Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a French philosopher who argued that living organisms cannot be understood by the same methods that work for inert matter. His central claim was that life is characterized by duration — an irreversible, creative flow of time that no equation can capture — and that the drive of life toward divergent forms points to an original vital impulse he called the élan vital. These arguments made Creative Evolution (1907) the most widely read work of biology-philosophy in the early twentieth century. Bergson’s influence shaped Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of medicine, reached Driesch’s neovitalism, and prepared the ground for the phenomenological tradition that would later insist on the distinction between the lived body and the biological organism. For the history of medicine, his work marks a sustained attempt to hold open the question of whether life requires its own logic.

Intellectual Context

Bergson entered philosophy in the 1880s against the backdrop of two dominant positions. The first was the mechanistic biology that had gathered force since Descartes’ homme machine and consolidated in the mid-nineteenth century as physiology and chemistry together dismantled one after another the functions once attributed to a special vital force: digestion, respiration, fermentation, and eventually the synthesis of organic compounds. La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (1747) had given that tradition its most provocative early statement, ridiculing Descartes for the “mistake” of giving man two substances when the evidence of disease and sleep showed mind and body to be a single material system — a doctrine that Aho and Aho note was initially burned publicly before it gradually prevailed in academic science.(James Aho, Kevin Aho, 2009) The second dominant position, closely tied to the first, was Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary positivism, which attempted to derive the whole of existence — including mind, life, and society — from a single principle of integration and differentiation applied uniformly across all domains. Bergson’s early work on time and consciousness had already identified something wrong with both: Spencer’s “false evolutionism,” he argued, cuts up “present reality, already evolved, into little bits no less evolved, and then recomposing it with these fragments, thus positing in advance everything that is to be explained,” rather than following reality as it is generated.(Bergson, 1911) The critique was methodological before it was metaphysical: any account that assembles the present from ready-made elements of the past has already assumed what needs explaining.

The evolutionist project contained a further internal contradiction that Bergson pressed: once a philosophy acknowledged the intellect as a local, evolved product of life’s history, it could not consistently use that same intellect to reconstruct all reality from first principles without circularity.(Bergson, 1911) To invoke evolutionary development as the ground of knowledge and then treat that knowledge as adequate to explain evolution from the outside is to reason in a circle. This epistemological point preceded and motivated the more elaborate biological argument of Creative Evolution.

Creative Evolution extended that critique to biology itself. Bergson’s introduction maps the argument in advance: mechanism and finalism are the two ready-made frameworks available, and he will show that “neither the one nor the other” fits evolution, though finalism “might be recut and resewn” to fit less badly than mechanism.(Bergson, 1911) The book begins from a diagnosis: our intellect, shaped by evolutionary pressure to act on inert matter — to manipulate, predict, and organize physical things — is “intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment” and is structurally “incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement.”(Bergson, 1911) This is not a counsel of ignorance but a precise complaint. The intellect operates by extracting stable snapshots from a flowing reality and stringing them on an abstract, uniform “becoming” — what Bergson calls the cinematographical mechanism.(Bergson, 1911) What is real is not form but the continual change of form; form is only a snapshot view of a transition, and to treat it as primary is to mistake a practical convenience for an ontological given.(Bergson, 1911) Duration, Bergson argues, is “the very stuff of reality,” and grasping it directly dissolves both the illusion of the void and the illusion of the immobile from which mechanism and finalism each suffer.(Bergson, 1911) This method works for physics, where matter is genuinely divisible into parts that can be reassembled. It fails for life, because living phenomena — aging, development, individuation — cannot be reconstructed from such snapshots. “Not one of the categories of our thought — unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, intelligent finality — applies exactly to the things of life: who can say where individuality begins and ends, whether the living being is one or many?”(Bergson, 1911)

The consequence Bergson drew was not that biology should abandon science but that a theory of knowledge and a theory of life must be developed together, since each requires the other to succeed.(Bergson, 1911) Neither could be built independently: epistemology without biology does not know what kind of intelligence is doing the knowing; biology without epistemology does not know what categories it is using. This mutual dependence was Bergson’s founding methodological principle, and it set him apart from both the scientist who ignores philosophy and the philosopher who ignores science.

