Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson was born in Paris in 1859 to the Polish-Jewish composer Michał Bergson and his English-born wife, and spent part of his early childhood in London before the family settled in France. At the Lycée Fontanes (now Condorcet) he showed such mathematical gifts that a solution of his was published while he was still a schoolboy, and his teachers were dismayed when he chose the humanities. He entered the École Normale Supérieure, passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1881, and taught in Angers and Clermont-Ferrand.

His doctoral thesis, published in 1889 and known in English as Time and Free Will, distinguished the measurable time of physics from durée — time as it is actually lived, continuous and qualitative — and made the case for human freedom on that basis. Matter and Memory (1896) examined the relation of mind and body; the essay Laughter (1900) traced comedy to “something mechanical encrusted on the living”; and Creative Evolution (1907), his most widely discussed book, pictured life as an inventive impulse, the élan vital, rather than a mechanism. Appointed to the Collège de France in 1900, he drew crowds to his public lectures, and his ideas spread far beyond philosophy.

The Nobel Prize for 1927, conferred in 1928, honoured not only his ideas but the clarity and grace with which he expressed them. His last major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, appeared in 1932. Bergson died in German-occupied Paris in January 1941. His influence waned after the war but revived when Gilles Deleuze returned to him in the 1960s.