Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
Gentlemen,
I thought, at the beginning of this year which finds France at its lowest ebb, its life subjected to the harshest trials, its future almost unimaginable, that I should express here the wishes we all form, absent and present from this Company, that the times ahead will be less bitter, less sinister, less dreadful than those we experienced in 1940, and are still experiencing.
Mr. Bergson died last Saturday, January 4, at the age of 81, apparently succumbing without suffering to pulmonary congestion. On Monday, the body of this illustrious man was taken to his home in the Cimetière de Garches, in what were necessarily the simplest and most moving circumstances. No funeral; no words; but no doubt, all the more thoughtful and with a sense of extraordinary loss for all those present. Some thirty people gathered in a salon around the coffin. The French State was represented by M. l'Ambassadeur de Brinon; the Minister of Public Instruction by M. Lavelle. I expressed the condolences of the Académie to Mme Bergson, whom she asked me to thank on her behalf. Immediately afterwards, the coffin was taken away, and on the threshold of the house, we saluted one last time the greatest philosopher of our time.
He was the pride of our Company. Whether or not his metaphysics had seduced us, whether or not we had followed him in the profound research to which he devoted his whole life, and in the truly creative evolution of his thought, ever bolder and freer, we had in him the most authentic example of the highest intellectual virtues. A kind of moral authority in matters of the mind was attached to his name, which was universal. France was able to call upon this name and authority in circumstances that I'm sure you remember. He had many disciples of a fervor, and almost of a devotion, that no one after him in the world of ideas can now flatter themselves to excite.
I won't go into his philosophy. This is not the time for an examination that needs to be deepened, and can only be done in the light of clear days and in the fullness of the exercise of thought. The very old, and consequently very difficult, problems that M. Bergson dealt with, such as time, memory and, above all, the development of life, have been renewed by him, and the philosophical situation, as it stood in France some fifty years ago, has been curiously modified. At that time, the powerful Kantian critique, armed with a formidable apparatus for controlling knowledge and a highly organized abstract terminology, dominated teaching and even imposed itself on politics, insofar as politics can have some contact with philosophy. Mr. Bergson was neither won over nor intimidated by the rigor of this doctrine, which so imperatively decreed the limits of thought, and he set about rescuing metaphysics from the kind of discredit and abandonment to which he had found it reduced. You know what a resounding success his lectures at the Collège de France were, and what a worldwide reputation his hypotheses and analyses gained. While most philosophers since the 18th century had been under the influence of physical-mechanical conceptions, our illustrious colleague had happily allowed himself to be seduced by the life sciences. Biology inspired him. He considered life, understood it and conceived of it as the carrier of the spirit. He was not afraid to look to the observation of his own conscience for insights into problems that would never be solved. But he had performed the essential service of restoring and rehabilitating the taste for a meditation closer to our essence than can be achieved by a purely logical development of concepts, to which, moreover, it is generally impossible to give irreproachable definitions. The true value of philosophy lies in bringing thought back to itself. This endeavor requires from those who wish to describe it, and to communicate what appears to them from their inner life, a particular application and even the invention of a way of expressing themselves suited to this purpose, for language expires at its own source. This is where M. Bergson's genius came into its own. He dared to borrow poetry's enchanted weapons, combining its power with the precision that a mind nurtured in the exact sciences cannot bear to deviate from. His desire to reconstitute in the consciousness of others the discoveries he had made in his own, and the results of his internal experiments, gave rise to the happiest and most novel images and metaphors. The result was a style which, while philosophical, neglected to be pedantic, which confused and even scandalized some, while many others were delighted to recognize in the suppleness and graceful richness of this language, the very French liberties and nuances which the previous generation had been convinced that serious speculation must carefully guard against. Allow me to observe here that this revival was almost contemporaneous with that which occurred in the world of music, when Claude Achille Debussy's very subtle and uncluttered work came to the fore. These were two characteristic French reactions.
Henri Bergson, a great philosopher and writer, was also, and should have been, a great friend of mankind. His mistake may have been to think that men were worth being friends with. He worked with all his soul for the union of minds and ideals, which he believed should precede that of political organizations and forces; but perhaps the opposite is true? Perhaps we should also consider as specifically human the very varied antagonisms that exist between men, among which is the one that pits the supporters and servants of this unity against those who don't believe in it and regard it as a dangerous chimera.
M. Bergson undoubtedly believed that the very fate of the spirit is inseparable from the feeling of its presence and universal value: in this, and in other respects, he was in line with the most religious thought. The meaning of life, from its simplest and humblest manifestations, seemed to him to be essentially spiritual. All of which allows us to imagine what must have been the state of this vast and profound intelligence in the presence of events that have ruined so many fine forecasts, and changed the face of things so rapidly and so violently. Did he despair? Was he able to keep his faith in the evolution of our species towards an ever more elevated condition? I don't know, since, unaware that he had been in Paris since September, and having only learned of his presence there at the same time as I learned of his death, I didn't go to visit him. But I have no doubt that he has been cruelly affected to the core of his being by the total disaster whose effects we are suffering.
A very high, very pure, very superior figure of the thinking man, and perhaps one of the last men who will have thought exclusively, profoundly and superiorly, in a time when the world is thinking and meditating less and less, when civilization seems, day by day, seems to be reduced to the memory and vestiges we keep of its multiform richness and its free and superabundant intellectual production, while misery, anguish and constraints of all kinds depress or discourage the undertakings of the mind, Bergson already seems to belong to a bygone age, and his name, the last great name in the history of European intelligence.
Paul Valéry, January 9, 1941, at a session of the Académie française.
