Henri Bergson
French philosopher (1859–1941), born in Paris to a Polish Jewish father and an English mother, professor at the Collège de France, where his lectures became an unprecedented Parisian social and intellectual event drawing crowds far beyond the academic world, and the most widely read and celebrated French philosopher of his time —awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 'in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented'. His central concept, duration (durée), distinguishes the lived time of consciousness —qualitative, indivisible, constantly flowing and heterogeneous— from the spatialized, measurable time of science and clocks, which for Bergson betrays and distorts real experience by turning it into a succession of discrete, interchangeable instants, like the frames of a film. Already in his Time and Free Will (1889) he grounded this distinction, and in Matter and Memory (1896) he addressed the mind-body problem through memory, distinguishing habit-memory (mechanical, bodily) from pure memory (which preserves the past in its entirety), in an attempt to move beyond both materialism and idealism. His most influential work, Creative Evolution (1907), introduced the famous concept of the élan vital, the creative vital impulse that runs through and drives biological evolution beyond both strict Darwinian mechanism and teleological finalism, offering a vitalist and dynamic alternative that fascinated a whole generation —from Marcel Proust to William James, who saw in it an ally of his pragmatism. In his later years, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) distinguished between closed societies, based on obligation and social pressure, and open societies, oriented toward universal love and inspired by the mystical intuition of the great saints and prophets. His influence on twentieth-century art, literature and philosophy was immense, though the subsequent decline of his philosophical reputation was pronounced, partly due to the hostile criticism of Bertrand Russell and analytic philosophy, and partly to his famous debate with Einstein on the nature of time.