BERGSON, HENRI. – Philosopher, born in Paris on 18 October 1859 to a Jewish family of Irish origin, died there on 4 January 1941. A student of Ollé-Laprune and 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), followed, in addition to other brief writings, by Matière et mémoire (1896), Le rire (1900), and L'évolution créatrice (1907), all published in Paris. Called to the Collège de France in 1900, he remained there, an immensely acclaimed teacher, until 1924, the year in which he voluntarily retired. In 1928 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Other principal writings: Durée et simultanéité, 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
(photo 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 regarded as the most original expression of the idealist reaction against science and scientific intellectualism, which characterized anti-positivist thought during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It represents the most vigorous reaction against scientism, that is, against the French evolutionary empiricism of the second half of the nineteenth century, in which motives drawn from the positivism of Comte and Taine, the dilettantism of Renan, the English empiricism renewed by Stuart Mill, post-Kantian German philosophy, and Spencer’s evolutionary and biological positivism converged.From nineteenth-century French thought itself B. drew motives for his critique of scientism, specifically from the psychologism of Maine de Biran, Ravaisson’s philosophy of freedom, Renouvier’s neo-criticism, Boutroux’s contingentism, and so forth. B. represents the resurgence of antirationalism, the revolt against the Cartesian tradition (with which the French philosophical milieu was permeated), against the «raison raisonnante», which had found its ultimate incarnation in scientism. His speculative effort has two directions converging in a fundamental unity: to free biologism and evolutionism from the weight of intellectualist scientism and immerse them in the living, bubbling current of life and, on the other hand, to give life itself not a purely biological and materialist meaning, but a profoundly spiritual significance. On the one hand, B. makes use of French Pascalian anti-intellectualism to demolish scientific intellectualism and, on the other, of the new biological and evolutionary theories to bring the former into contact with concrete reality and, through the principles of «intuition», «duration» and «vital impetus», make it the metaphysical expression of all reality.
Thus B.’s anti-intellectualism (and this is its polemical aspect) presents itself as a critique of a particular form of intellectualism (scientific intellectualism), not as a denial of every form of intellectual and rational knowledge. On the basis of this critique he constructs a philosophy (a metaphysics) which, rejecting none of the legitimate demands of positivism, asserts against it precisely the concrete meaning of life and the reality of its spiritual values. Positivism was above all a «method», whose abstractness B. seeks to demonstrate, while simultaneously indicating a new way of philosophizing. B. (like Blondel in another sense, and like other contemporary French thinkers) represents the resurgence of conscience against raison. His is intuitionism, but not irrationalism: intuition does not exclude a concrete rationality. A distinction must be made between B. and the «Bergsonism» of some of his followers, who are inclined toward a dilettantish anti-intellectualism.
II. INTUITION, REAL DURATION, AND VITAL IMPETUS
It is one thing to say what an object is, to describe it, and to express it in symbols; it is another to penetrate it inwardly and grasp its profound essence, which cannot be expressed in symbols. The former is the method of knowledge through concepts (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction), characteristic of philosophical and scientific intellectualism: symbolic, extrinsic, abstract, and relative; the latter is the method of immediate intuition, intrinsic, concrete, absolute knowledge. Until now, says B., science and philosophy have been like two bridges, between whose piers the current of living reality flows; intuition, on the other hand, places itself in the midst 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 has the same appearance twice, but assumes at every moment an original and unforeseeable aspect: it is an incessant flow, in which nothing persists, a mobile and living continuity, without any division into parts.” Intuition means living a thing from within and is therefore an absolute mode of knowledge, different from the relative mode of analysis; it is a kind of intellectual sympathy that enables us to grasp an object in its essence, beyond every symbolic expression, like the positive sciences, which limit themselves to photographing objects externally. Hence: 1) on the one hand, scientific theories, philosophical doctrines, and religious dogmas are abstract, relative, obscure symbols (which fail to reach profound, concrete, and true reality), elaborated by the intellect for practical purposes; 2) on the other hand, only intuition is the type of concrete and absolute knowledge, that is, metaphysical knowledge. Indeed, for B., metaphysics is a special way of knowing, “of possessing a reality absolutely instead of knowing it relatively, of penetrating into it instead of adopting points of view concerning it, of having its intuition instead of analyzing it, in order to grasp it outside every symbolic expression, translation, or representation” (Introduction à la métaphysique, in Revue de métap. et de morale, 1 [1903]).Through intuition we know at least the reality of our ego, whose essence, like that of the universe, is real duration, an unceasing flow in which the various states interpenetrate in unity. Introspection shows us that our spiritual life is nothing other than the intimately lived experience of something that endures, that persists through change. The person is psychological or real duration.
