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Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson (18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopher,    who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.

Bergson was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". In 1930, France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur. Bergson's great popularity created a controversy in France, where his views were seen as opposing the secular and scientific attitude adopted by the Republic's officials.

Overview
Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works:

 * 1) in 1889, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience)
 * 2) in 1896, Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire)
 * 3) in 1907, Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice)
 * 4) in 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion)

In 1900, the Collège de France selected Bergson to a Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy, which he held until 1904. He then replaced Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy, which he held until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers.

Early years
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859. His father, the composer and pianist Michał Bergson, was of Polish-Jewish background (originally bearing the name Bereksohn). His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry, especially those associated with the Hasidic movement. His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English-Jewish and Irish-Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław II Augustus, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.

Henri Bergson's family lived in London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the English language from his mother. Before he was nine, his parents settled in France, and Henri became a naturalized French citizen.

Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891. (The novelist served as best man at Bergson's wedding.) Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896. Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers), married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the couple later relocated to Paris as well.

Education and career
Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes (known as the Lycée Condorcet 1870–1874 and 1883–present) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education. Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude (1990), this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares a common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity.

While at the lycée, Bergson won a prize for his scientific work and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen, for the solution of a mathematical problem. His solution was published the following year in Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques. It was his first published work. After some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, to the dismay of his teachers. When he was nineteen, he entered the École Normale Supérieure. During this period, he read Herbert Spencer. He obtained there the degree of licence ès lettres, and this was followed by that of agrégation de philosophie in 1881 from the University of Paris.

The same year he received a teaching appointment at the lycée in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou. Two years later he settled at the in Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the Puy-de-Dôme département.

The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand, Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of De Rerum Natura, issued as Extraits de Lucrèce, and of the materialist cosmology of the poet (1884), repeated editions of which attest to its value in promoting Classics among French youth. While teaching and lecturing in this part of his country (the Auvergne region), Bergson found time for private study and original work. He crafted his dissertation Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle (Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit, "On the Concept of Place in Aristotle") for his doctoral degree, which was awarded by the University of Paris in 1889. The work was published in the same year by Félix Alcan. He also gave courses in Clermont-Ferrand on the Pre-Socratics, in particular on Heraclitus.

Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier (1832–1918), then public education minister, a disciple of Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) and the author of a philosophical work On the Founding of Induction (Du fondement de l'induction, 1871). Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism". (Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the École Normale Supérieure. Compare his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in 1900.) According to Louis de Broglie, Time and Free Will "antedates by forty years the ideas of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg on the physical interpretation of wave mechanics."

Bergson settled again in Paris in 1888, and after teaching for some months at the municipal college, known as the College Rollin, he received an appointment at the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. There, he read Darwin, and gave a course on his theories. Although Bergson had previously endorsed Lamarckism and its theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics, he came to prefer Darwin's hypothesis of gradual variations, which were more compatible with his continual vision of life.

In 1896, he published his second major work, entitled Matter and Memory. This rather difficult work investigates the function of the brain and undertakes an analysis of perception and memory, leading up to a careful consideration of the problems of the relationship of body and mind. Bergson had spent years of research in preparation for each of his three large works. This is especially obvious in Matter and Memory, where he showed a thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological investigations which had been carried out during the period.

In 1898, Bergson became maître de conférences at his alma mater, École Normale Supérieure, and later in the same year received a promotion to a Professorship. The year 1900 saw him installed as Professor at the Collège de France, where he accepted the Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy in succession to.

At the first International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August 1900, Bergson read a short, but important, paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality" (Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance à la loi de causalité). In 1900, Felix Alcan published a work which had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris, entitled Laughter (Le rire), one of the most important of Bergson's minor productions. This essay on the meaning of comedy stemmed from a lecture which he had given in his early days in Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. The main thesis of the work is that laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings. People laugh at those who fail to adapt to the demands of society if it seems their failure is akin to an inflexible mechanism. Comic authors have exploited this human tendency to laugh in various ways, and what is common to them is the idea that the comic consists in there being "something mechanical encrusted on the living".

