The Forgotten Brilliance of Henri Bergson

Bergson was once the most famous philosopher in the world; today, his still applicable insights are now unfairly neglected.

For several decades in the first half of the 1900s, French philosopher Henri Bergson (1856–1941) was probably the most famous philosopher in the world. He is now tragically largely forgotten because his work is incorrectly dismissed as mere speculation because it is not reducible to the methods of analytical philosophy. Bergson, similar to G.W.F. Hegel, thought of knowledge as an ongoing process of development, but he rejected the mechanistic causality of Hegel’s historicism. Bergson developed a highly original approach to philosophy that took into account elements of Kant, Hegel, and pragmatism.

Related: Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Philosophy

Bergson Explains the Analytical/Continental Divide

Bergson proposes that in the quest for understanding the world, there are two methods of gaining knowledge of an object. There is analysis, which seeks to know an object absolutely, and there is intuition, which seeks to understand an object relatively.

The method of analysis is how science and analytical philosophy think empirical knowledge…