Henri Bergson
The free act springs from our whole personality: lived duration cannot be cut up like space.
Life
Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was a French philosopher, professor at the Collège de France and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. He distinguished measured, spatialised time from lived "duration", and drew from it a philosophy of freedom, memory and creative life. He matters for questions of time, mind and freedom.
Main works
Contrasts lived duration with spatialised time and roots freedom in the whole personality.
Studies the relation of body and mind through perception and memory.
Sees in the evolution of life a creative impetus that intelligence alone grasps poorly.
In his own words
« Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. »
« Intelligence therefore represents to activity only goals to be reached, that is, points of rest. »
Positions
click a row to see the evidenceGod is the source of the creative life-impulse, known through mystic experience, not a classical creator.
Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932)
Intuition grasps duration and reality from within, which intellect alone cannot reach.
Bergson, Introduction à la métaphysique (1903)
Calls Matter and Memory 'frankly dualistic' while trying to overcome dualism's difficulties; pure memory is not reducible to the brain.
Bergson, Matière et mémoire (1896)
The free act expresses the whole self in lived time, and is not predictable like a mechanism.
Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889)