The Nobel Prize in Literature 1927
Henri Bergson
Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, President of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, on December 10, 1928*
In his L'Évolution
créatrice (1907) [Creative Evolution], Henri
Bergson has declared that the most lasting and most fruitful of
all philosophical systems are those which originate in intuition.
If one believes these words, it appears immediately with regard
to Bergson's system how he has made fruitful the intuitive
discovery that opens the gate to the world of his thought. This
discovery is set forth in his doctoral thesis, Essai sur les
données immédiates de la conscience (1889) [Time
and Free Will], in which time is conceived not as something
abstract or formal but as a reality, indissolubly connected with
life and the human self He gives it the name
«duration», a concept that can be interpreted as
«living time», by analogy with the life force. It is a
dynamic stream, exposed to constant qualitative variations and
perpetually increasing. It eludes reflection. It cannot be linked
with any fixed point, for it would thereby be limited and no
longer exist. It can be perceived and felt only by an
introspective and concentrated consciousness that turns inward
toward its origin.
What we usually call time, the time which is measured by the
movement of a clock or the revolutions of the sun, is something
quite different. It is only a form created by and for the mind
and action. At the end of a most subtle analysis, Bergson
concludes that it is nothing but an application of the form of
space. Mathematical precision, certitude, and limitation prevail
in its domain; cause is distinguished from effect and hence rises
that edifice, a creation of the mind, whose intelligence has
encircled the world, raising a wall around the most intimate
aspirations of our minds toward freedom. These aspirations find
satisfaction in «living time»: cause and effect here
are fused; nothing can be foreseen with certainty, for certainty
resides in the act, simple in itself, and can be established only
by this act. Living time is the realm of free choice and new
creations, the realm in which something is produced only once and
is never repeated in quite the same manner. The history of the
personality originates in it. It is the realm where the mind, the
soul, whatever one may call it, by casting off the forms and
habits of intelligence becomes capable of perceiving in an inner
vision the truth about its own essence and about the universal
life which is a part of our self.
In his purely scientific account, the philosopher tells us
nothing of the origin of this intuition, born perhaps of a
personal experience skilfully seized upon and probed, or perhaps
of a liberating crisis of the soul. One can only guess that this
crisis was provoked by the heavy atmosphere of rationalistic
biology that ruled toward the end of the last century. Bergson
had been brought up and educated under the influence of this
science, and when he decided to take up arms against it, he had a
rare mastery of its own weapons and full knowledge of the
necessity and grandeur it had in its own realm, the conceptual
construction of the material world. Only when rationalism seeks
to imprison life itself in its net does Bergson seek to prove
that the dynamic and fluid nature of life passes without
hindrance across its meshes.
Even if I were competent, it would still be impossible to give an
account of the subtlety and scope of Bergson's thought in the few
minutes at my disposal. The task is even more impossible for one
who possesses only a very limited sense of philosophy and has
never studied it.
At his starting point, the intuition of a living time, Bergson
borrows in his analysis, in the development of his concepts, and
in the sequence of his proofs, something of the dynamic, flowing,
and almost irresistible essence of this intuition. One has to
follow every movement; every moment introduces a new element. One
has to follow the current, trying to breathe as best one can.
There is scarcely time for reflection, for the moment one becomes
static oneself, one loses all contact with the chain of
reasoning.
In a singularly penetrating refutation of determinism our
philosopher demonstrates that a universal intellect, which he
calls Pierre, could not predict the life of another person, Paul,
except in so far as he can follow Paul's experiences, sensations,
and voluntary acts in all their manifestations, to the extent of
becoming identical with him as completely as two equal triangles
coincide. A reader who wants to understand Bergson completely
must to a certain extent identify himself with the author and
fulfil enormous requirements of power and flexibility of
mind.
This is by no means to say that there is no point in following
the author in his course, for good or ill. Imagination and
intuition are sometimes capable of flights where intelligence
lags behind. It is not always possible to decide whether the
imagination is seduced or whether the intuition recognizes itself
and lets itself be convinced. In any event, reading Bergson is
always highly rewarding.
In the account, so far definitive, of his doctrine,
L'Évolution créatrice, the master has created a
poem of striking grandeur, a cosmogony of great scope and
unflagging power, without sacrificing a strictly scientific
terminology. It may be difficult at times to profit from its
penetrating analysis or from the profundity of its thought; but
one always derives from it, without any difficulty, a strong
aesthetic impression.
The poem, if one looks at it in that way, presents a sort of
drama. The world has been created by two conflicting tendencies.
