Character Catalog

Bergson's founding thesis in which he introduces the concept of 'duration' as the inner experience of time, irreducible to the time measured by science. This work constitutes the starting point of his entire philosophy.

A major work exploring the relationships between the brain, memory, and perception. Bergson distinguishes habit-memory (mechanical) from pure memory (spiritual), laying the foundations of a philosophy of mind.

A brilliant essay in which Bergson analyzes laughter as a social reaction to 'the mechanical encrusted upon the living.' An accessible work frequently studied in secondary education for its clarity and depth.

Bergson's masterpiece, in which he develops the concept of the élan vital to propose a creative reading of biological evolution against pure Darwinian mechanism. This work earned him immediate international recognition.

Bergson's last major work, distinguishing closed morality (tribal, mechanical) from open morality (universal, creative), and exploring mysticism as the culmination of the élan vital in humanity.

A collection of essays and lectures in which Bergson revisits his philosophical method and defends intuition as a mode of knowledge superior to analytical intelligence for grasping living reality.

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.

The vital impetus we speak of consists, in short, in a need for creation. It cannot create absolutely, because it encounters matter before it, that is to say the movement inverse to its own.

Any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical side of a person when it is the moral side that is at stake. Why does one laugh at an orator who sneezes at the most pathetic moment of his speech? Because something mechanical is encrusted upon something living.

A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing; and even then it is something he has tried to say rather than actually said, and what he has said he has only half said.

Humanity lies groaning, half crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. It does not sufficiently realize that its future is in its own hands. It is for humanity to see first whether it wants to go on living.

Institution where Bergson taught from 1900 to 1921 and where his lectures on the philosophy of duration drew considerable crowds, making him the most celebrated intellectual figure of the Belle Époque.

Elite graduate school where Bergson pursued his brilliant studies from 1878 and forged his philosophical training, rubbing shoulders with the future intellectual elites of France.

School where Bergson taught as a philosophy professor from 1883 to 1888, a formative provincial period during which he wrote his foundational thesis on consciousness and time.

Institution to which Bergson was elected a member in 1914, cementing his status as a major figure in French letters and thought, where he delivered several widely noted speeches.

Bourgeois residential district where Bergson lived for much of his adult life, in an apartment that served as the setting for numerous intellectual conversations with the leading figures of his time.

The very object Bergson used to illustrate the difference between time as measured by science (mechanical ticking, divisible) and duration as lived inwardly, continuous and indivisible. For him, the watch represents the artificial spatialization of time.

Bergson was a remarkable teacher who made extensive use of the blackboard to illustrate his abstract concepts with diagrams. His students at the Collège de France recalled his drawings representing memory as a cone or duration as a continuous line.

Passionately interested in the life sciences, Bergson avidly read the works of biologists and naturalists of his time. His library contained the writings of Darwin, Lamarck, and contemporary embryologists, all of which nourished his theory of the élan vital.

Bergson worked very slowly and wrote his texts by hand with extreme care, revising at length before any publication. His notebooks bear witness to a thought in perpetual motion, in keeping with his philosophy of duration.

The characteristic attire of the bourgeois professor of the Belle Époque, which Bergson wore during his lectures and talks. His sartorial elegance contrasted with the revolutionary radicalism of his philosophy.

Bergson received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, an extremely rare distinction for a philosopher. Unable to travel to Stockholm for health reasons, he had his acceptance speech read on his behalf, in which he defended the value of philosophical intuition.