*Emily Herring* # Progressive Summary One might describe Bergson's philosophy as the philosophy of change. He had started out as a believer of a mechanistic universe (he was an admirer of Herbert Spencer), but in Clermont-Ferrand, he began developing his idea of the durée, which became the cornerstone of his new philosophy. > Many years later, he told a friend: "I was careful not to reveal any of my ideas for fear of dispelling a kind of dream that was developing inside of me." Early Life & Academic Rise - **1859 (October 18):** Born in Paris, France, to a Polish-Jewish musician father and an English mother. - **1878:** Enters the prestigious **École Normale Supérieure**. - **1881:** Achieves second place in the _Agrégation de Philosophie_; begins teaching philosophy at a high school in Angers. - **1889:** Defends his doctoral thesis and publishes his first major work, _Time and Free Will_ (_Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience_). Career Milestones & Major Publications - **1896:** Publishes _Matter and Memory_ (_Matière et mémoire_). - **1900:** Publishes _Laughter_ (_Le Rire_). Appointed to the chair in Greek and Roman philosophy at the **Collège de France**. - **1901:** Elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. - **1902:** Elected to the Légion d'honneur. - **1904:** Becomes the Chair of Modern Philosophy at the **Collège de France**. - **1907:** Publishes his most famous work, _Creative Evolution_ (_L’Évolution créatrice_), which popularized the concept of the _élan vital_. International Recognition & Debate - **1911:** Awarded a Doctor of Science degree from [Oxford University](https://www.ox.ac.uk/). - **1914:** Elected to the [Académie Française](https://www.academie-francaise.fr/). Retires from active duties at the [Collège de France](https://www.college-de-france.fr/). - **1913:** Tours the United States, giving lectures that cause massive public excitement in [New York City](https://www.nyc.gov/). - **1922 (April 6):** Engages in a famous public debate with physicist Albert Einstein over the philosophical vs. scientific nature of time. Later Years & Legacy - **1927:** Awarded the [Nobel Prize in Literature](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/) for his "rich and vitalizing ideas". - **1932:** Publishes his final major book, _The Two Sources of Morality and Religion_. - **1940:** Under the Vichy regime in France, he refuses special exemptions offered to him regarding anti-Semitic laws and registers as a Jew in solidarity with others. - **1941 (January 4):** Passes away in Paris, France. # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## Chapter 1 - On the Origin of Henri In 1859, the world changed twice. Henri Bergson was born. And Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species – paleontologists had replaced priests as the guides to the meaning of life. Most religious and philosophical texts had described a fixed and unchanging human nature. But after Darwin, species could no longer be seen as fixed, eternal categories. Zeno had set the template with his paradoxes, such as Achilles and the Tortoise, which he claimed to show that motion and change were logical impossibilities or illusions. Philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Descartes built their philosophy around the idea that in order to know the world it is better to focus on eternal, unchanging ideas than on the fluctuations and accidents of everyday life. The idea that there is more reality in stability than in change, more truth in eternity than in the passing of time, became one of the most engrained biases in Western thinking. Bergson became famous because he reversed this trend. "For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on endlessly creating oneself." (Creative Evolution). ## Chapter 4 - Time Is Not Space Asked by a woman to sum up his philosophy, Bergson replied, "Time is not space," and promptly walked away. This is how he summed up his concept of *durée*. > To measure or even talk about time and movement, science has to borrow from space, a category external to time, thus confusing time with space, movement with immobility. > To theorise about time, scientists and mathematicians first had to stop it in its tacks. Something in constant flux, like time or movement, is difficult to talk about, to seize, and to measure. Scientific concepts and mathematical equations require stability. The many symbols and concepts we use to represent time and motion – minutes on a clock, pages on a calendar, points on a graph – are sophisticated ways of freezing time's continuous flow, of cutting it up into identical, solid units in order to measure them. These units are positioned one after the other like objects in space, like interchangeable beads on a string. > All Zeno had been able to show was that movement could be represented as a line, and that this line could be divided into as many points as the mathematician wanted. > Science cannot deal with time and motion except on condition of