Henri Bergson

Lived time, free will and the creative impulse of life

• At his Collège de France lectures, about 700 people on average tried to get into a room built for 375, and his 1913 Columbia University lectures were said to have caused Broadway's first traffic jam.^{[9],[10],[15]}
• Historians trace his influence in writers and artists from Proust, Valéry and Péguy to Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Henri Matisse and the Italian Futurists.^[9],[12]
• He was the first president of the League of Nations' International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (1922-1925), whose members included Einstein and Marie Curie; the committee was a forerunner of UNESCO.^{[9],[10],[17]}
• The chemist Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize 1977) recalled the spell Creative Evolution cast on him as a teenager and wondered whether it shaped his work on irreversible processes.^[7]
• Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism (1966) revived interest in his work, and in 2021 scholars launched Bergsoniana, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated solely to his thought.^[9],[10]

Bergson's impact was on ideas, and it cannot honestly be counted. He gave the twentieth century a vocabulary of lived time, duration, intuition and the vital impulse for the parts of experience that clocks and equations leave out, and he defended free will against the mechanistic science of his day. That vocabulary shaped modernist literature and painting, American pragmatism, French philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Deleuze, and thinkers as far away as Japan. It also drew sharp criticism: scientists rejected his biology and his reading of relativity, and his fame faded after the First World War before a later revival. Through the League of Nations he helped launch organized international cooperation among scholars, a line that led to UNESCO. We record no quantified claims. There is no credible way to measure how many lives his philosophy changed, and an invented number would break this site's evidence-first standard.

CultureEducationPeace

No number is given here on purpose. Some contributions cannot be counted honestly, and we would rather describe them than invent a figure.

• Minor

  Philosophy in the service of war propaganda

  At the start of the war he gave patriotic speeches and, in an address to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, called the fight against Germany a struggle of civilization against barbarism. His December 1914 speech as the academy's president, published in English as The Meaning of the War (1915), cast Germany as a militarized, mechanical power whose methods amounted to barbarism.^[10],[21]

• Minor

  Misreading relativity, and a mention at Einstein's Nobel

  After debating Einstein in Paris on 6 April 1922, Bergson argued in Duration and Simultaneity that relativity fit his ideas about time. Scientists said he had misunderstood the theory; after a sixth edition in 1931 he stopped reprints. The 1922 Nobel speech for Einstein noted Bergson's challenge, though committee records do not show that Bergson swayed the decision. In a 1924 letter Bergson called relativity a very great advance.^{[6],[9],[10],[16],[26]}

• Minor

  A vague theory of life, borrowed by others

  Biologists increasingly criticized the élan vital, and Julian Huxley, a founder of the modern synthesis of Darwin and genetics, judged Bergson a better poet than scientist. That synthesis left his biology looking obsolete. His ideas were also taken up piecemeal by others, including the syndicalist Georges Sorel, who drew on them for a theory of revolution.^{[8],[10],[12]}

• Minor

  Silence on Dreyfus and a troubling line in his will

  Commentators have noted that he stayed out of the public debate over the Dreyfus Affair. His 1937 will said the coming wave of antisemitism was in large part the fault of some Jews he called lacking in moral sense; the scholar Catherine Chalier, drawing on his biographers, says he meant communism.^{[9],[10],[22]}

• 1894

  Discrimination

  The Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason in 1894 amid antisemitic agitation and not cleared until 1906. The affair split France while Bergson was building his career in Paris; he chose to stay out of the public debate.^{[9],[10],[18]}

• 1911

  Discrimination

  In 1910-1911 Pierre Lasserre, chief literary critic of the Action Française newspaper, ran a string of articles attacking Bergson, the last claiming he could never equal Aristotle or Leibniz because he was Jewish. The movement's leader, Charles Maurras, portrayed him as a figurehead of Jewish influence.^[12],[15]

• 1914

  Censorship

  The Catholic Church placed his works on its Index of forbidden books, in a backlash against evolutionary ideas and Catholic modernism.^{[9],[10],[12]}

• 1925

  Other

  From about 1925 severe rheumatoid arthritis gradually immobilized him and forced him out of public life; he was too ill to travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize.^[4],[8],[10]

• 1940

  Persecution

  Vichy's Statut des Juifs of October 1940 excluded Jews from public life and many professions, and a German-ordered census that autumn registered about 150,000 Jews in Paris. Bergson refused an offered exemption and, though weak and ill, went in person to register as Jewish.^{[9],[10],[11],[13],[19],[20]}

Both of Bergson's parents were Jewish. His father, the pianist and composer Michał Bergson, came from a wealthy Hasidic merchant family in Warsaw, and his great-grandmother Temerl Bergson was a noted patron of Polish Hasidism. His mother, Kate Levinson, was an English Jewish woman of Irish descent. As an adult he had no formal religious affiliation and was drawn to Catholicism. In his 1937 will he wrote that his thinking had brought him ever closer to Catholicism, but he refused baptism so as to stay with the Jews he foresaw would be persecuted. In late 1940 he registered as Jewish in the census of Jews ordered in German-occupied Paris.^{[2],[8],[9],[10],[11],[13],[14],[22],[24]}