Duration, the Living Body, and the Limits of Mechanism

The core concept Bergson brought to biology was durée — duration — which he had developed in his earlier Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889). That earlier work had established what Bergson calls “real duration” — the datum of immediate consciousness — as irreducibly distinct from the spatialized time of physics.(Bergson, 1911) Consciousness, he argues, is not a succession of discrete states but a continuous flow: “there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow.”(Bergson, 1911) Duration is “the continuous progress of the past pressing into the future,” with the past preserved automatically in the present.(Bergson, 1911) For a conscious being, then, “to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”(Bergson, 1911) The self does not have states; it is change, and the change never stops.

Inorganic matter, unlike the living, has no history and can in principle return to earlier states; its present state contains nothing more than the past.(Bergson, 1911) The living body, by contrast, genuinely individuates itself and ages; wherever anything lives, time is being inscribed in an open register.(Bergson, 1911) For the living organism, its past is prolonged into its present, and it endures, growing old.(Bergson, 1911)

The argument’s relevance for medicine appears when Bergson extends duration from consciousness to the living body. Inorganic matter, he notes, can in principle return to an earlier state; it has no history in the strict sense, because its present state contains nothing that the past does not already fully determine.(Bergson, 1911) The living body is different. Like consciousness, it ages; its past is not behind it but lives on in its present, acting on it, and this means that organisms carry their history inside them in a way that stones do not. “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.”(Bergson, 1911) This is not poetry but a specific ontological claim: organic memory — the way an organism’s past shapes its present responses — is a real feature of living things that mechanistic biology cannot accommodate without either suppressing it or reducing it to something else.

This argument is the ground of Bergson’s objection to radical mechanism. Mechanism, in its most rigorous form — from Laplace’s imagined demon to du Bois-Reymond’s universal equation — treats time as having no real efficacy. If the present state of the universe fully determines the future, then time is merely the “infirmity of a mind that cannot know everything at once.”(Bergson, 1911) Duration, as Bergson had described it, is precisely the opposite: an irreversible accumulation in which the past is genuinely novel and the future is genuinely open. The sugar-in-water example crystallizes the point: when I wait for the sugar to melt, the time I wait “coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.”(Bergson, 1911) Real time resists the mathematician’s substitution of variables.

The equally important symmetrical argument concerns finalism. Radical finalism — the claim that all of nature works toward pre-established ends — is, Bergson argues, only inverted mechanism. If everything unfolds according to a programme arranged in advance, time is again rendered useless: “if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again.”(Bergson, 1911) Both mechanism and finalism suppress genuine becoming by insisting that the future is, in some sense, already given — whether given by the past (mechanism) or by the future itself as pre-drawn plan (finalism). Bergson’s own position is closer to finalism than to mechanism, but it differs from classical finalism by locating the harmony of living things behind rather than in front of them: in a shared original impetus rather than a shared aspiration toward a pre-existing end.(Bergson, 1911)

Élan Vital and Creative Evolution

Bergson accepts transformism — evolution — as the best available biological account of species diversity, but argues that neither Darwinian natural selection nor Lamarckian adaptation reaches to the real cause of evolution’s movement.(Bergson, 1911) Adaptation explains the particular path evolution takes, the sinuosities of its course, as a road adapts itself to the hills; but adaptation does not explain the road itself or its direction.(Bergson, 1911) Something more is needed: an inner impulsion.

That impulsion is what Bergson names the élan vital — the vital impulse. It is not a substance or a force in the physicochemical sense but a movement, something like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of each developed organism, with the organism itself as an “excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former germ endeavoring to continue itself in a new germ.”(Bergson, 1911) The vital impulse is also incompatible with finalism’s claim that evolution realizes a pre-existing plan. If evolution is “a creation unceasingly renewed,” Bergson argues, then it creates as it goes not only the forms of life but the very ideas by which those forms can be understood: “its future overflows its present, and can not be sketched out therein in an idea.”(Bergson, 1911) There is no blueprint; each new form is genuinely novel, and the categories adequate to grasp it come into being alongside the form itself. Evolution on this account is not a linear march but a sheaf of diverging tendencies, “like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn.”(Bergson, 1911) Each burst reflects the combination of the vital impulse with the resistance of inert matter that it encounters and must work through.

