Life and Thought

Henri Bergson was born in Paris on October 18, 1859 and lived a life of an intellectual from a young age. As a young man, he attended the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris. After graduating, he was a teacher in several secondary schools until 1898. In that year, Bergson was offered a position as a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. He was later appointed to the prestigious position as the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. By 1914, Bergson was honored by being elected to the French Academy. By 1921, Bergson resigned from the Collège de France and focused his time and energy on international affairs, politics, moral problems, and religion. He was so involved in political and moral issues that in his later years, he only published one book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. He was awarded the the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927.

Bergson's doctoral dissertation, Time and Free Will was published in 1889 and caught the interest of many noted philosophers. Bergson believed in freedom of the mind and on a state of thought known as “duration.” Bergson described duration as a conscious state that cannot be measured. Some of his other books include Matter and Memory, Laughter, and Creative Evolution. All of these works address the mind and its functions and were very influential on writers, artists, philosophers, intellectuals and poets through the entire 20th century.

Henri Bergson’s work emphasized the importance of intuition in the function of thought. Although he is often associated with the school of philosophy known as intuitionalist, his work did not address intuition alone. It did, however, celebrate the vital action of human creativity as it emerged in the course of life.