School of thought

Bergsonism

Intellectual current

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Classification

Period
c. 1903-1941 CE
Regions
europe
Domains
Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind

Overview

Bergsonism was an early twentieth-century intellectual current formed around Henri Bergson's accounts of duration, memory, life, and creative change. It became internationally influential after “Introduction to Metaphysics” and Creative Evolution, drawing philosophical, scientific, literary, and artistic responses before its prominence declined after the First World War.

The current cannot be reduced to a single doctrine. Its reception included disputes about evolution, psychology, time, and the limits of conceptual analysis, while later revivals reinterpreted different parts of Bergson's work.

Key ideas

  • Duration: Lived time is a continuous qualitative development rather than a row of interchangeable instants.
  • Memory and perception: Conscious experience selects and contracts a richer temporal field in response to the demands of action.
  • Creative evolution: Life and novelty cannot be exhaustively represented as the rearrangement of fixed, pre-given possibilities.
  • Intuition and intellect: Bergsonism distinguishes the practical, analytic work of intelligence from the direct experiential inquiry represented separately as Bergsonian Intuition.

Key figures

Henri Bergson · Édouard Le Roy

Methods used

Reacts to

  • Kantian Critical Philosophy

    Time and Free Will is built as an attack on Kant's treatment of time as a homogeneous medium like space, and Bergson offers intuition as the metaphysical knowledge Kant had declared impossible.

Later connections

References