Henri Bergson

Abstract

Now, or from where we are, we can comfortably assert that there was a before and an after Bergson. Let us venture, indeed, that there was a before and an after Bergson as much as there was a before and an after Descartes. In Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, E. Matthews wrote that twentieth-century French philosophy is configured as a series of notes in the margins of Bergsonian production, and reading it, one is immediately reminded of the Whiteheadian catchphrase that the ‘surest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of notes to Plato’. Far beyond the fortunes of a lifetime - with reference to the fluctuating reception - Bergson the philosopher was already born, in swaddling clothes, as an incontournable classic.