The most forceful evidence Bergson marshals for this impulsion is the phenomenon of convergent evolution: the fact that organs as complex as the vertebrate eye and the cephalopod eye have arisen independently on widely separated evolutionary lines, arriving at structurally similar solutions to the same optical problem. Pure mechanism — accidental variation plus selection — cannot account for this, because the probability of arriving at the same complex result by independent accidents is negligible. Bergson concludes that such convergence implies “a common impetus” working through different material channels, arriving at similar functional results by different structural paths.(Bergson, 1911)

The élan vital does not make Bergson a vitalist in the older sense. He explicitly notes that standard vitalistic theories — those that posit a vital principle distinct from and governing the body — fall into their own difficulty: there is in nature “neither purely internal finality nor absolutely distinct individuality,” and any vital principle must be either too narrow (attached to the individual organism) or too broad (the whole of life), neither of which is coherent.(Bergson, 1911) Life, Bergson insists, “is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines” — the curve is tangent at every point to straight lines yet is not composed of them.(Bergson, 1911) The relationship between life and chemistry is real but irreducible: chemistry covers the descending, katagenetic phase of energy expenditure in living tissue, not the ascending, constructive work of what Bergson calls anagenesis — the building of living structure against entropy.(Bergson, 1911)

Evolution also diverges the lines of consciousness. Bergson argues that consciousness is not a property added to matter at a certain level of complexity but is coextensive with life, proportional to the organism’s freedom of movement: “the humblest organism is conscious in proportion to its power to move freely.”(Bergson, 1911) The plant line evolved toward fixity, torpor, and the storage of solar energy; the animal line evolved toward mobility and an increasingly articulate consciousness able to choose among responses.(Bergson, 1911) Within the animal line, evolution further divided into instinct — the arthropod line — and intelligence — the vertebrate line. Bergson’s definition of human intelligence is notable: not Homo sapiens but Homo faber, the tool-making animal, “the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture.”(Bergson, 1911) Intelligence is adapted to work on inert matter; instinct is adapted to work with living matter but cannot reflect on itself. Neither is complete; what both lack is what Bergson calls intuition — “instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object” — the mode of apprehension that philosophy requires.(Bergson, 1911)

The nervous system itself, on this account, is best understood as a reservoir of indetermination: by multiplying the possible divergent responses at each neural junction, it “inserts freedom into what would otherwise be mechanically determined biological behavior.”(Bergson, 1911) The brain does not produce thought; it canalizes it, directs it, and especially inhibits certain responses to leave room for novel ones.

Bergson’s Critique of Medical Mechanism

Bergson argues that the living body differs from artificially isolated physical systems in that it genuinely individuates itself and ages, with time being inscribed in an open register.(Bergson, 1911) He further notes that the organism endures, its past prolonged into its present, and even a simple cell undergoes the same process of growing old.(Bergson, 1911)

The second implication concerns time. A medicine that treats the body as a machine in the Cartesian sense — a mechanism whose state at any moment fully determines its next state — has no room for the organism’s history as a real determinant of its present condition. Bergson’s account of duration, in which the past “gnaws into” the present without being reducible to it, points instead toward what later medicine would approach through concepts like allostatic load, developmental programming, and the body’s capacity to carry the traces of earlier insults. The body, on Bergson’s view, genuinely ages — not merely wears out, but accumulates its history in a way that makes it not the same organism it was.(Bergson, 1911)

The third implication concerns consciousness and its relation to the body. Bergson’s claim that consciousness is not dependent on the nervous system — that the nervous system canalizes and intensifies what is diffused throughout living substance — does not make him a Cartesian dualist. He argues that intellect and materiality “have been constituted, in detail, by reciprocal adaptation,” and that both derive “from a wider and higher form of existence.”(Bergson, 1911) But this means that reducing consciousness to neural states will always be inadequate: not because consciousness is made of different stuff, but because both consciousness and matter are regional expressions of something more fundamental, and the reduction proceeds in the wrong direction.

Hans Jonas, writing in 1966, crystallized the larger historical argument: the modern era replaced a premodern vitalist ontology — in which death was the anomaly requiring explanation — with an ontology of matter in which death became the essence of beings and life the exception.(James Aho, Kevin Aho, 2009) Bergson’s work, from this perspective, was a philosophical effort to reverse that replacement, not by returning to premodern animism but by showing that mechanism’s apparent self-evidence rested on intellectual habits shaped by practical needs, not on any demonstrated superiority as an account of life.

