Author: Henri Bergson

Bergson argued that time as it is lived cannot be the divisible quantity physics measures, and gave it a name, durée. Creative Evolution added the élan vital, a drive running through evolution for which mechanism alone could not account. Before the First World War he was a public event: his lectures at the Collège de France filled to the point of blocking the street, and he took the Nobel in literature in 1927. His 1922 confrontation with Einstein over what relativity meant for time went badly for him among physicists, and is part of why philosophy lost that argument for good. He was Jewish, and in 1940 the Vichy government offered him exemption from its racial laws. He refused, queued to register with everybody else, and died a few weeks afterwards in January 1941.