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Henri Bergson

Modern European · Europe · 1859 to 1941

French thinker who held that lived time and life itself cannot be captured by science, and who stressed intuition.

What it is

Henri Bergson (1859 to 1941) was a French philosopher who became one of the most famous thinkers of his time. He argued that real time is not a row of identical moments on a clock but lived duration, in which past and present flow into each other. He believed that the intellect, shaped by the needs of action, cuts experience into pieces, and that a method he called intuition could reach what lies underneath.

He was born in Paris to a Polish father and an English mother, both Jewish, and began in mathematics, winning a national prize in mathematics that led to the publication, in 1877, of his solution to a problem of Pascal. He then turned to philosophy and lived the quiet life of a French professor. His fame grew until it reached cult-like heights. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 and died in 1941.

The main ideas

  • Duration. Time as we live it is continuous and cannot be rebuilt out of separate moments. Past and present are bound together in memory.
  • Multiplicity. He wanted a way to think of things as many without being cut into separate parts, holding together difference and continuity. Later readers, Deleuze among them, saw this as his most lasting idea.
  • Intuition. His method of intuition aims to put us back in contact with what the intellect splits apart, and so to make real knowledge of reality possible. He saw this as a way past Kant, who had ruled such knowledge out.
  • Matter and spirit. He called his view of mind and body frankly dualistic, since he held both matter and spirit to be real, but he tried to remove the old difficulties of dualism.
  • Life as creative. In Creative Evolution he treated life as a flow in duration, held in memory, and pressed by the body's practical needs into the spatial way we usually know things.
  • Two kinds of morality. In his last book he argued that morality and religion each have two sources. A closed morality is about the cohesion and survival of a person's own society, and so it shuts others out. An open morality includes everyone, aims at peace and grows from creative emotion.

What it looks like in practice

Think of listening to a melody. You do not hear separate notes lined up like beads. Each note carries the ones before it and leans into the next. Bergson would say that lived time works the same way, and that counting the seconds on a clock tells you something quite different. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Time and Free Will (1889) is his first book, on the immediate data of consciousness.
  • Matter and Memory (1896) is about perception, memory and the relation between mind and body.
  • Creative Evolution (1907) is his book on life and the flow of time.
  • The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) is his last major work.

Questions and criticism

  • A difficult idea. Even sympathetic readers admit that his concept of multiplicity is hard to grasp, though many think it revolutionary.
  • Why did he fade? After the Second World War a new generation of French philosophers, interested in phenomenology, set themselves against the tradition he dominated, and his influence dropped until it returned in the 1960s.
  • Can intuition be checked? If intuition goes beyond what the intellect can say, it is fair to ask how one person's intuition could be tested against another's.

Close neighbours

Immanuel Kant is the thinker Bergson set out to overcome. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas all acknowledged his influence, and Gilles Deleuze brought his ideas back, so those pages show where his thought travelled.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Alfred North Whitehead · Whitehead shared his view that change and process are basic, though he built his own system. (scholars disagree about this link)
  • Gilles Deleuze · He wrote a book on Bergson and built on his view of time and creative change.
  • Leopold Sedar Senghor · He took up Bergson's view that intuition grasps what analysis misses, and applied it to African ways of knowing.
  • Muhammad Iqbal · He took up Bergson's view of time and creative change in his lectures on reconstruction of religious thought.

Other Modern European thinkers

Sources we used

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