Henri Bergson

1859-1941 · French · Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Time, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Biology, Aesthetics

Time is invention, or it is nothing at all.

When Henri Bergson lectured at the Collège de France after 1900, the rooms overflowed; fashionable Parisians arrived early to hear a philosopher argue that we have fundamentally misunderstood time. The son of a Polish-Jewish musician and an English mother, trained alongside Jaurès and Durkheim, he became a cultural event in his own lifetime — winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, and, in 1940, registering as a Jew under Vichy rather than accept the exemption his stature was offered.

Topics Henri Bergson addresses

• durée (duration)
• the critique of spatialized time
• intuition as philosophical method
• élan vital
• creative evolution
• the two multiplicities
• heterogeneous multiplicity
• differences in kind vs. differences in degree
• virtual and actual
• the body as action-center
• pure perception
• pure memory
• the cone of memory
• image (technical sense)
• habit-memory and recollection-memory
• planes of consciousness
• instinct, intelligence, and intuition
• the cinematographic illusion
• movement and the moving
• false problems
• the retrograde movement of the true
• the possible and the real
• mechanism and finalism critique
• closed and open society

Questions to put to Henri Bergson

Duration and the Spatialized Time of Science

• What do you mean by durée, and how is it different from clock time?
• Why do you say that treating time like space creates false problems?
• How does real duration make room for free will?
• Can physics ever capture what you call real time?
• What's wrong with thinking of the past as a series of moments lined up behind us?

Matter and Memory: Perception, Image, and the Virtual

• What do you mean when you say we perceive things where they are, not in our heads?
• How is the body an action-center rather than something that produces representations?
• What's the difference between pure perception and pure memory?
• How does memory coexist with the present instead of being stored in the brain?
• Can you explain the cone of memory and what it shows us?
• What do you mean by calling matter an aggregate of images?

Intuition as Method and the Critique of False Problems

• How is intuition a precise philosophical method and not just feeling?
• What makes a philosophical problem false rather than just hard to solve?
• What do you mean by the retrograde movement of the true?
• How do you distinguish differences in kind from differences in degree?
• Why do you say nonbeing and disorder are illusions rather than real absences?
• How does your method respond to Russell's charge that you're just doing poetry?

Creative Evolution and the Élan Vital

• What do you mean by élan vital, and why isn't it just vitalism?
• How is evolution creative rather than the unfolding of what was already possible?
• What's the difference between instinct and intelligence as divergent evolutionary lines?
• Why do you reject both mechanism and finalism as accounts of life?
• How does the idea of the possible being less than the real overturn common sense?
• What does it mean to say that life is a differentiating tendency?

The Two Sources: Closed and Open Society, Static and Dynamic Religion

• What's the difference between closed morality and open morality?
• How do obligation and aspiration work as the two sources of morality?
• What do you mean by static religion versus dynamic religion?
• Why do you see mysticism as the completion of philosophy rather than its rejection?
• How does the fabulation function protect social cohesion?
• What's at stake for you in the wartime claim that Germany represents mechanism against life?

Converse with Henri Bergson on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Henri Bergson's own writing, cited to the page.