A philosopher won the Nobel for literature, with Proust as his best man
Henri Bergson argued that lived experience and intuition reveal more about reality than abstract reasoning or science. The idea made him a celebrity: crowds packed his Paris lectures, he took the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, and his fame alarmed French officials who saw him as a threat to the Republic's secular, scientific outlook.
He was born in Paris in 1859 near the old opera house. His father, the composer Michał Bergson, came from a prominent Polish-Jewish family, and his mother was the daughter of a Yorkshire doctor. The family spent a few years in London, which gave him early English, before settling in France, where he became a naturalised citizen. Raised with a Jewish religious education, he lost his faith as a teenager, a crisis one biographer links to encountering evolutionary theory.
At school he showed real mathematical talent: at 18 he solved a problem whose solution became his first publication. His teachers were dismayed when he chose the humanities instead. He trained at the École Normale Supérieure, taught in Angers and Clermont-Ferrand, and in 1889 earned his doctorate with Time and Free Will. The physicist Louis de Broglie later claimed that this book anticipated by forty years ideas that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg would apply to wave mechanics.
Matter and Memory followed in 1896, a demanding study of perception, memory and the link between brain and mind built on years of reading clinical research. Having once favoured Lamarck, he came to prefer Darwin's gradual variation as closer to his view of life as continuous, a theme he developed in Creative Evolution in 1907. From 1900 he held chairs at the Collège de France, first in ancient and later in modern philosophy.
His private life was eventful. In 1891 he married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, who served as best man; their daughter Jeanne was born deaf. His sister Mina married the English occultist MacGregor Mathers, who helped found the magical society known as the Golden Dawn. Bergson's influence faded before the Second World War, then revived after Gilles Deleuze published a study of him in 1966.
Source: Henri Bergson