first eliminating the essential qualitative element – of time, duration, and of motion, mobility. – Bergson 1910. ## Chapter 5 - The Melody of Durée Our experience of time is like our experience of music. Musical notes written on a page can never capture the experience of music, which is indivisible. Altering even one note changes the entire musical experience. > Our personality is like a snowball rolling down a hill, accumulating experience as it grows. Time that passes is not lost but rather it is gained. We carry our whole history with us as we advance. ## Chapter 6 - The Enchanter > The grand philosophical projects of the century, like those of Comte and Spenser, rested upon the idea that scientific methods can be applied to social and ethical problems to steer humanity towards progress. > If something as mysterious as the origins of life could be made intelligible by the theory of evolution, then there appeared to be little that could escape the meticulous gaze of scientific understanding." These were the ambitions of the French positivists. But just as Hume drove a wedge between fact and value, so did Bergson do the same for quantity and quality. Bergson felt there was a long tradition of theories that inserted space into the nonspatial and quantity into the unquantifiable. [Most likely this comes from the modern attachment to control and predictability.] > In space, objects can be placed next to one another. The larger object can contain the smaller one. But mental states do not occupy physical space; they cannot be contained. As Guerlac writes, inner states do not have the same boundaries as external things, but rather “overflow into one another, interpenetrate, even as they succeed one another.” ## Chapter 7 - Memory Matters When Bergson married in 1892, his best man was Marcel Proust, who was the second cousin of the bride. Bergson's wife, Louise, protected him from all kinds of distractions so he could do his thinking. When they installed a phone in the 1920s, she didn't share the number with anyone, not even their closest friends. She knew that the invasive ringing mechanism would become an unbearable nuisance to her husband. > In 1896, Bergson published Matter and Memory, his contribution to the memory debate. In preparation for his second book, Bergson spent half a decade reading all the available literature on psychopathology, in particular research about aphasia. As he condensed this huge mass of information into philosophical lines of enquiry, he became convinced that, despite what the data on aphasia appeared to show, it made no sense to think of memories as “located,” or “stored.” Bergson wanted to change the way we think about the brain and about memory. > In Matter and Memory, Bergson made a radical move by arguing that we do not perceive in order to know, but that we perceive in order to act. ## Chapter 8 - Snowballing > The Collège de France was born in the sixteenth century as a rival institution to the already three-hundred-year-old Sorbonne, which the new institution deemed to be out of touch with the Renaissance spirit spreading through Europe. At the Sorbonne, all teaching was dispensed in Latin based on the medieval Quadrivium system, and students learned the scholastic art of disputation, a method of debate that allowed very little departure from tradition and orthodoxy. In 1530, following the advice of fellow humanists, King François I, a patron of the arts (it was he who acquired the Mona Lisa), founded the Collège Royal, which later became the Collège de France. It was a place where knowledge could be dispensed freely with none of the constraints of a university. To this day the Collège grants no degrees and has no entry or registration requirements. The dozens of weekly lectures delivered in the sciences and the humanities are open to the public. Bergson's intuitive philosophy did not mesh well with the Sorbonne's materialist bias. It rejected him when he applied in 1894, and again in 1898. In 1899, the chair of ancient philosophy opened up at the Collège de France, which he took, even though he was eyeing the chair for modern philosophy. Bergson didn't develop his own school of thought. There was no Bergsonian school. The Collège de France was an institution open to all; it did not have a registration process and did not issue diplomas. Bergson didn't take on students as he would have at other institutions. Furthermore, Bergson did not espouse any system: > I have no system in philosophy. I have no simple set of rules from which I could evolve my philosophy. In philosophy there are different problems and each problem must be solved by special methods. The methods employed in solving one problem will not do when you attempt to solve another problem. I cannot always deduce from answers I have already given the answers to other problems. There must be a new answer to every new question. In 1902, William James wrote a glowing response to receiving a copy of Bergson's *Matter and Memory*: > I saw its great originality, but found your ideas so new and vast that I could not be sure that I fully understood them, although the style, Heaven knows, was lucid enough. So I laid the book aside for a second reading, which I have just accomplished, slowly and carefully.