French philosopher; Nobel Prize in Literature (1927). Criticized scientific mechanism and intellectualism, proposing intuition as a superior philosophical method and duration as the real time of consciousness. Enormous influence in the early twentieth century.
Key Concepts
- Duration (durée): the time lived by consciousness is radically different from the measurable time of science — it is continuous and heterogeneous flux, not succession of discrete instants. The clock spatializes time, falsifying it
- Intuition: the philosophical method par excellence — intellectual sympathy that inserts itself into the interior of the object, grasping it in its becoming; superior to analytical intelligence, which fragments and spatializes
- Intelligence vs. intuition: intelligence evolved to act upon matter (carving out, measuring, fabricating); only intuition grasps the living in its duration. Philosophy must overcome intelligence by itself
- Élan vital (Creative Evolution, 1907): immanent vital force that drives evolution — neither teleological nor mechanistic, but creative and unpredictable; life is continuous invention of new forms
- Memory (Matter and Memory, 1896): distinction between habit-memory (motor, corporal) and pure memory (image of the past as it was); the present is the tip of the past — no pure present exists
- Laughter (Laughter, 1900): we laugh at what is mechanical superimposed upon the living — rigidity where we expect flexibility. Comedy is social diagnosis
Influenced by
- Kant — criticism and limits of knowledge (but overcomes idealism)
- Herbert Spencer — evolution (starting point for critique)
- William James — pragmatism and experience of time
Influenced
- Merleau Ponty — body and perception
- Deleuze — Bergsonism (1966): the concept of duration and multiplicity as the basis of his ontology of difference
- William James — mutual exchange
- Literary modernism (Proust, the time of memory)
- Husserl — parallelisms in the critique of objective time
Works
Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889); Matter and Memory (1896); Laughter (1900); Creative Evolution (1907); Introduction to Metaphysics (1903); The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932).
See also
Twentieth-Century Philosophy