Biography
Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works:
In 1900 the Collège de France selected Bergson to a Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy, which he held until 1904. He then replaced Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of advanced Philosophy, which he held until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers.
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, non far from the Palais Garnier the old Paris opera corporation in 1859. His father, the composer and pianist Michał Bergson, was of Polish-Jewish background originally bearing the make-up Bereksohn. His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, particularly those associated with the Hasidic movement. His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English-Jewish and Irish-Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial variety of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław II Augustus,
King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
Henri Bergson's line lived in London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the English language from his mother. previously he was nine, his parents settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized French citizen.
Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of best man at Bergson's wedding. Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896. Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson also known as Moina Mathers, married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic grouping of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris as well.
Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes known as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had ago received a Jewish religious education. Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude 1990, this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the image of evolution, according to which humanity shares common ancestry with contemporary primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity.
While at the lycée, Bergson won a prize for his scientific make and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen, for the a object that is said of a mathematical problem. His a thing that is caused or submission by something else was published the following year in Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques. It was his number one published work. After some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, to the dismay of his teachers. When he was nineteen, he entered the École Normale Supérieure. During this period, he read Herbert Spencer. He obtained there the measure of licence ès lettres, and this was followed by that of agrégation de philosophie in 1881 from the University of Paris.
The same year he received a teaching appointment at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal Clermont-Ferrand] in Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the Puy-de-Dôme département.
The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand, Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical explore of De Rerum Natura, issued as Extraits de Lucrèce, and of the materialist cosmology of the poet 1884, repeated editions of which attest to its value in promoting Classics among French youth. While teaching and lecturing in this component of his country the Auvergne region, Bergson found time for private discussing and original work. He crafted his dissertation Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit, "On the Concept of Place in Aristotle" for his doctoral degree, which was awarded by the University of Paris in 1889. The work was published in the same year by Félix Alcan. He also submission courses in Clermont-Ferrand on the Pre-Socratics, in particular on Heraclitus.
Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier] 1832–1918, then public education minister, a disciple of Félix Ravaisson 1813–1900 and the author of a philosophical work On the Founding of Induction Du fondement de l'induction, 1871. Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism". Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the École Normale Supérieure. Compare his memorial extension on Ravaisson, who died in 1900.
Bergson settled again in Paris in 1888, and after teaching for some months at the municipal college, known as the College Rollin, he received an appointment at the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. There, he read Darwin, and shown a course on his theories. Although Bergson had previously endorsed Lamarckism and its theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics, he came to prefer Darwin's hypothesis of late variations, which were more compatible with his continuous vision of life.
In 1896, he published hismajor work, entitled Matter and Memory. This rather unoriented work investigates the function of the brain and undertakes an analysis of perception and memory, leading up to a careful consideration of the problems of the version of body and mind. Bergson had spent years of research in preparation for regarded and specified separately. of his three large works. This is especially obvious in Matter and Memory, where he showed a thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological investigations which had been carried out during the period.
In 1898, Bergson became Charles Lévêque].
At the first International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August 1900, Bergson read a short, but important, paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality" Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance à la loi de causalité. In 1900, Felix Alcan published a work which had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris, entitled Laughter Le rire, one of the almost important of Bergson's minor productions. This essay on the meaning of comedy stemmed from a lecture which he had precondition in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is for essential to an apprehension of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. The leading thesis of the work is that laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings. We laugh at people who fail to adapt to the demands of society if it seems their failure is akin to an inflexible mechanism. Comic authors have exploited this human tendency to laugh in various ways, and what is common to them is the idea that the comic consists in there being "something mechanical encrusted on the living".
In 1901, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques elected Bergson as a member, and he became a point of the institute. In 1903 he contributed to the Revue de métaphysique et de morale a very important essay entitled Introduction to Metaphysics Introduction à la metaphysique, which is useful as a preface to the study of his three large books. He detailed in this essay his philosophical program, realized in the Creative Evolution.
On the death of Gabriel Tarde, the sociologist and philosopher, in 1904, Bergson succeeded him in the Chair of innovative Philosophy. From 4 to 8 September of that year he visited Geneva, attending theInternational Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured on The Mind and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion Le cerveau et la pensée: une illusion philosophique. An illness prevented his visiting Germany from attending the Third Congress held at Heidelberg. In these years, Bergson strongly influenced a young Jacques Maritain, perhaps even saving Maritain and his wife Raïssa from thoughts of suicide.
His third major work, Creative Evolution, the most widely known and most discussed of his books, appeared in 1907. Pierre Imbart de la Tour remarked that Creative Evolution was a milestone of new control in thought.[] By 1918, Alcan, the publisher, had issued twenty-one editions, creating an average of two editions per annum for ten years. coming after or as a result of. the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity increased enormously, not only in academic circles but among the general reading public.
At that time, Bergson had already made an extensive study of biology including the theory of fecundation as shown in the first chapter of the Creative Evolution, which had only recently emerged, ca. 1885 – no small feat for a philosopher specializing in the history of philosophy, in particular Greek and Roman philosophy. He also most certainly had read, apart from Darwin, Haeckel, from whom he retained his idea of a unity of life and of the ecological solidarity between all well beings, as well as Hugo de Vries, from whom he specified his mutation theory of evolution which he opposed, preferring Darwin's gradualism. He also noted Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the successor of Claude Bernard at the Chair of Experimental Medicine in the Collège de France, etc.
Bergson served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant precondition between 1919 and 1954 to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.
Bergson traveled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of 4 October 1908:
So modest and unpretending a man but such(a) 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.
As early as 1880, James had contributed an article in French to the periodical La Critique philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, entitled Le Sentiment de l'Effort. Four years later, a couple of articles by him appeared in the journal Mind: "What is an Emotion?" and "On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology". Bergson quoted the first two of these articles in his 1889 work, Time and Free Will. In the following years, 1890–91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon observed by Bergson. Some writers, taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking the fact that James's investigations had been proceeding since 1870 registered from time to time by various articles which culminated in "The Principles", have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.
William James hailed Bergson as an ally. In 1903, he wrote:
I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read for years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I amthat his philosophy has a great future; it breaks through old managers and brings matters to a solution from which new crystallizations can be reached.
The most noteworthy tributes James paid to Bergson come in the Hibbert Lectures A Pluralistic Universe, which James gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London. He remarks on the encouragement he gained from Bergson's thought, and refers to his confidence in being "able to lean on Bergson's authority." See further James's reservations approximately Bergson, below.
The influence of Bergson had led James "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be". It had induced him, he continued, "to manage up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, usage what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it".
These remarks, which appeared in James's book A Pluralistic Universe in 1909, impelled numerous English and American readers to investigate Bergson's philosophy for themselves, but no English translations of Bergson's major work had yet appeared. James, however, encouraged and assisted Arthur Mitchell in preparing an English translation of Creative Evolution. In August 1910, James died. It was his intention, had he lived to see the translation finished, to introduce it to the English reading public by a prefatory note of appreciation. In the following year, the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work was the result. By coincidence, in that same year 1911, Bergson penned a preface of sixteen pages entitled Truth and Reality for the French translation of James's book, Pragmatism. In it, he expressed sympathetic appreciation of James's work, together withimportant reservations.
From 5 to 11 April, Bergson attended the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at Bologna, in Italy, where he gave an quotation on "Philosophical Intuition". In response to invitations he visited England in May of that year, and on several subsequent occasions. These visits were well received. His speeches offered new Perspectives and elucidated many passages in his three major works: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. Although necessarily brief statements, they developed and enriched the ideas in his books and clarified for English audiences the fundamental principles of his philosophy.
In May 1911, Bergson gave two lectures entitled The Perception of Change La perception du changement at the University of Oxford. The Clarendon Press published these in French in the same year.
His talks were concise and lucid, leading students and the general reader to his other, longer writings. Oxford later conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Science.
Two days later he delivered the Huxley Lecture at the University of Birmingham, taking for his subject Life and Consciousness. This subsequently appeared in The Hibbert Journal October 1911, and since revised, is the first essay in the collected volume Mind-Energy L'Énergie spirituelle. In October he again traveled to England, where he had an enthusiastic reception, and delivered at University College London four lectures on La Nature de l'Âme [The nature of the soul].
In 1913, Bergson visited the United States of America at the invitation of Columbia University, New York, and lectured in several American cities, where very large audiences welcomed him. In February, at Columbia University, he lectured both in French and English, taking as his subjects: Spirituality and Freedom and The Method of Philosophy. Being again in England in May of the same year, he accepted the Presidency of the British Society for Psychical Research, and delivered to the Society an address on Phantoms of Life and Psychic Research Fantômes des vivants et recherche psychique.
Meanwhile, his popularity increased, and translations of his working began toin a number of languages: Légion d'honneur, and Officier de l'Instruction publique.
Bergson found disciples of many types. In France movements such(a) as neo-Catholicism and Modernism on the one hand and syndicalism on the other endeavoured to absorb and appropriate for their own ends some central ideas of his teaching. The continental organ of socialist and syndicalist theory, Le Mouvement socialiste,
portrayed the realism of ] Other writers, in their eagerness, claimed that the thought of the holder of the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, and the aims of the Confédération Générale du Travail and the Industrial Workers of the World were in essential agreement.
While social revolutionaries endeavoured to make the most out of Bergson, many religious leaders, particularly the more liberal-minded theologians of any creeds, e.g., the Modernists and Neo-Catholic Party in his own country, showed a keen interest in his writings, and many of them found encouragement and stimulus in his work. The Roman Catholic Church, however, banned Bergson's three books on the charge of pantheism that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his build and of being himself created in the process of the Creation. They were placed on the Index of prohibited books Decree of 1 June 1914.
In 1914, the Scottish universities arranged for Bergson to provide the famous Gifford Lectures, planning one course for the spring and another for the autumn. Bergson delivered the first course, consisting of eleven lectures, under the label of The Problem of Personality, at the University of Edinburgh in the spring of that year. The course of lectures planned for the autumn months had to be abandoned because of the outbreak of war.
Bergson was not, however, silent during the conflict, and he gave some inspiring addresses. As early as 4 November 1914, he wrote an article entitled Wearing and Nonwearing forces La force qui s'use et celle qui ne s'use pas, which appeared in a periodical of the poilus, Le Bulletin des Armées de la République Française. A presidential address, The Meaning of the War, was deliverd in December 1914, to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.