… > > It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley’s “Principles” or Kant’s “Critique” did, and will probably, as it gets better and better known, open a new era of philosophical discussion. It fills my mind with all sorts of new questions and hypotheses and brings the old into a most agreeable liquefaction. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. ## Chapter 9 - Laughter is Vital In 1900, Bergson published an essay entitled *Laughter*. He was one of the few philosophers to write about humour in a serious way. > Social life, wrote Bergson, requires a “delicate adjustment of wills” and constant “reciprocal adaptation” between the members of the group. Society therefore needs its members to display “the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability,” and society itself must guard against “a certain rigidity of body, mind and character.” These ossified expressions of human life, according to Bergson, are at the source of the comical, because this is precisely what laughter seeks to correct. Rather than a definition of the comical, Bergson arrived at a “leitmotiv”—a common thread uniting various forms of comedy. In general, we laugh at “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” > In both accidental blunders and carefully choreographed slapstick comedy, we are laughing at figures who lack “elasticity,” who are mechanically following a predetermined trajectory and therefore fail to adapt to their surroundings. ## Chapter 10 - Lifting the Veil > Bergson saw language as an imperfect but essential practical and social tool. In an ever-changing universe, it provides us with solid anchoring points. In a sense, the very purpose of language, concepts, and symbols is to stop durée in its tracks. Indeed, communication would be impossible if our definitions of words changed following the constant flow of durée. This is exactly what Enfield says in [[Language vs Reality]] ## Chapter 13 - Deluged > In 1914, his friend Isaak Benrubi wrote in his journal: Bergson told me that he received an average of thirty letters a day and that he did not know how to both answer them and complete all the work with which he was overloaded. He longed to leave Paris and settle somewhere else. I asked him: “Why don’t you get a secretary?” He replied that it wouldn’t do him much good, because he’d still have to do everything himself. ## Chapter 16 - A Philosopher for Women 9 out of 10 people in the audience for his Collège de France lectures were women. Most of Bergson's critics used this to label him as a philosopher of the irrational who peddled an obscure and feminine mysticism. This was in keeping with a long-standing French tradition of looking upon women as mostly irrational. In the 17th century, the word *précieuse* was used to derogate the intellectual capabilities of women. In 1659, Molière wrote the one-act comedy "Les Précieuses ridicules", about two provincial women with aspirations to partake in Parisian literary salons. He gave dramatic expression to "the pervasive idea that the women who attended the salons were superficial socialites, that their language was affected, and that their attempts to produce intellectual content were laughable." In 1680, in the first French monolingual dictionary, Pierre Richelet defined a précieuse as “she who deserves to be mocked for the way she acts and speaks.” It wasn't until 1980 that the first woman, Marguerite Yourcenar, was elected to the French Academy, a council of 40 members (nicknamed "the immortals"), who have been arbiters of the French language since 1635. > The associations between femininity, irrationality, and Bergson’s philosophy often overlapped with anti-Semitic attacks against the philosopher. In France, these attacks were coordinated by the right-wing, overtly anti-Semitic political movement Action Française. Between 1910 and 1911, Pierre Lasserre, the main literary critic for the movement’s newspaper (also called Action Française), published a series of anti-Bergsonian articles. He painted Bergson’s philosophy as sentimental and vague, and in his final article he claimed that Bergson would never reach the level of an Aristotle or a Leibniz because he was Jewish. Such ideas were in line with the theories of the intellectual leader of Action Française, Charles Maurras, who frequently warned that French civilisation was declining because of the influences of “barbarian” and “feminine” ideologies. According to Maurras, Bergson, as the “Master of Jewish France” and a defender of “feminine romanticism,” embodied both threats. ^f55ae2 # Quotes > Mankind lies groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining whether they want to go on living or not. > – Bergson, *The Two Sources of Morality and Religion*, 1932 # References