Bergson, Henri

BERGSON, HENRI. - Philosopher, b. in Paris on
18 Oct. 1859 to a Jewish family of Irish origin,
d. there on 4 Jan. 1941. A pupil of Ollé-Laprune and of
Boutroux at the École Normale Supérieure, where he
subsequently taught (1897-1900), he obtained his doctorate
in 1889 with the defense of the celebrated thesis Essai
sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris
1889), which was followed, besides other brief writings,
by Matière et mémoire (1896), Le rire (1900), L'évolution créatrice (1907), all published in Paris. Called
in 1900 to the Collège de France, he remained there, a most
applauded master, until 1924, the year in which he spontaneously retired. In 1928 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Other principal writings: Durée et simulta-
néité, à propos de la théorie d'Einstein (1922) and Les
deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932).
Essays, studies and lectures are collected in the two
volumes L'énergie spirituelle (1919) and La pensée et

(phot. Anderson)
BERGOGNONE - Carthusians following Christ.
Pavia, school of Fine Arts.

le mouvant (1933). B. has had and still has a
worldwide influence.

I. INTUITIONISM AND SCIENTISM

His intuitionism may be considered the most original expression of the idealistic reaction against science and scientific intellectualism, which characterized anti-positivist thought in the last years of the 19th century. It represents the most vigorous reaction against scientisme, that is, against that French evolutionist empiricism of the second half of the 19th century, in which motives from the positivism of Comte and Taine converged, along with the dilettantism of Renan, the English empiricism renewed by Stuart Mill, post-Kantian German philosophy, and the evolutionist and biological positivism of Spencer.

From the same 19th-century French thought B. drew motives for his critique of scientism, and precisely from the psychologism of Maine de Biran, from the philosophy of freedom of Ravaisson, from the neo-criticism of Renouvier, from the contingentism of Boutroux, etc. B. represents the resurgence of anti-rationalism, the revolt against the Cartesian tradition (with which the French philosophical milieu was impregnated), against "raison raisonnante", which in scientism had found its final incarnation. His speculative effort has, as it were, two directions converging into a fundamental unity: to free biologism and evolutionism from the heaviness of intellectualist scientism and to immerse them in the living, welling current of life, and, on the other hand, to give to life itself not a purely biological and materialist meaning, but a profoundly spiritual sense. On one side, B. makes use of French anti-intellectualism of the Pascalian type to demolish scientistic intellectualism, and on the other, of the new biological and evolutionist theories to bring the former into contact with concrete reality, to make of it, through the principles of "intuition", "duration" and "élan vital", the metaphysical expression of all that is real. Therefore B.'s anti-intellectualism (and this is its polemical aspect) presents itself as a critique of a particular form of intellectualism (the scientistic one) and not as a negation of any form of intellectual and rational knowledge. On the basis of this critique he constructs a philosophy (a metaphysics) which, rejecting nothing of the legitimate demands of positivism, vindicates against it precisely the concrete sense of life and the reality of its spiritual values. Positivism was above all a "method", whose abstractness B. wishes to demonstrate, while at the same time indicating a new way of philosophizing. B. (like Blondel in another sense and other contemporary French thinkers) is the resurgence of conscience against raison. His is an intuitionism, but not an irrationalism: intuition does not exclude a concrete rationality. A distinction must be made between B. and the "Bergsonism" of some of his followers, inclined toward a dilettantish anti-intellectualism.

II. INTUITION, REAL DURATION AND ÉLAN VITAL

It is one thing to say what an object is, to describe it, to express it in symbols; another to penetrate it from within, to grasp its profound essence, which is not expressed in symbols. The first is the method of knowledge through concepts (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction), proper to philosophical and scientific intellectualism, symbolic, extrinsic, abstract, relative; the other is the method of immediate intuition, intrinsic, concrete, absolute knowledge. Until now, says B., science and philosophy have been like two bridges, between whose pillars flows the current of living reality; intuition, on the other hand, places itself in the middle of the river of life and grasps its reality in immediate experience. "Reality is a process of perpetual creation without beginning or end, which never twice has the same countenance, but assumes at every instant an original and unforeseeable aspect: it is an incessant flux, where nothing persists, a mobile and living continuity, without any division into parts." Intuition means living from within a thing, and therefore it is an absolute mode of knowledge, different from the relative mode of analysis; it is a kind of intellectual sympathy that makes us grasp an object in its essence, beyond every symbolic expression, of the type of positive science which limits itself to photographing objects, extrinsically. Therefore: 1) on the one hand, scientific theories, philosophical doctrines, religious dogmas are abstract, relative, obscure symbols (which the profound, concrete and true reality escapes), elaborated by the intelligence for practical ends; 2) and, on the other, only intuition is the type of concrete and absolute knowledge, that is, metaphysical. Indeed, for B., metaphysics is a special mode of knowing, "of possessing a reality absolutely instead of knowing it relatively, of penetrating into it instead of adopting points of view upon it, of having intuition of it instead of making an analysis of it, in order to grasp it outside of every expression, translation or symbolic representation" (Introduction à la métaphysique, in Revue de métap. et de morale, 1 [1903]).

