The Creative Mind

The Creative Mind is the standard English title for a collection of essays by Henri Bergson, originally published in French as La Pensée et le Mouvant in 1934. Bergson, who lived from 1859 to 1941, was the most internationally famous French philosopher of the early twentieth century and the central figure in the broader European philosophical movement that developed around his work in the years before the First World War.

Bergson’s major philosophical works included Time and Free Will of 1889, Matter and Memory of 1896, Creative Evolution of 1907, and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion of 1932. The Creative Mind collects various essays and lectures that he had produced across his career and provides his own retrospective philosophical position toward the end of his working life. The book was one of the last substantial publications Bergson produced before his death during the German occupation of France in 1941.

Bergson’s central philosophical contribution was his analysis of time as duration rather than as the spatial quantitative time that classical physics and the broader Western philosophical tradition had assumed. He argued that the actual lived experience of time is fundamentally different from the mathematical time of physics and that the failure to recognise this difference had produced systematic distortions in Western philosophical thinking about consciousness, freedom, evolution, and various other major philosophical subjects. The detailed working out of this central insight across his major books constituted one of the most original European philosophical projects of the early twentieth century.

The Creative Mind brings together various of Bergson’s reflections on the methodological and philosophical questions that his work had raised. The essays include treatments of philosophical intuition as the proper method for philosophy, of the relationship between philosophy and science, of the differences between his own approach and the various other major philosophical traditions, and of the various particular subjects on which his thinking had developed across his career.

Bergson won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, partly in recognition of the substantial literary quality of his philosophical prose. The Creative Mind shows this literary quality at its most accessible. For readers approaching Bergson, the book is a useful entry point that does not require the substantial prior commitment that the major books demand. It pairs naturally with the major works and with the substantial twentieth century critical literature on Bergson by Deleuze and others.