Influence on the Philosophy of Medicine

Driesch’s History and Theory of Vitalism (1914) placed Bergson alongside Gurwitsch among the significant recent vitalists, though Driesch’s assessment was characteristically competitive: Creative Evolution, he wrote, confirms “more or less, in a slightly altered form, the conclusions which we had already reached,” with Bergson’s “fundamental theories” to be studied in his own writings.(Driesch, 1914) Driesch’s grumbling backhanded acknowledgment is itself significant: it reflects a recognition that Bergson had reached similar conclusions through different methods and that the two represented parallel trajectories of early-twentieth-century vitalism.

The more consequential line of influence runs through Canguilhem. Wolfe’s analysis distinguishes Bergson’s approach from Canguilhem’s carefully: where Bergson “begins with a metaphysical assertion of the uniqueness of Life,” Canguilhem begins inside science, treating vitalism as a historical-epistemological demand rather than a metaphysical claim.(Wolfe, Charles T., 2010-2015) What Canguilhem drew from Bergson was the frame: Creative Evolution “introduced the possibility of a biological philosophy into a French tradition that had, from Descartes through Sartre, consistently neglected life as a philosophical object.”(Wolfe, Charles T., 2010-2015) For Canguilhem, who would build the most sustained philosophy of medicine in the French tradition, Bergson had made the question answerable — had shown that the “oblivion of life” in French philosophy was not necessary.

Canguilhem’s specific intellectual debts to Bergson include the reversal of the machine-organism priority. Following Bergson’s argument that intellect and its categories were shaped by the needs of action on inert matter, Canguilhem argued that biological organization must precede the existence and meaning of mechanical constructions — the organism is not a machine and cannot be understood through the machine model, because the machine is an artifact whose intelligibility is derived from, not prior to, the organism.(Wolfe, Charles T., 2010-2015) Undergirding this reversal is a metaphysical claim Bergson had established in Chapter III of Creative Evolution: the same movement by which the mind forms itself into distinct concepts also brings matter to break itself into mutually external objects, so that “the more consciousness is intellectualized, the more is matter spatialized.”(Bergson, 1911) Machine-thinking and the image of inert, divisible matter are not independent achievements — they are correlative products of a single movement of intellectual adaptation to inert matter. To take the machine as the model for the organism is therefore to take the derivative for the primary. Where Bergson had argued this at the level of evolutionary phylogeny, Canguilhem argued it at the level of the history of biology as a science.

Canguilhem also shared with Bergson the project of holding open the question of life’s meaning — what Canguilhem called vitalism as “demand” or exigence: not a specific doctrine affirming particular properties of life, but a requirement that the question of the relation between life and science remain open.(Canguilhem, Georges, 1952/2008) The living organism is not indifferent to the conditions of its life; it has a normative relation to health and disease that is absent from physical systems, and this irreducible normativity — the fact that there is no pathological astronomy — marks biology and medicine as sciences requiring their own logic.(Canguilhem, Georges, 1952/2008) Canguilhem formulated the epistemological corollary directly: living forms can be grasped in a vision, never by a division — they are totalities whose sense resides in their tendency to realize themselves as such in confrontation with their milieu, and biological knowledge must adopt a mode of comprehension adequate to that totality rather than decomposing it into independently manipulable parts.(Canguilhem, Georges, 1952/2008) This claim is Bergson’s Chapter III argument translated into the terms of the history of biological science. This insight, which Canguilhem built into a philosophy of medicine, was prepared by Bergson’s insistence that the categories adequate to physics are not adequate to life.

