The author first learned of Henri Bergson while reading Akutagawa in high school.
Revisiting Bergson’s philosophy of élan vital and durée in the internet age, he becomes convinced that Le Clézio—who profoundly influenced him—must also have studied Bergson deeply.
A reflection on philosophy, memory, and intellectual lineage.

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.
2016-12-06
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 a state of ill health after eating a large amount of spoiled nameko mushrooms last night and upsetting my stomach,
in an instant,
I was able to learn about the life of Henri Bergson across the long span of years.
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” in a Germanized form, but in recent years the form closer to the original pronunciation, “Bergson,” has become mainstream.
Early life.
He was born on 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 Lower Normandy, France.
Student years.
After studying classics and mathematics deeply 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 closely and deepening his understanding of positivism and social evolutionism.
Through these, he formed his own philosophy.
In the national examination for teaching qualifications he took in 1881, when questioned about the value of modern psychology, he gave an answer strongly criticizing 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 Freedom.”
After qualifying, Bergson became a lycée teacher and devoted himself to writing his doctoral dissertation while teaching.
In 1888 he submitted to the Sorbonne his thesis “Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness” (known in English as “Time and Free Will”), and the following year he was awarded the doctorate in letters.
In this work, Bergson criticized what had been called “time” as something produced by applying spatial cognition to what should originally be indivisible, thereby segmenting it.
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” was personal as a conception of time and consciousness and can be said to have thrown 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 mind and body.
This book, his second major work, addressed the mind–body problem using research on aphasia as a clue and employing the concept of “image” as an intermediate existence between matter and representation.
That is, from the standpoint that reality is the flow of duration, Bergson grasped mind (memory) and body (matter) as “located at the two poles of tension and relaxation within duration.”
He demonstrated that both interact with one another 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.