The author recounts discovering Henri Bergson through Akutagawa Ryunosuke in youth and later revisiting his philosophy—élan vital, duration, and free will. This reflection traces Bergson’s profound influence on twentieth-century literature and the author’s conviction that J. M. G. Le Clézio studied him deeply.

Reading this passage, I became convinced that Le Clézio, who had a decisive influence on me, must also have studied him thoroughly.
2018-01-22
I first learned the name of Henri Bergson when I was in high school, while reading Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
December 6, 2016
Today, inspired by the élan vital (“vital impetus”) spoken of by Susumu Nishibe, I searched for him.
I have repeatedly mentioned that the Internet is the greatest library in human history.
Even in the condition of having upset my stomach after eating a large quantity of old nameko mushrooms last night,
in an instant,
I am able to learn about the life of Henri Bergson across long decades.

Henri-Louis Bergson (pronounced [bɛʁksɔn], October 18, 1859 – January 4, 1941) was a French philosopher.
He was born in Paris.
In Japanese, he has often been written as “Bergson” (ベルグソン), but in recent years the form closer to the original pronunciation, “Berukuson” (ベルクソン), has become mainstream.

Childhood
He was born on Lamartine Street in Paris, not far from the Opera House, to a father of Polish-Jewish origin and an English mother (his sister Mina later married the English occultist MacGregor Mathers and took the name Moina Mathers).
For several years after his birth, he lived in London with his family.
Through his mother, he became familiar with English from an early age.
Before he turned nine, his family moved to the Manche department in Lower Normandy, France.

Student years
After studying classical literature and mathematics intensively at the lycée, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, one of the grandes écoles.
There, most of the professors were Neo-Kantians, and while opposing them, Bergson read Herbert Spencer thoroughly, deepening his understanding of positivism and social evolutionism.
Through these influences, he formed his own philosophy.
In the national teaching qualification examination he took in 1881, when asked about the value of modern psychology, he gave an answer strongly critical not only of modern psychology but of 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 devoted himself to writing his doctoral thesis while teaching.
In 1888 he submitted his dissertation, “Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness” (translated into English as Time and Free Will), to the Sorbonne, and the following year he was awarded a doctorate in literature.
In this work, Bergson criticized what had been called “time,” arguing that it arises from segmenting what should be indivisible through spatialized perception.
He called the flow of consciousness that cannot be divided by spatial perception “duration” (“durée”) and, based on this idea, discussed the problem of human free will.
This concept of “duration,” as a personal conception of time and consciousness, may be said to have cast a new light on the philosophical problem of time.

Matter and Memory
In 1896, Bergson published Matter and Memory, addressing the major philosophical problem of the relation between mind and body.
This book, his second major work, approaches the mind-body problem using the concept of “image” as an intermediate between matter and representation, taking research on aphasia as a starting point.

In other words, from the standpoint that reality is the flow of duration, Bergson understood mind (memory) and body (matter) as “two poles of tension and relaxation within duration.”
He demonstrated that both interact with each other through the rhythm of duration.
To be continued.

Reading this passage, I became convinced that Le Clézio, who had a decisive influence on me, must also have studied him thoroughly.