Bergson’s Core Ideas

Bergson’s core ideas concern intuition, duree reelle, memory and perception, and the elan vital. In this volume I will mostly be using the terms he used, in French, for duree reelle and elan vital, because the English translations — commonly ‘duration’ or ‘real time’ for duree reelle, and either ‘vital impetus’ or ‘life drive’ (among others) for elan vital, are inadequate.1 For simplicity I shall attempt to deal with each of them in turn; but as the reader will grasp, they are very closely interrelated, interpenetrating, even built upon each other. The concept of the elan vital will become the most important, to the concerns of this book, as it unfolds, but to understand this concept fully the other concepts must be explored first.