Bergson's Philosophical Itinerary

Bergson did what philosophers are not supposed to do. He questioned the primacy of human reason. He did not do this through a general sceptical programme, but by a gradual itinerary through a variety of issues. And as he trod this path, he tried to show, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, how it was that some philosophical problems were illusory and were generated by adopting the wrong view of the nature and role of reason.

Such an approach has cousins, for instance in the writings of Pascal, or of William James. But here, we shall sketch the path which Bergson himself took.

Personal itineraries form a background to the intellectual itinerary. Bergson's father, Michel, came from Poland but lived and worked as a musician, composer and teacher of music, in Saxony, Italy, France, Switzerland and England. His mother, Catherine Levison, from Doncaster in England, was of Irish origin. Bergson himself was born in France in 1859 and was later naturalised as a French subject. He was taken to Switzerland at the age of four. When he was seven, his parents went back to Paris. At the age of nine, he obtained a scholarship to the Lycée Condorcet (then the Lycée Impérial Bonaparte) where he remained for ten years.

His twelfth year is to be remarked. It was the year in which his parents moved to London, leaving their son to board in the Springer Institution in Paris.