In 1901, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques elected Bergson as a member, and he became a member of the institute. In 1903 he contributed to the Revue de métaphysique et de morale a very important essay entitled Introduction to Metaphysics (Introduction à la metaphysique), which is useful as a preface to the study of his three large books. He detailed in this essay his philosophical program, realized in the Creative Evolution.

On the death of Gabriel Tarde, the sociologist and philosopher, in 1904, Bergson succeeded him in the Chair of Modern Philosophy. From 4 to 8 September of that year, he visited Geneva, attending the Second International Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured on The Mind and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion (Le cerveau et la pensée : une illusion philosophique). An illness prevented his visiting Germany to attend the Third Congress held at Heidelberg. In these years, Bergson strongly influenced a young Jacques Maritain, perhaps even saving Maritain and his wife Raïssa from suicide.

His third major work, Creative Evolution, the most widely known and most discussed of his books, appeared in 1907. Pierre Imbart de la Tour remarked that Creative Evolution was a milestone of a new direction in thought. By 1918, Alcan, the publisher, had issued twenty-one editions, making an average of two editions per annum for ten years. Following the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity increased enormously, not only in academic circles but among the general reading public.

At that time, Bergson had already made an extensive study of biology including the theory of fecundation (as shown in the first chapter of the Creative Evolution), which had only recently emerged, ca. 1885 – no small feat for a philosopher specializing in the history of philosophy, in particular Greek and Roman philosophy. He also most certainly had read, apart from Darwin, Haeckel, from whom he retained his idea of a unity of life and of the ecological solidarity between all living beings, as well as Hugo de Vries, from whom he quoted his mutation theory of evolution (which he opposed, preferring Darwin's gradualism). He also quoted Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the successor of Claude Bernard at the Chair of Experimental Medicine in the Collège de France, etc.

Bergson served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919 and 1954 to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.

Relationship with James and pragmatism
Bergson travelled to London in 1908 and met there with William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. The two became great friends. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under the date of 4 October 1908:

"So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy."

As early as 1880, James had contributed an article in French to the periodical La Critique philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, entitled Le Sentiment de l'Effort. Four years later, a couple of articles by him appeared in the journal Mind: "What is an Emotion?" and "On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology". Bergson quoted the first two of these articles in his 1889 work, Time and Free Will. In the following years, 1890–91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon observed by Bergson. Some writers, taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking the fact that James's investigations had been proceeding since 1870 (registered from time to time by various articles which culminated in "The Principles"), have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.

William James hailed Bergson as an ally. In 1903, he wrote: I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read for years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure that his philosophy has a great future; it breaks through old frameworks and brings things to a solution from which new crystallizations can be reached.

The most noteworthy tributes James paid to Bergson come in the Hibbert Lectures (A Pluralistic Universe), which James gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London. He remarks on the encouragement he gained from Bergson's thought, and refers to his confidence in being "able to lean on Bergson's authority". (See further James's reservations about Bergson, below.)

The influence of Bergson had led James "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be". It had induced him, he continued, "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it".

These remarks, which appeared in James's book A Pluralistic Universe in 1909, impelled many English and American readers to investigate Bergson's philosophy for themselves, but no English translations of Bergson's major work had yet appeared. James, however, encouraged and assisted Arthur Mitchell in preparing an English translation of Creative Evolution. In August 1910, James died. It was his intention, had he lived to see the translation finished, to introduce it to the English reading public by a prefatory note of appreciation. In the following year, the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work was the result. By coincidence, in that same year (1911), Bergson penned a preface of sixteen pages entitled Truth and Reality for the French translation of James's book, Pragmatism. In it, he expressed sympathetic appreciation of James's work, together with certain important reservations.

From 5 to 11 April, Bergson attended the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at Bologna, in Italy, where he gave an address on "Philosophical Intuition". In response to invitations he visited England in May of that year, and on several subsequent occasions. These visits were well received. His speeches offered new perspectives and elucidated many passages in his three major works: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. Although necessarily brief statements, they developed and enriched the ideas in his books and clarified for English audiences the fundamental principles of his philosophy.

Lectures on change
In May 1911, Bergson gave two lectures entitled The Perception of Change (La perception du changement) at the University of Oxford. The Clarendon Press published these in French in the same year. His talks were concise and lucid, leading students and the general reader to his other, longer writings. Oxford later conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Science.

Two days later he delivered the Huxley Lecture at the University of Birmingham, taking for his subject Life and Consciousness. This subsequently appeared in The Hibbert Journal (October 1911), and since revised, is the first essay in the collected volume Mind-Energy (L'Énergie spirituelle). In October he again travelled to England, where he had an enthusiastic reception, and delivered at University College London four lectures on La Nature de l'Âme [The Nature of the Soul].

In 1913, Bergson visited the United States of America at the invitation of Columbia University, New York, and lectured in several American cities, where very large audiences welcomed him. In February, at Columbia University, he lectured both in French and English, taking as his subjects: Spirituality and Freedom and The Method of Philosophy. Being again in England in May of the same year, he accepted the Presidency of the British Society for Psychical Research, and delivered to the Society an address on Phantoms of Life and Psychic Research (Fantômes des vivants et recherche psychique).

Meanwhile, his popularity increased, and translations of his works began to appear in a number of languages: English, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian. In 1914 Bergson's fellow countrymen honoured him by his election as a member of the Académie française. He was also made President of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, and in addition, he became Officier de la Légion d'honneur, and Officier de l'Instruction publique.

Bergson found disciples of many types. In France movements such as neo-Catholicism and Modernism on the one hand and syndicalism on the other endeavoured to absorb and appropriate for their own ends some central ideas of his teaching. The continental organ of socialist and syndicalist theory, Le Mouvement socialiste, portrayed the realism of Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as hostile to all forms of intellectualism, and argued, therefore, that supporters of Marxist socialism should welcome a philosophy such as that of Bergson. Other writers, in their eagerness, claimed that the thought of the holder of the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, and the aims of the Confédération Générale du Travail and the Industrial Workers of the World were in essential agreement.

While social revolutionaries endeavoured to make the most out of Bergson, many religious leaders, particularly the more liberal-minded theologians of all creeds, e.g., the Modernists and Neo-Catholic Party in his own country, showed a keen interest in his writings, and many of them found encouragement and stimulus in his work. The Roman Catholic Church, however, banned Bergson's three books on the charge of pantheism (that is, of conceiving of God as immanent to his Creation and of being himself created in the process of the Creation). They were placed on the Index of prohibited books (Decree of 1 June 1914).

Later years
In 1914, the Scottish universities arranged for Bergson to give the famous Gifford Lectures, planning one course for the spring and another for the autumn. Bergson delivered the first course, consisting of eleven lectures, under the title of The Problem of Personality, at the University of Edinburgh in the spring of that year. The course of lectures planned for the autumn months had to be abandoned because of the outbreak of war.

Bergson was not, however, silent during the conflict, and he gave some inspiring addresses. As early as 4 November 1914, he wrote an article entitled Wearing and Nonwearing Forces (La force qui s'use et celle qui ne s'use pas), which appeared in a periodical of the poilus, Le Bulletin des Armées de la République Française. A presidential address, The Meaning of the War, was delivered in December 1914, to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.

Bergson contributed also to the publication arranged by The Daily Telegraph in honour of King Albert I of the Belgians, King Albert's Book (Christmas, 1914). In 1915, he was succeeded in the office of President of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques by Alexandre Ribot, and then delivered a discourse on "The Evolution of German Imperialism". Meanwhile, he found time to issue at the request of the Minister of Public Instruction a brief summary of French Philosophy. Bergson did a large amount of traveling and lecturing in America during the war. He participated in the negotiations which led to the entry of the United States in the war. He was there when the French Mission under René Viviani paid a visit in April and May 1917, following upon America's entry into the conflict. Viviani's book La Mission française en Amérique (1917), contains a preface by Bergson.

Early in 1918, the Académie française received Bergson officially when he took his seat among "The Select Forty" as successor to Emile Ollivier (the author of the historical work L'Empire libéral). A session was held in January in his honour at which he delivered an address on Ollivier. In the war, Bergson saw the conflict of Mind and Matter, or rather of Life and Mechanism; and thus he shows the central idea of his own philosophy in action. To no other philosopher has it fallen, during his lifetime, to have his philosophical principles so vividly and so terribly tested.

As many of Bergson's contributions to French periodicals remained relatively inaccessible, he had them published in two volumes. The first of these was being planned when war broke out. The conclusion of strife was marked by the appearance of a delayed volume in 1919. It bears the title Spiritual Energy: Essays and Lectures (reprinted as Mind-Energy – L'Énergie spirituelle : essais et conférences). The advocate of Bergson's philosophy in England, Wildon Carr, prepared an English translation under the title Mind-Energy. The volume opens with the Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1911, "Life and Consciousness", in a revised and developed form under the title "Consciousness and Life". Signs of Bergson's growing interest in social ethics and in the idea of a future life of personal survival are manifested. The lecture before the Society for Psychical Research is included, as is also the one given in France, L'Âme et le Corps, which contains the substance of the four London lectures on the Soul. The seventh and last article is a reprint of Bergson's famous lecture to the Congress of Philosophy at Geneva in 1904, The Psycho-Physiological Paralogism (Le paralogisme psycho-physiologique), which now appears as Le cerveau et la pensée : une illusion philosophique. Other articles are on the False Recognition, on Dreams, and Intellectual Effort. The volume is a most welcome production and serves to bring together what Bergson wrote on the concept of mental force, and on his view of "tension" and "detension" as applied to the relation of matter and mind.

In June 1920, the University of Cambridge honoured him with the degree of Doctor of Letters. In order that he might devote his full-time to the great new work he was preparing on ethics, religion, and sociology, the Collège de France relieved Bergson of the duties attached to the Chair of Modern Philosophy there. He retained the chair, but no longer delivered lectures, his place being taken by his disciple, the mathematician and philosopher Édouard Le Roy, who supported a conventionalist stance on the foundations of mathematics, which was adopted by Bergson. Le Roy, who also succeeded to Bergson at the Académie française and was a fervent Catholic, extended to revealed truth his conventionalism, leading him to privilege faith, heart and sentiment to dogmas, speculative theology and abstract reasoning. Like Bergson's, his writings were placed on the Index by the Vatican.

Debate with Albert Einstein
In 1922, Bergson's book Durée et simultanéité, à propos de la théorie d'Einstein (Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe) was published. Earlier that year, Albert Einstein had come to the French Society of Philosophy and briefly replied to a short speech made by Bergson. It has been alleged that Bergson's knowledge of physics was insufficient and that the book did not follow up contemporary developments on physics. On the contrary, in "Einstein and the Crisis of Reason", a leading French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, accused Einstein of failing to grasp Bergson's argument. This argument, Merleau-Ponty says, which concerns not the physics of special relativity but its philosophical foundations, addresses paradoxes caused by popular interpretations and misconceptions about the theory, including Einstein's own. Duration and Simultaneity was not published in the 1951 Edition du Centenaire in French, which contained all of his other works, and was only published later in a work gathering different essays, titled Mélanges. This work took advantage of Bergson's experience at the League of Nations, where he presided from 1920 to 1925 over the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (the ancestor of UNESCO, and which included Einstein, Marie Curie, etc.).

Later years and death
While living with his wife and daughter in a modest house in a quiet street near the Porte d'Auteuil in Paris, Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 for having written The Creative Evolution. Because of serious rheumatics ailments, he could not travel to Stockholm, and sent instead a text subsequently published in La Pensée et le mouvant. He was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1928.