One of them represents matter which, in its own consciousness,
tends downwards; the second is life with its innate sentiment of
freedom and its perpetually creative force, which tends
increasingly toward the light of knowledge and limitless
horizons. These two elements are mingled, prisoners of each
other, and the product of this union is ramified on different
levels.
The first radical difference is found between the vegetable and
the animal world, between immobile and mobile organic activity.
With the help of the sun, the vegetable world stores up the
energy it extracts from inert matter; the animal is exempt from
this fundamental task because it can draw energy already stored
up in the vegetables from which it frees the explosive force
simultaneously and proportionately to its needs. At a higher
level in the chain, the animal world lives at the expense of the
animal world, being able, due to this concentration of energy, to
accentuate its development. The evolutionary paths thus become
more and more diverse and their choice is in no way blind:
instinct is born at the same time as the organs that it utilizes.
Intellect is also existent in an embryonic stage, but still mind
is inferior to instinct.
At the top of the chain of being, in man, intelligence becomes
predominant and instinct subsides, without however disappearing
entirely; it remains latent in the consciousness that unites all
life in the current of «living time»; it comes into
play in the intuitive vision. The beginnings of intelligence are
modest and manifestly timid. Intelligence is expressed only by
the tendency and the ability to replace organic instruments
instinctively by instruments sprung from inert matter, and to
make use of them by a free act. Instinct was more conscious of
its goal, but this goal was, on the other hand, greatly limited;
intelligence engaged itself, on the contrary, in greater risks,
but tended also toward infinitely vaster goals, toward goals
realized by the material and social culture of the human race.
Inevitably a risk existed, however: intelligence, created to act
in the spatial world, might distort the image of the world by the
modality thus acquired from its concept of life and might remain
deaf to its innermost dynamic essence and to the freedom that
presides over its eternal variation. Hence the mechanistic and
deterministic conception of an external world created by the
conquests of intelligence in the natural sciences.
We will find ourselves, then, irremediably cornered in an
impasse, without any consciousness of freedom of mind and cut off
from the sources of life we carry within us, unless we also
possess the gift of intuition when we trace ourselves back to our
origin. Perhaps one can apply to this intuition, the central
point of the Bergsonian doctrine, the brilliant expression that
he uses about intelligence and instinct: the perilous way toward
vaster possibilities. Within the limits of its knowledge,
intelligence possesses logical certainty, but intuition, dynamic
like everything that belongs to living time, must without doubt
content itself with the intensity of its certainty.
This is the drama: creative evolution is disclosed, and man finds
himself thrust on stage by the élan vital of
universal life which pushes him irresistibly to act, once he has
come to the knowledge of his own freedom, capable of divining and
glimpsing the endless route that has been travelled with the
perspective of a boundless field opening onto other paths. Which
of these paths is man going to follow?
In reality we are only at the beginning of the drama, and it can
scarcely be otherwise, especially if one considers Bergson's
concept that the future is born only at the moment in which it is
lived. However, something is lacking in this beginning itself.
The author tells us nothing of the will inherent in the free
personality, of the will that determines action and that has the
power to trace straight lines across the unforeseeable curves of
this personality. Furthermore, he tells us nothing about the
problem of life dominated by will power, about the existence or
non-existence of absolute values.
What is the essence of the irresistible élan vital,
that onslaught of life against the inertia of matter, which,
according to Bergson's audacious and magnificent expression, will
one day triumph perhaps over death itself? What will it make of
us when it places at our feet all earthly power?
However complicated they may be, one cannot escape these
questions. Is the philosopher perhaps at this very moment on his
way to the solution, certainly as tentative and audacious as his
previous work has been and richer still in possibilities?
There still remain some points to clarify. Does he perhaps seek
to put an end to the dualism of the image he gives of the world
in seeking out a kind of élan vital that applies to
matter? We know nothing in this regard, but Bergson has himself
presented his system as constituting, on many points, only an
outline that must be completed in its details by the
collaboration of other thinkers.
We are indebted to him, nevertheless, for one achievement of
importance: by a passage he has forced through the gates of
rationalism, he has released a creative impulse of inestimable
value, opening a large access to the waters of living time, to
that atmosphere in which the human mind will be able to
rediscover its freedom and thus be born anew.
If the outlines of his thought prove sound enough to serve as
guides to the human spirit, Bergson can be assured, in the
future, of an influence even greater than the influence he is
already enjoying. As stylist and as poet, he yields place to none
of his contemporaries; in their strictly objective search for
truth, all his aspirations are animated by a spirit of freedom
which, breaking the servitude that matter imposes, makes room for
idealism.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
* The Nobel Prize in Literature 1927 was announced on November 13, 1928.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1927
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