Thinker · TH-0202
Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who taught at the Collège de France in Paris and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927.…
Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who taught at the Collège de France in Paris and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. He contrasted lived duration (durée) with the spatialised time of physics and argued that intuition grasps the flow of life better than analytic intellect. In his essay on laughter he proposed that we laugh at the mechanical encrusted on the living, when people behave like rigid machines. His ideas on time, memory and creative evolution influenced philosophy and literature widely.
Key ideas
- Lived time, duration, is a qualitative flow that cannot be represented as a series of spatial points.
- Free acts spring from the whole personality in duration and are distorted when analysed spatially.
- Laughter is provoked by the mechanical encrusted on the living and works as a social corrective to rigidity.
- Evolution is driven by a creative vital impulse (élan vital) rather than by mechanism or predetermined design.
Major works
- Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889)
- Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire, 1896)
- Laughter (Le rire, 1900)
- Creative Evolution (L'évolution créatrice, 1907)
In the conversation
- Reading group Reading group: Bergson’s Laughter (1900), one chapter a fortnight
- Discussion Cutting film taught me that clock time and lived time are different things
- Question What is Husserl’s “retention”, and how is it different from simply remembering?
- Debate The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind