Henri Bergson

French philosopher (1859-1941), Nobel laureate (1927), author of Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Creative Evolution (1907), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), and Thought and Movement (1934). On Merleau-Ponty's reading (IPoP §II, 1953), Bergson's intellectual trajectory is "the development from a philosophy of impression to a philosophy of expression" — a reading that recovers Bergson from both his friends and his enemies, neither of whom understood him. Bergson is one of the central interlocutors of MP's inaugural lecture and recurs in several of MP's Collège de France courses on nature, passivity, and dialectical philosophy.

Key Points

  • The "wholly positive Bergson" of intuition-as-coincidence — fusion with things, "simple act", "viewing without a point of view" — is the polemical Bergson against Taine and Spencer, not Bergson's best self. MP: "Perhaps it is time to look in Bergson for something more than the antithesis to their abandoned theses" (IPoP §II, p. 18)
  • Bergson's real insight, MP argues, is the "retrograde movement of the true" (Thought and Movement): "The experience of the true cannot keep from projecting itself back into the time which preceded it... In Thought and Movement Bergson suggests... that it is a question of a fundamental property of truth" (IPoP §II, p. 34)
  • The durée is not "a second reality" that coincides with a first but a system of oppositions that "internally divides into these three dimensions [past, present, future]" and "receives in itself the body and spatiality which constitute the present" (Hyppolite, as MP cites in IPoP §II, p. 28)
  • Bergson's refusal of conversion to Catholicism in his 1937 testament ("I have wished to remain among those who tomorrow will be the persecuted") is the emblem of philosophical fidelity to the event of truth, not its abstract form (IPoP §II, p. 36)
  • MP characterizes Bergson's intuition as a reading, not a coincidence: "a reading, the art of grasping a meaning in a style before it has been put into concepts" (IPoP §II, p. 25)
  • Péguy and MP both criticize "Bergson's friends" for having understood him no better than his enemies; MP's corrective reading goes through Le Roy, Jean Hyppolite, and (to a lesser extent) Bachelard
  • On cinema: Bergson's Creative Evolution ch. 4 (1907) posits cinema as "the typical example of false movement" — analytic reconstruction via "immobile sections and abstract time." This becomes the silently polemical target of MP's 1945 IDHEC lecture and the explicit target of the 1952–53 course (see carbone-2019-philosophy-screens). But Bergson also, in Matter and Memory, posits a "black screen" against which images are seen — a figure Carbone takes as symptomatic of philosophy's unacknowledged reliance on the arche-screen even when it condemns screens.
  • Bergson 1896 anticipated wave-particle duality as a temporal duality (per Morris 2024 §3, p. 162). MM 226, 230 on red light: experiencing light as red "contracts" a vast quantity of electromagnetic vibrations, spread over space and time, into one qualitative effect, now. Morris argues Bergson conceptualizes red light's two modes — countable wave-frequency vs indivisible wave packet — as a temporal duality (protracted "when" of the wave vs contracted past punching into the now as particle), not as a spatial juxtaposition of the wave with the particle. Bergson "doesn't get the energy part" but anticipates the duality structurally. The MM 74 thesis — "questions concerning subject and object, their distinction and union, must be posed as a function of time rather than space" — is the philosophical ground of this temporal-duality reading. This makes Bergson, in 1896, a proto-philosopher of quantum mechanics on Morris's reading. See melting-time §"What the Concept Does" for how Morris develops this into his own philosophy of physics.

Life

Born in Paris to a Jewish family (Michał Bergson, a Polish Jewish musician; Katherine Levinson). Student at the École Normale Supérieure, where his philosophical work transformed the French academic scene. Taught at various lycées, then at the Collège de France (1900-1921), where his lectures drew enormous popular audiences. Elected to the Académie française (1914) and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1927). In his 1937 testament, revealed after his death, Bergson explained that he would have converted to Catholicism — to which his thought had led him closer and closer — but for the rise of antisemitism: "I have wished to remain among those who tomorrow will be the persecuted." He died January 4, 1941, in occupied Paris; his funeral was held as the Vichy anti-Jewish laws tightened.

Major Works

  • Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889; Time and Free Will) — the durée as the immediate data of consciousness, against the spatialization of time
  • Matière et mémoire (1896; Matter and Memory) — the celebrated "first chapter" with the theory of "images", and the account of memory as virtual past
  • L'Évolution créatrice (1907; Creative Evolution) — the élan vital and the critique of mechanism
  • Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932; The Two Sources) — the distinction of static and dynamic religion, the God of mystical experience
  • La Pensée et le mouvant (1934; Thought and Movement) — the retrospective philosophical essays including the retrograde-movement-of-the-true passages MP cites

MP's Reading of Bergson (IPoP §II)

Against Both Friends and Enemies

MP's strongest methodological move is to refuse the standard polemical frame. "It is said that he restored intuition against the intellect and logic, spirit against matter, life against mechanism. This is how both his friends and his adversaries understood him when his studies appeared. But his adversaries have missed the point. Perhaps it is time to look in Bergson for something more than the antithesis to their abandoned theses" (IPoP §II, p. 18). The anti-Bergsonian reading and the pro-Bergsonian reading share a mistake: both think the core Bergson is the polemical Bergson. MP goes looking for a different Bergson behind the polemics.

From Impression to Expression

The decisive claim is summary-programmatic:

We can summarize the internal movement of Bergsonism by saying that it is the development from a philosophy of impression to a philosophy of expression. What Bergson said against language has caused us to forget what he said in its favor. (IPoP §II, p. 34)

The trajectory is visible if one pays attention to Bergson's own later analyses. The "massive grip on being" and "intuition as coincidence" formulations give way, over the course of Bergson's oeuvre, to a philosophy in which "the more energetic our intention to see the things themselves, the more the appearances by which they are expressed and the words by which we express them will be interposed between these things and us" (IPoP §II, p. 26). The final Bergson is not the Bergson who merges with things but the Bergson who reads them.

The Retrograde Movement of the True

MP's most distinctive use of Bergson is the "retrograde movement of the true" — a Bergsonian concept that MP reappropriates as the counter to the "retrospective illusion":

What we call expression is only another formula for the phenomenon to which Bergson continually returns — the retroactive effect of the true. The experience of the true cannot keep from projecting itself back into the time which preceded it. Frequently this is only an anachronism and an illusion. But in Thought and Movement Bergson suggests, in speaking of a retrograde movement of the true, that it is a question of a fundamental property of truth. To think, or, in other words, to think an idea as true, implies that we arrogate to ourselves the right of recovering the past, either to treat it as an anticipation of the present, or at least to place the past and the present in the same world. What I say of the sensible world is not in the sensible world, and yet it has no other meaning than to say what the sensible world means. The expression antedates itself and postulates that being comes towards it. (IPoP §II, pp. 34-35)

The retrograde movement is not the same as the retrospective illusion (which projects the present into the past as if it had been there). Rather, it is a structural feature of how truth and expression work: expression "antedates itself". When we express a truth, we are also claiming that this truth was always there waiting to be expressed — and this claim is not an illusion but a necessary feature of expressive thought.

"The Best of Bergsonism"

MP's summative judgment:

This exchange between the past and the present, between matter and spirit, silence and speech, the world and us, this metamorphosis of one into the other, with a transparent gleam of truth, is, in our view, much more than the famous intuitive coincidence, the best of Bergsonism. (IPoP §II, p. 35)

This judgment is significant because it is MP's verdict, not a summary of Bergson's own claims. MP is selecting within Bergson for the parts that connect to his own late-ontology project: the metamorphosis-across-oppositions, the exchange, the transparent gleam of truth. These are the Bergsonian seeds of what MP will later call interrogation and the ineinander.

The 1937 Testament

MP closes the Bergson chapter with the 1937 testament, treating it as a philosophical act, not biographical curiosity:

After declaring in his testament of 1937 that his reflexions had "led him closer and closer to catholicism," he added these words which pose our problem: "I would have been converted if I had not seen for many years the beginnings of the fearsome wave of antisemitism which was about to break out in the world. I have wished to remain among those who tomorrow will be the persecuted." (IPoP §II, p. 36)

The philosophical reading: Bergson's refusal of conversion, despite assent "on fundamentals", shows that "there is no place of truth to which one should go to search for it at any cost, even breaking human relationships and the ties of life and history. Our relationship to the true passes through others" (IPoP §II, p. 37). This is the implicit model of MP's own philosophical style in the inaugural lecture — the "limping philosophy" that refuses both church and state in the name of fidelity to the truth of the event.

