JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ergson, henri louis
tor from 1969 to 1970. He remained involved in activities at
the center until 2002, frequently leading off the questionand-answer
period at lectures and symposia. His knowledge
of Soviet economic policies and practices qualified him as the
outstanding expert before congressional committees dealing
with the Soviet economy. As the world’s leading authority
on the subject, he was consulted and cited far more than any
other expert about the assessment and evaluation of Soviet
economic performance. After the Soviet Union collapsed in
1991 Soviet scholars, once forced to adjust their findings to
the “Party line,” were free to express their esteem for Bergson’s
work. “They would make pilgrimages to see him as if
they were coming to consult the oracle,” observed Marshall
Goldman, associate director of the Davis Center for Russian
and Eurasian Research.
In 1983 Bergson received the Distinguished Fellow award
of the American Economic Association.
Bergson was the editor of Economic Trends in the Soviet
Union (1963). He wrote extensively on his special field
of interest; his published works include The Structure of Soviet
Wages (1944), Soviet National Income and Product in 1937
(1953), Soviet Economic Growth, Conditions and Perspectives
(1953), Soviet National Income and Product 1940–48 (1954),
The Real National Income of Soviet Russia Since 1928 (1961),
The Economics of Soviet Planning (1964), Essays in Normative
Economics (1966), Planning and Productivity Under Soviet
Socialism (1968), Productivity and the Social System: The
U.S.S.R. and the West (1978), Welfare, Planning, and Employment
(1982), and The Soviet Economy: Towards the Year 2000
(co-editor with Herbert Levine, 1983).
[Joachim O. Ronall / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]
BERGSON, HENRI LOUIS (1859–1941), French philosopher.
His father, Michael *Bergson, came from a distinguished
Warsaw family; his mother from England. He was born in
Paris and from 1881 taught philosophy at the Angers Lycée
and subsequently at Clermont-Ferrand, where he gave his
famous lectures on laughter, and where, after long meditations
in the countryside, he first devised the idea of the vital,
continuous, and generative impulse of the universe. From the
age of 25, Bergson devoted himself to elaborating this theory
in various forms. In 1889 he returned to Paris, published his
Ph.D. thesis Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience
(Time and Free Will, 1910), and lectured at the Lycée Henri
IV and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. In 1900 he was appointed
professor of philosophy at the Collège de France. His
lectures were popular and were attended by the elite of Paris
society. These lectures, like his books, especially L’Evolution
créatrice (1907; Creative Evolution, 1911), were distinguished
by their lucid and brilliant style and established his fame in
France and throughout the world. In 1914 he became a member
of the French Academy and in 1928 was awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature. Bergson was also politically active, especially
in foreign affairs, and headed a French delegation to
the U.S. He was president of the League of Nations’ Commit-
tee for Intellectual Cooperation. In 1940, after the French surrender
to the Nazis, Bergson returned all his decorations and
awards, and, rejecting the French authorities’ offer to exclude
him from the edicts against the Jews, queued for many hours
to register as a Jew although he was weak and ill. In his latter
years he was attracted to Catholicism but remained a Jew in
order to maintain his identification with the persecuted. He
died a Jew in 1941.
Most of his works deal with the conception and explication
of the notions of “duration” and “movement,” not as static
concepts defined by the mind but as experiences, conceived by
the intuition when it is freed from the limitations which the
intellectual consciousness imposes upon the conceiver and the
conceived. According to Bergson, the dynamic element of the
duration, the flowing time, is the sole penetrator of real existence.
“Time” abolishes the static world of the conscious mind
and the concept of “duration” may be defined as the continual
change which takes place in time. This change is not transcendentally
motivated but results from an inner energy – the vital
impulse (élan vital) which derives from an unlimited source.
The actual duration of the vital impulse is the basic element
of the universe, while matter and awareness are only momentary
manifestations or creations of the central stream. The consciousness
can grasp the essence of reality, both in its primary
purity as a duration and in its consolidation and objectification
as matter in space. In the same manner consciousness
can also reach self-knowledge in two different ways: through
intellectual static self-consciousness, and through an intimate
awareness of its essence as a conscious duration, a vital and
fluctuating spirit, regenerating and developing continuously.
From this it follows that the factor fashioning consciousness
is memory. Memory comprises the duration for it accumulates
all past achievements and within it “the past grows into
the present.” Through the intuition, which is the essence of the
memory, man grasps his personal essence as a vital and conscious
duration, and, similarly, grasps the creative duration,
which is absolute reality.
Bergson’s view also appears in his theories on the functions
of instinct, intellect, and intuition. Life evolution advances
in three directions: vegetative, instinctive, and rational.
The instinct is the capability of utilizing organic instruments,
but this function is merely a blind practical knowledge. The
intellect has the ability of execution and of utilizing inorganic
instruments, and it introduces, therefore, the knowledge of the
qualities of objects, accompanied by self-knowledge. When
the intellect has time enough to develop its knowledge, it
judges all objects as if they were inorganic instruments, thus
viewing the living reality itself in a mechanical, devitalized
mirror. This perverted conception can be corrected by intuition,
which is a developed instinct with self-awareness. Bergson
conceived the intuition as the only means by which it is
possible to inject a primary flexibility into fossilized scientific
methods and draw them closer to reality.
Bergson recognized that the potential capability for immediately
grasping reality is actualized only in a few select
432 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3