After his retirement from the Collège de France, Bergson began to fade into obscurity: he suffered from a degenerative illness (rheumatism, which left him half paralyzed ). He completed his new work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, which extended his philosophical theories to the realms of morality, religion, and art, in 1932. It was respectfully received by the public and the philosophical community, but all by that time realized that Bergson's days as a philosophical luminary were past. He was, however, able to reiterate his core beliefs near the end of his life, by renouncing all of the posts and honours previously awarded him, rather than accept exemption from the antisemitic laws imposed by the Vichy government.

Bergson inclined to convert to Catholicism, writing in his will on 7 February 1937: "My thinking has always brought me nearer to Catholicism, in which I saw the perfect complement to Judaism." Though wishing to convert to Catholicism, as stated in his will, he did not convert in view of the travails inflicted on the Jewish people by the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s; he did not want to appear to want to leave the persecuted. After the fall of France in 1940, Jews in occupied France were required to register at police stations. When completing his police form, Bergson made the following entry: "Academic. Philosopher. Nobel Prize winner. Jew." It was the position of the Archbishop of Paris, Emmanuel Célestin Suhard, that the public revelation of Bergson's conversion was too dangerous at the time, when the city was occupied by the Nazis, to both the Church and the Jewish population.

On 3 January 1941, Bergson died in occupied Paris from bronchitis. A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request. Bergson is buried in the Cimetière de Garches, Hauts-de-Seine.

Philosophy
Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly mechanistic predominant view of causality (as expressed in reductionism). He argued that free will must be allowed to unfold in an autonomous and unpredictable fashion. While Kant saw free will as something beyond time and space and therefore ultimately a matter of faith, Bergson attempted to redefine the modern conceptions of time, space, and causality in his concept of Duration, making room for a tangible marriage of free will with causality. Seeing Duration as a mobile and fluid concept, Bergson argued that one cannot understand Duration through "immobile" analysis, but only through experiential, first-person intuition.

Creativity
Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasizes pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.

Criticizing Kant's theory of knowledge exposed in the Critique of Pure Reason and his conception of truth – which he compares to Plato's conception of truth as its symmetrical inversion (order of nature/order of thought) – Bergson attempted to redefine the relations between science and metaphysics, intelligence and intuition, and insisted on the necessity of increasing thought's possibility through the use of intuition, which, according to him, alone approached a knowledge of the absolute and of real life, understood as pure duration. Because of his (relative) criticism of intelligence, he makes frequent use of images and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use of concepts, which (he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things. For instance, he says in The Creative Evolution (chap. III) that thought in itself would never have thought it possible for the human being to swim, as it cannot deduce swimming from walking. For swimming to be possible, man must throw himself in water, and only then can thought to consider swimming as possible. Intelligence, for Bergson, is a practical faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty, a product of evolution used by man to survive. If metaphysics is to avoid "false problems", it should not extend the abstract concepts of intelligence to pure speculation, but rather use intuition.

The Creative Evolution in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in philosophy and to construct a cosmology based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "survival of the fittest"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.

Bergson's Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) can be seen as a response to the mechanistic philosophies of his time, but also to the failure of finalism. Indeed, he considers that finalism is unable to explain "duration" and the "continuous creation of life", as it only explains life as the progressive development of an initially determined program – a notion which remains, for example, in the expression of a "genetic program"; such a description of finalism was adopted, for instance, by Leibniz.

Bergson regarded planning beforehand for the future as impossible since time itself unravels unforeseen possibilities. Indeed, one could always explain a historical event retrospectively by its conditions of possibility. But, in the introduction to the Pensée et le mouvant, he explains that such an event created retrospectively its causes, taking the example of the creation of a work of art, for example, a symphony: it was impossible to predict what would be the symphony of the future as if the musician knew what symphony would be the best for his time, he would realize it. In his words, the effect created its cause. Henceforth, he attempted to find a third way between mechanism and finalism, through the notion of an original impulse, the élan vital, in life, which dispersed itself through evolution into contradictory tendencies (he substituted to the finalist notion of a teleological aim a notion of an original impulse).

