From reading Ryūnosuke Akutagawa in high school to revisiting Henri Bergson through Nishibe Susumu’s notion of élan vital, this essay traces Bergson’s life and core ideas—duration, time, freedom, and the mind–body problem—across years and texts.

I first learned the name Henri Bergson when I was in high school, while reading Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.
2016-12-06
I first learned the name Henri Bergson when I was in high school, while reading Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.
Today, inspired by the élan vital spoken of by Nishibe Susumu, I searched for him. I have repeatedly mentioned that the Internet is the greatest library in human history.
Even while suffering from an upset stomach after eating a large quantity of old nameko mushrooms last night, I was able, in no time at all, to learn about the life of Henri Bergson across long years.
Henri-Louis Bergson (Henri-Louis Bergson [bɛʁksɔn], pronunciation example, October 18, 1859 – January 4, 1941) was a French philosopher. He was born in Paris. In Japanese he has often been written as “Bergson,” but in recent years the form closer to the original, “Berkuson,” has become mainstream.
Early life
Born on the Rue Lamartine not far from the Paris Opera, to a Polish Jewish father and an English mother (his sister Mina married the English occultist MacGregor Mathers and took the name Moina Mathers). For several years after his birth, he lived with his family in London, England. Through his mother, he became familiar with English from an early age. Before he turned nine, his family moved to the Manche department in the Basse-Normandie region of France.
Student years
After studying classical languages and mathematics in depth at the lycée, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, one of the grandes écoles. There, since the professors were all Neo-Kantians, Bergson resisted them while at the same time reading Herbert Spencer’s works closely, deepening his understanding of positivism and social evolutionism. Through these, he formed his own philosophy. In the state examination for teaching qualification that he took in 1881, when asked about the value of modern psychology, he submitted an answer that strongly criticized not only modern psychology but psychology in general. As a result, he incurred the displeasure of the examiners and passed in second place.
“Time and Free Will”
After passing, Bergson became a lycée teacher and, while teaching, devoted himself to writing his doctoral dissertation. In 1888, he submitted his dissertation, “Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness” (the English title being “Time and Free Will”), to the Sorbonne, and the following year he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters. In this work, Bergson criticized what had been called “time” as something produced by using spatial cognition to segment what should originally be indivisible. He then called the flow of consciousness, which cannot be divided by spatial cognition, “duration” (“durée”), and on this basis discussed the problem of human free will. This “duration” is personal in its conception of time and consciousness, and can be said to have cast a stone into the philosophical problem of time.
“Matter and Memory”
In 1896, Bergson published “Matter and Memory,” which dealt with the major philosophical problem of the mind–body relationship. This book, his second major work, approached the mind–body problem by using the concept of “image” as an intermediate existence between matter and representation, drawing on studies of aphasia.
That is, from the standpoint of seeing reality as the flow of duration, Bergson understood mind (memory) and body (matter) as “positioned at the two poles of tension and relaxation of duration,” and demonstrated that the two are mutually involved through the rhythm of duration.
This manuscript continues.
*Reading this passage, I became convinced that J. M. G. Le Clézio, who decisively influenced me, must also have read him closely.