Where Canguilhem and Bergson diverged was on method. Bergson sought the meaning of life through philosophical intuition — the mode of apprehension that goes beyond analysis and intellect. Canguilhem held that “philosophy should not begin at the place where science terminates, because science in its own manner is already a philosophy.”(Wolfe, Charles T., 2010-2015) For Canguilhem, the history of science was itself philosophical, and the concept-forming activity of biologists was already a vital activity, not something philosophy needed to supplement. Canguilhem was initially anti-Bergsonian before evolving his own vitalism; his later position, in which “life is concept,” is both a transformation and a partial preservation of the Bergsonian legacy.(Wolfe, Charles T., 2010-2015)

Wolfe’s analysis also notes what this entails for the history of vitalism itself. The two canonical experimental “refutations” of vitalism — Wöhler’s synthesis of urea in 1828, and the Vienna Circle’s logical critique of Driesch — targeted only chemical vitalism and substantival vitalism respectively, leaving Canguilhem’s heuristic vitalism, inherited in part from Bergson, untouched.(Wolfe, Charles T., 2010-2015) Vitalism on the Bergsonian-Canguilhemian reading is not a theory awaiting falsification but a standing demand that the question of the specificity of life remain open; no single experimental result can close it. That demand Canguilhem expressed in his concept of “medical vitalism” as an instinctive suspicion toward the power of technology over life — a suspicion that, in his reading, expressed not mysticism but the clinician’s recognition that living beings are normative and cannot be managed as mere mechanisms.(Wolfe, Charles T., 2010-2015)

The epistemological claim Bergson lodged against mechanism in Chapter III of Creative Evolution undergirds this entire discussion. Pure duration — the datum of lived inner experience — is the source from which free acts arise; they are incommensurable with any intellectual formula precisely because intellect is shaped for other purposes.(Bergson, 1911) When consciousness relaxes away from that pure durational life toward the practical activity of managing the world, it descends toward matter and spatiality; spirit and matter are not distinct substances but represent opposite poles of a single movement.(Bergson, 1911) Intellect and matter have co-adapted because they were constituted by the same inversion of the same original movement: “the more consciousness is intellectualized, the more is matter spatialized.”(Bergson, 1911) From this it follows that positive science, which works on inert matter, touches something absolute within that domain — it is not merely conventional — but when extended to life its results become increasingly symbolic and demand philosophical supplement if they are to reach the living reality.(Bergson, 1911) Canguilhem’s epistemology of biology is best understood as the working out of these claims at the level of the history of biological concepts.

Bergson also figures in a broader story about the phenomenological tradition’s engagement with medicine. The Körper/Leib distinction — between the body as biological organism and the body as lived — which became central to phenomenological medicine in the twentieth century depends on an account of the lived body as something that cannot be captured by physico-chemical description alone. Bergson did not use this vocabulary, but his claim that the living body carries its history, ages genuinely, and is an expression of duration rather than merely a machine subject to the laws of reversible mechanics prepared the intellectual ground for this distinction.

Olmsted’s biography of Claude Bernard contains a small but telling episode: Bergson, Olmsted notes, “seized upon” Bernard’s phrase “systems do not exist in nature but only in men’s minds” to make Bernard “appear to be the forerunner of his own philosophical system.”(Olmsted, 1938) Bernard, an experimentalist who distrusted all philosophical systematization equally, would likely have been uncomfortable with the appropriation. But the episode illustrates the way Bergson was actively reading the history of physiology for precedents and allies — he was constructing not just a philosophy of life but a lineage for it, one that could situate his work within the scientific tradition rather than against it.

Human Notes

No human notes yet.

See Also

• vitalism
• elan-vital
• georges-canguilhem
• mechanism
• hans-driesch
• duration
• phenomenology-of-medicine
• philosophy-of-biology
• claude-bernard
• herbert-spencer
• creative-evolution

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Bergson, H. (1911). Creative Evolution. Trans. A. Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt. [Source ID: bergson-creative-evolution-1911]
• Canguilhem, G. (2008). Knowledge of Life. Trans. S. Geroulanos & D. Ginsburg. New York: Fordham University Press. [Source ID: canguilhem-knowledgeoflife-2008]
• Driesch, H. (1914). The History and Theory of Vitalism. Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Macmillan. [Source ID: driesch-historyvitalism-1914] — authority: superseded-but-valuable
• Wolfe, C. T. (2014). “The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem, Bergson and the Project of Biophilosophy.” In Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010. [Source ID: wolfe-vitalism-papers]
• Aho, K. & Aho, J. (2009). Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Disease and Illness. Lanham: Lexington Books. [Source ID: aho-aho-body-matters-2009]
• Olmsted, J. M. D. (1938). Claude Bernard, Physiologist. New York: Harper. [Source ID: olmsted-claudebernard-1938]