sense, is not empty time to be filled or killed. It is time made conscious of itself.

Bergson would say that our normal mode of living is to spatialize time, to treat it as a series of tasks to be accomplished, appointments to be kept, moments to be measured and managed. This is necessary for practical life, but it comes at a cost. We lose touch with duration. We forget what it feels like to be alive in time rather than racing through it.

Waiting, especially the enforced waiting that modern life often imposes on us—waiting for news, waiting in line, waiting for something we cannot hurry—strips away the practical framework and leaves us with duration itself. This can feel tedious or even agonizing. But Bergson would suggest that it is also an opportunity. In waiting, we glimpse something that our busy, time-managing, clock-watching lives normally obscure: the creative, flowing, inexhaustible nature of temporal experience.

This does not make waiting pleasant. Bergson was no romantic about suffering. But it suggests that waiting is not merely an obstacle to life but a dimension of it—perhaps even a privileged dimension, where the truth about time becomes impossible to ignore.

Bergson spent his life trying to articulate truths that slip through the net of language. Time flows; consciousness creates; life evolves in ways that mechanism cannot capture. These insights resist summary because they point to realities that must be experienced, not just described. But if there is a single lesson to draw from Bergson's work, it might be this: the moments when life seems to pause—the waiting rooms, the sleepless nights, the hours before dawn—are not gaps in experience. They are invitations to experience more deeply, to feel the pulse of duration that underlies all our hurried days.