Bergson in MP's Course Summaries

Bergson recurs across several courses in this volume:

  • Course 1 (The Sensible World and the World of Expression, 1953): Bergson on "the internal experience of motion" is the anchor for MP's argument that the perception of motion requires a body situated spatially (p. 78).
  • Course 6 (The Problem of Passivity, 1954-55): Bergson on the "traditional questions" ("Why have I been born? Why is there something rather than nothing? How can I know anything?") as "pathological" is cited in MP's treatment of sleep and unconscious (p. 123).
  • Course 7 (Dialectical Philosophy, 1955-56): Zeno is "at first considered (and by Bergson still) as sophisms". MP treats Bergson as an anti-dialectical figure here, though less sharply than one might expect (p. 134).
  • Course 8 (The Concept of Nature I, 1956-57): "Bergson might seem to be far removed from what is best in Schelling... Nevertheless there is enough substance in this criticism. To rediscover the dialectic despite oneself is perhaps a more sure way of taking it seriously than by starting from it" (pp. 150-51). Bergson is given credit for rediscovering the dialectic through the problem of the élan vital, Kant's third Critique, and the organism.

Connections

  • read through merleau-ponty-1970-in-praise-of-philosophy — IPoP §II is MP's most sustained reading of Bergson
  • is a counter-example to the view that early 20th-century French philosophy was exclusively rationalist or Catholic
  • is an influence on maurice-merleau-ponty — MP's reading of Bergson as philosopher-of-expression is structurally continuous with MP's own project; the concept of the ineinander and interrogation can both be seen as developing Bergsonian seeds
  • is read through Le Roy — Le Roy "anticipated the latent sense of Bergsonism" and gave "the best direction of Bergsonism" (IPoP §II, pp. 19, 33)
  • is read through Hyppolite — Jean Hyppolite's reading of the durée (cited at p. 28) is taken as authoritative by MP
  • refused to convert to Catholicism (1937 testament) — the paradigmatic philosophical act of solidarity with the persecuted
  • influenced gaston-bachelard — MP notes that Bachelard's dialectical reading of Bergson recovers "the fundamental dialectic of being and nothingness stretched out in time" (IPoP §II, p. 26)

Open Questions

  • Is MP's reading of Bergson (as philosopher-of-expression-not-of-coincidence) historically correct, or does it project onto Bergson MP's own late-ontology commitments? Readers of Bergson have been divided
  • What is the relation between MP's "retrograde movement of the true" and Bergson's own use of the term? MP cites Thought and Movement but does not work through the text in detail
  • Does MP's Bergson chapter fit smoothly with his dismissive remarks on Bergson in Phenomenology of Perception? The 1945 treatment and the 1953 treatment are noticeably different
  • How does Bergson's influence appear in the late MP ontology? The 2022 course notes rarely mention Bergson but operate with concepts (Ineinander, expression, interrogation) that have Bergsonian genealogies

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1964-signs — "Bergson in the Making" (1959, MP's paper at the Bergson Centenary, pp. 182–191): distinguishes "two Bergsonisms" — the audacious one and the "established" one — and argues that Bergson's central discovery was not duration but absolute knowledge as partial coincidence / inherence: "In 1889 it was a great novelty... to present as the basis of philosophy not an I think and its immanent thoughts but a Being-self whose self-cohesion is also a tearing away from self" (p. 186). MP reads Matter and Memory as "regaining at the heart of man a pre-Socratic and 'prehuman' meaning of the world" (p. 187). Also: "Einstein and the Crisis of Reason" (pp. 192–197) reads the Bergson-Einstein debate on simultaneity as a founding moment of "reason prior to reason" — the perceptual evidence that grounds scientific rationality
  • merleau-ponty-1970-in-praise-of-philosophy — IPoP §II (1953 inaugural lecture), pp. 9-38: the main reading. Recurring references in Course 1 (p. 78), Course 6 (p. 123), Course 7 (p. 134), Course 8 (pp. 150-152). Author's Note III (p. 73) on Bergson and painting
  • carbone-2019-philosophy-screens — primary source for Bergson-on-cinema. Ch. 1 on the young Sartre's reading of Bergson as philosopher of cinema-as-Bergsonian-art (Apologie pour le cinéma, 1924–25). Ch. 2 on Creative Evolution ch. 4 as the silently polemical target of MP's IDHEC lecture. Preface on the Bergsonian "black screen" of Matter and Memory as emblem of philosophy's ambivalence about screens.
  • decarie-daigneault-2024-crooked-finger — develops the Bergsonian cone of memory (from Matter and Memory) as the figure for temporal depth, inverted so that the cone's depth is the virtual past and its apex is the perspectival surface (the present from which "the appeal to which memory responds comes," MM p. 153). Décarie-Daigneault's 2024 paper also makes the MP-1959 commemoration speech ("Bergson in the Making," in Signs) the load-bearing methodological pivot: MP's "second strand" of Bergsonism (inherence to duration: "I am the duration I grasp, and time is duration grasped in me," Signs p. 184) is what allows the encounter to open onto the supra-personal past without re-introducing the Kosmotheoros the spiritualist-vitalist Bergsonism would generate.