By means of intuition we know at least the reality of our own self, whose essence, like that of the universe, is real duration, a perpetual flowing, in which the various states interpenetrate in unity. Introspection shows us how our spiritual life is nothing but an intimately lived experience of something that endures, that persists through change. The person is psychological or real duration. If we succeed in descending below the superficial self, fragmentary and divided into so many psychic acts, below the superficial freezing of the outer layers of consciousness, we grasp a continuity and a succession of movement and of states solidly organized and animated by a common life, in which it is our whole past that swells with the present (consciousness is memory), we discover our deep self, that is, our unitary, permanent and yet ever new life.

The inexhaustible source from which all things spring in their perpetual flux, spiritual as well as material, is the vital impulse (élan vital), an impulse (different from mechanistic evolutionism) that is not substance, but force producing through evolution ever new and better forms. The original vital impulse unfolds first in vegetative life and in animal life, where instinct and intelligence lie undifferentiated and almost dormant. Subsequently, in animals only instinct is formed, and in man intelligence develops. In man the vital impulse rises up to consciousness and freedom, but loses instinct, the faculty that knows real things (intelligence, on the other hand, knows only conceptual relations and not real objects). Instinct and intelligence unite in intuition, the only cognitive and metaphysical faculty, which therefore does not exclude but includes reflective activity. When we free ourselves from the habit (and therefore intuition demands an "act of violence" and a laborious effort) of our intellect of applying to living and concrete reality the conceptual categories, crystallized like the inorganic matter on which they are fashioned, incapable of understanding the manifold forms of organization and evolution of life; when we recognize the erroneousness of the two hypotheses, mechanistic and finalist (both abolish evolution, the first by denying that there is an enrichment and an originality from cause to effect, and the other by inverting the causal process by conceiving the end as ultimate cause), born from the use of classificatory schemas, which assimilate to matter the profound nature of life and confuse organic processes with material processes, then we grasp the real characteristics of life, that is, the difference in nature between matter, which is inertia, dispersion, energy deprived of power and solidified, and life, which is evolution, unity, energetic integration, dynamic rhythm, uninterruptedly creative virtuality, ascending, inexhaustible movement.

III. MORALITY AND RELIGION

To the primitive vital impetus B. sometimes gives the name of God (L'évolution créatrice, 6th ed., Paris 1910, p. 270), but he deals specifically with the moral problem and that of religion in his last work, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Following the schema of the antithesis between mechanical matter and vital impetus, B. distinguishes between static morality and dynamic morality. Obligation is proper to the former: it is the morality imposed by society, of a life conforming to the rule, without initiative and without effort. The latter is the morality of the "ethical genius," without obligations and restrictions, the morality of the spirit of sacrifice and of charity, of mystical souls, which trace the movement of civilized societies. The two moralities, meeting, form that synthesis proper to humanity which places itself at a determinate level "higher than an animal society, in which obligation would be nothing but the force of instinct, but lower than a gathering of gods, where everything would be creative impetus. Considering then the manifestations of the moral life, that is, of organized life, they will be found perfectly coherent with one another, and thus capable of being traced back to determinate principles. The moral life will be a rational life.

Similarly B. distinguishes between static or crystallized religion and dynamic or creative religion. Man, besides intelligence, is also endowed with the faculty of fabulation, which counterbalances the dangers to which the dissolving power of intelligence exposes him. From fabulation static, social or gregarious religion has its origin, which is therefore "a defensive reaction of nature against what could be depressing (the inevitability of death, discouragement at the unforeseen) for the individual and dissolving (egoistic ends) for society, in the exercise of intelligence."

But beyond the mythology of the gods, there is the religion of God, of God the creator, the dynamic or interior religion, with which man re-enters the current of the vital impetus. Dynamic religion is supra-intellectual, mystical experience, "singular or privileged," of very few (saints and heroes). The great mystics, the expression of dynamic religion, are the souls that cease to turn around themselves, listen to themselves, feel within themselves the indefinable force that moves them forward, God and they in God. The soul is at the same time agissante et agie. In mystical action it unites itself to God: life, impetus, freedom overflow; great is the force of expansion and of apostolate, the desire to transform humanity, to triumph over materiality. The mystic, through God and for God, loves all humanity with a divine love. Above natural societies, the product of the egoism of races, the concept of total human society is born.

It is evident that, for dynamic or mystical religion, the content of faith (the positive religions) is something accidental, which must be surpassed and as it were dissolved in love. Likewise dogma, for B., is the symbolic transcription of mystical experience. Mysticism, penetrating beneath the inert shell, quickens the experience enclosed in dogmatic formulas and renews it. But in this way B. denies all importance to the content of faith and to dogma, reduced to the level of crystallized, relative, superficial and symbolic knowledge. This is a consequence of his anti-intellectualism, which has the fault of not recognizing that the intellect too is life, profound and metaphysical knowledge. The Bergsonian doctrine of religious faith and of dogma is in clear contrast with the teaching of the Catholic Church (v. IMMANENTISMO). Some of the philosopher's principal works (Essai... L'évolution créatrice, Matière et mémoire) were placed on the Index. To Catholicism, however, B. had given, in the last years of his life, his moral adherence, without, however, for reasons that seem contingent, reaching Baptism.

Michele Federico Sciacca