1. October 18, 1859

   Born in Paris, the second of seven children of the Polish-Jewish pianist and composer Michał Bergson and Kate Levinson, an English Jewish woman.^[1],[9],[10]

2. 1877

   Wins first prize in mathematics in France's national Concours général; his solution to a problem posed by Pascal is later published.^[8],[9],[10]

3. 1878

   Enters the École Normale Supérieure in the same intake as the future socialist leader Jean Jaurès, and becomes a French citizen.^[9]

4. 1889

   Earns his doctorate and publishes Time and Free Will, which introduces his idea of duration, or lived time.^[2],[3],[9]

5. 1900

   Takes a chair at the Collège de France, where his free public lectures become a sensation, and publishes Laughter, his theory of comedy.^[1],[2],[10]

6. 1907

   Publishes Creative Evolution, his most famous book, which presents evolution as driven by a creative vital impulse.^[2],[3],[9]

7. 1913

   Lectures at Columbia University in New York; the crowds were said to have caused Broadway's first traffic jam.^[9],[10]

8. 1914

   Elected to the Académie française after years of antisemitic attacks from the Action Française movement; the same year the Catholic Church puts his works on its Index.^{[2],[8],[9],[10],[12],[15]}

9. February 18, 1917

   Sent by the French government under cover of a lecture tour, he meets President Woodrow Wilson at the White House to urge the US to join the Allies.^[9],[10]

10. 1922

    Becomes first president of the League of Nations' International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, and debates Einstein on time in Paris on 6 April.^{[10],[16],[17]}

11. November 13, 1928

    After ten nominations since 1912, he is announced as winner of the reserved 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature; too ill to travel, he sends a letter to the banquet.^{[3],[4],[5],[23],[25]}

12. 1937

    Writes in his will that he would have converted to Catholicism but chose to remain with the Jews who would soon be persecuted.^{[9],[13],[22]}

13. 1940

    Refuses Vichy's offer to exempt him from its anti-Jewish laws and, though ill, registers in person as Jewish.^{[9],[10],[11]}

14. January 4, 1941

    Dies at his home in German-occupied Paris, aged 81.^[1],[10]

1. 1.Henri Bergson - Facts · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach)
2. 2.Henri Bergson - Biographical · NobelPrize.org (from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967), 1928
3. 3.The Nobel Prize in Literature 1927 - Award ceremony speech by Per Hallström · NobelPrize.org, 1928
4. 4.Henri Bergson - Banquet speech (letter read by the French Minister, Armand Bernard) · NobelPrize.org, 1928
5. 5.The Nobel Prize in Literature 1927 - Summary · NobelPrize.org
6. 6.The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 - Presentation speech by Svante Arrhenius (10 December 1922) · NobelPrize.org, 1922
7. 7.Ilya Prigogine - Biographical · NobelPrize.org, 1977
8. 8.Henri Bergson (Wikipedia) · Wikipedia
9. 9.Henri Bergson (Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard-Leonard) · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2025
10. 10.Henri Bergson (Mathilde Tahar) · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
11. 11.Bergson, Henri Louis (Pepita Haezrahi), Encyclopaedia Judaica · Encyclopaedia Judaica via Encyclopedia.com
12. 12.Bergson, Henri (Mark Antliff), Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe 1789-1914 · Charles Scribner's Sons via Encyclopedia.com
13. 13.Bergson, Henri Louis, New Catholic Encyclopedia · New Catholic Encyclopedia via Encyclopedia.com
14. 14.Bergson, Henri Louis, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography · Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography via Encyclopedia.com
15. 15.Henri Bergson, celebrity (Henri Bergson, the philosopher damned for his female fans) by Emily Herring · Aeon, 2019
16. 16.This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No Nobel for Relativity, by Jimena Canales · Nautilus, 2016
17. 17.Notable Members of the Committee - League of Nations: Intellectual Cooperation · United Nations Library & Archives Geneva
18. 18.Alfred Dreyfus and the "Dreyfus Affair" · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
19. 19.France · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
20. 20.Paris · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
21. 21.The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict, by Henri Bergson (English translation, 1915) · Project Gutenberg, 1915
22. 22.Bergson : de la conversion religieuse à la conversion philosophique (interview with Catherine Chalier) · Canal Académie (Académies de l'Institut de France), 2011
23. 23.Henri Bergson: Nobel Prize nominations archive · NobelPrize.org
24. 24.Bergson Family (Marcos Silber) · YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2010
25. 25.1927 Nobel Prize in Literature · Wikipedia
26. 26.The 100th Anniversary of Einstein's Nobel Prize: Facts and Fiction, by Robert Marc Friedman (Annalen der Physik 2022, 2200305) · Annalen der Physik (Wiley-VCH), open-access copy via Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, 2022