Overview
Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Nobel laureate in Literature (1927), developed a philosophy of duration, memory, and creative evolution opposing purely spatialized time.
Main ideas
Lived time (durée) differs from clock time; intuition grasps becoming; élan vital names life’s inventive push. Comedy, mysticism, and freedom appear across his essays.
Major works
- Time and Free Will
- Matter and Memory
- Creative Evolution
- The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Legacy
Bergson influenced process thought, modernist literature, and later philosophies of time and life.