If we succeed in descending beneath the superficial ego, fragmented and divided into many psychic acts, beneath the superficial freezing of the outer layers of consciousness, we grasp a continuity and succession of movement and states, solidly organized and animated by a common life, in which all our past grows larger through the present (consciousness is memory); we discover our deep ego, that is, our unitary, enduring, and ever-new life.
The inexhaustible source from which all things spring in their perpetual flow, spiritual as well as material, is the vital impetus (élan vital), an impulse (different from mechanistic evolutionism) that is not a substance but a force producing ever new and better forms through evolution. The original vital impulse first unfolds in vegetative and animal life, where instinct and intelligence remain undifferentiated and almost dormant. Subsequently, in animals only instinct takes shape, while intelligence develops in man. In man, the vital impetus rises to consciousness and freedom, but loses instinct, the faculty that knows real things (intelligence, by contrast, knows only conceptual relations and not real objects). Instinct and intelligence are united in intuition, the sole cognitive and metaphysical faculty, which therefore does not exclude but includes reflective activity. When we free ourselves from the habit (and intuition therefore requires an “act of violence” and laborious effort) of our intellect to apply to living and concrete reality conceptual categories, crystallized like the inorganic matter from which they are fashioned, incapable of understanding the manifold forms of life’s organization and evolution; when we recognize the erroneousness of the two mechanistic and finalist hypotheses (both abolish evolution, the former by denying that there is any enrichment or originality from cause to effect, and the latter by reversing the causal process, conceiving the end as the ultimate cause), born of the use of classificatory schemes that assimilate the profound nature of life to matter and confuse organic processes with material processes—then we grasp the real characteristics of life, namely, the difference in nature between matter, which is inertia, dispersion, weakened and solidified energy, and life, which is evolution, unity, energetic integration, dynamic rhythm, uninterruptedly creative potentiality, upward movement, inexhaustibility.
III. MORALITY AND RELIGION
B. sometimes gives the name of God to the primitive vital impulse (L'évolution créatrice, 6th ed., Paris 1910, p. 270), but he deals specifically with the moral problem and that of religion in his final work, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Following the pattern of the antithesis between mechanical matter and the vital impulse, 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 charity, of mystical souls, which chart the movement of civilized societies. The two moralities, meeting one another, form that synthesis proper to humanity which places itself at a determinate level « higher than that of an animal society, in which obligation would be nothing other than the force of instinct, but lower than that of an assembly of gods, where everything would be creative impulse. Considering, then, the manifestations of moral, that is, organized, life, they will be foundperfectly coherent with one another, and therefore capable of being traced back to determinate principles. Moral life will be a rational life.
Similarly, B. distinguishes between static or crystallized religion and dynamic or creative religion. In addition to intelligence, man is also endowed with the faculty of fabulation, which counterbalances the dangers to which the dissolving power of intelligence exposes him. Static, social, or gregarious religion originates in fabulation, and is therefore «a defensive reaction of nature against what might be depressing in it (the inevitability of death, discouragement in the face of the unforeseen) for the individual, and dissolving (egoistic ends) for society, in the exercise of intelligence».
But besides the mythology of the gods, there is the religion of God, of God the creator, dynamic or interior religion, through which man re-enters the current of the vital impulse. Dynamic religion is supra-intellectual, a mystical experience, «singular or privileged», belonging to very few (saints and heroes). The great mystics, the expression of dynamic religion, are souls that cease to revolve around themselves, listen to themselves, and feel within themselves the indefinable force that moves them forward, God and themselves in God. The soul is at once agissante et agie. In mystical action it unites itself with God: life, impulse, and freedom overflow; the power of expansion and apostolate is great, as is the desire to transform humanity and 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, there arises the concept of the total human society.
It is evident that, for dynamic or mystical religion, the content of faith (positive religions) is something accidental, which must be surpassed and, as it were, dissolved in love. Likewise, for B., dogma is the symbolic transcription of mystical experience. Mysticism, penetrating beneath the inert envelope, enlivens the experience enclosed in dogmatic formulas and renews II. But in this way B. denies all importance to the content of faith and to dogma, reduced to the status of crystallized, relative, superficial, and symbolic knowledge. This is a consequence of his anti-intellectualism, whose fault is that it fails to recognize that the intellect too is life, profound knowledge, and metaphysics. The Bergsonian doctrine of religious faith and 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. B. had nevertheless given his moral adherence to Catholicism in the final years of his life, without, however, for reasons that seem to have been contingent, proceeding to Baptism.
Michele Federico Sciacca