Whatever Happened to Henri Bergson?

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson (1859–1941) ranked among the world’s most eminent philosophers. His distinction between clock-time and time as subjectively experienced, as well as his invocation of the élan vital as driving humanity to higher planes of creativity and freedom, enabled him to enjoy unparalleled influence among French students as well as international writers. Bergson personified philosophy. He also seemed to justify the gamble of emancipation that France had taken barely a century earlier, in granting talented Jews the opportunity to flourish. In 1927 Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet very soon thereafter, the prominence that he had enjoyed quite precipitously declined, and he drifted into obscurity from which his writings have yet to recover. How can such an eclipse be explained? Part of the reason was an inevitable shift in philosophic fashion. By the 1920s, belles-lettres aimed at an educated public yielded to linguistic analysis in the Anglo-American world and to phenomenology on the continent. Part of the reason was the shock of the First World War. Its carnage led to disillusionment and to pessimism, which made Bergson’s paeans to the intuitive powers of humanity seem tone-deaf. Another part of the reason was an illness that left him virtually speechless—and thus unresponsive—for the last fifteen years of his life, which was cut short by the German invasion and occupation. Registering as a Jew in the dead of winter, Bergson died—a victim of Nazism—of pneumonia.