What might a philosophy of becoming look like? Henri Bergson (1859-1941), along with Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), is one of the great 20th-century philosophers who, as the life sciences took off, tried to build a philosophy suited to an emergent evolution. Since Whitehead, in the preface to his book Process and Reality (1929), expressed his indebtedness to Bergson, and since the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Bergson's book L'Évolution créatrice (1907), celebrated in France in 2007, has spawned a number of publications and critical studies, it is to Bergson that we turn for an initial response. Given what we now know of Bergson's work, it's clear that this was a "fundamental question" for him very early on: "Heraclitus was struck by the universal flow of things, by that perpetual change which, today, has so strongly struck the proponents of the doctrine of evolution. Guided by this idea, he said to himself that this universal change was perhaps more than a simple quality of things, that it was perhaps the most important thing, the essence, the very existence of things" (Bergson, Cahier noir, notes de cours, Clermont-Ferrand, autumn 1884; cit. Hude, II, p. 113).
In 1884, Henri Bergson was a young teacher in his final year at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, where he was teaching a program (psychology-logic-morality-metaphysics) designed to enable his students to pass the second part of their baccalauréat. Did he tell them about Heraclitus? In fact, Henri Hude has established that the lecture on the pre-Socratics was part of a lecture on the history of Greek philosophy that the young Bergson was given at the University of Clermont (alongside his lycée lectures). What Bergson retained from Heraclitus (that "change is the essence of things", ibid., p. 112) was commented on by Henri Hude, who was convinced that Bergson, who had remained a Platonist, had then discovered the possibility of reconciling, so to speak, Heraclitus and Plato: "Becoming is in essence, which does not mean that essence would be suppressed from within by the becoming that is in it. There is essence, and becoming is not produced against it, without it, outside it, but by it, according to it, and, in a quite original sense, in it" (Hude, ibid., p. 112).
