LitRadar - July 21, 2026 - Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Memory

French philosopher Henri Bergson transformed memory studies with his 1896 book Matter and Memory. He rejected the idea that memories are simply stored in the brain, arguing instead that memory is a dynamic flow of consciousness, or duration (durée). Bergson distinguished between habit memory, which enables automatic skills like riding a bicycle or typing, and pure memory, which preserves our personal experiences and recollections. While habit memory serves practical action, pure memory connects us to our lived past. To explain memory, Bergson introduced the Memory Cone, where the base represents the vast store of past experiences and the apex represents the body acting in the present. The mind continually selects and reshapes memories according to present needs rather than merely retrieving them. Bergson’s ideas continue to influence memory studies, cognitive science, and literary theory. His philosophy inspired modernist writers such as Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, while contemporary researchers increasingly view remembering as an active process of reconstruction rather than simple recall. Even today, Bergson’s concept of memory remains central to discussions of identity, trauma, and digital memory.