Duration
The foundation of Henri Bergson's philosophy, his theory of Duration, he discovered when trying to improve what he saw as the inadequacies of Herbert Spencer's philosophy. Bergson introduced Duration as a theory of time and consciousness in his doctoral thesis Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness as a response to another of his influences: Immanuel Kant.

Kant believed that free will could only exist outside of time and space, indeed the only non-determined aspect of private existence in the universe, separate from water cycles, mathematics and mortality. However, it could therefore not be ascertained whether or not it exists, and that it is nothing but a pragmatic faith. Bergson responded that Kant, along with many other philosophers, had confused time with its spatial representation. In reality, Bergson argued, Duration is unextended yet heterogeneous, and so its parts cannot be juxtaposed as a succession of distinct parts, with one causing the other. Based on this he concluded that determinism is an impossibility and free will pure mobility, which is what Bergson identified as being the Duration. For Bergson, reality is composed of change.

Intuitionism
Duration, as defined by Bergson, then is a unity and a multiplicity, but, being mobile, it cannot be grasped through immobile concepts. Bergson hence argues that one can grasp it only through his method of intuition. Two images from Henri Bergson's An Introduction to Metaphysics may help one to grasp Bergson's term intuition, the limits of concepts, and the ability of intuition to grasp the absolute. The first image is that of a city. Analysis, or the creation of concepts through the divisions of points of view, can only ever offer a model of the city through a construction of photographs taken from every possible point of view, yet it can never produce the dimensional value of walking in the city itself. One can only grasp this through intuition; likewise the experience of reading a line of Homer. One may translate the line and pile commentary upon commentary, but this commentary too shall never grasp the simple dimensional value of experiencing the poem in its originality itself. The method of intuition, then, is that of getting back to the things themselves.

Élan vital
Élan vital ranks as Bergson's third essential concept, after Duration and intuition. An idea with the goal of explaining evolution, the élan vital first appeared in 1907's Creative Evolution. Bergson portrays élan vital as a kind of vital impetus which explains evolution in a less mechanical and more lively manner, as well as accounting for the creative impulse of mankind. This concept led several authors to characterize Bergson as a supporter of vitalism—although he criticized it explicitly in The Creative Evolution, as he thought, against Driesch and Johannes Reinke (whom he cited) that there is neither "purely internal finality nor clearly cut individuality in nature":

"Hereby lies the stumbling block of vitalist theories ... It is thus in vain that one pretends to reduce finality to the individuality of the living being. If there is finality in the world of life, it encompasses the whole of life in one indivisible embrace."

Laughter
In Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Bergson develops a theory not of laughter itself but of how laughter can be provoked (see his objection to Delage, published in the 23rd edition of the essay). He describes the process of laughter (refusing to give a conceptual definition which would not approach its reality ), used in particular by comics and clowns, as caricature of the mechanistic nature of humans (habits, automatic acts, etc.), one of the two tendencies of life (degradation towards inert matter and mechanism, and continual creation of new forms). However, Bergson warns that laughter's criterion of what should be laughed at is not a moral criterion and that it can in fact cause serious damage to a person's self-esteem. This essay made his opposition to the Cartesian theory of the animal-machine obvious.

Reception
From his first publications, Bergson's philosophy attracted strong criticism from different quarters, although he also became very popular and durably influenced French philosophy. The mathematician Édouard Le Roy became Bergson's main disciple. Nonetheless, Suzanne Guerlac has argued that his institutional position at the Collège de France, delivering lectures to a general audience, may have retarded the systematic reception of his thought: "Bergson achieved enormous popular success in this context, often due to the emotional appeal of his ideas. But he did not have the equivalent of graduate students who might have become rigorous interpreters of his thought.  Thus Bergson's philosophy—in principle open and nonsystematic—was easily borrowed piecemeal and altered by enthusiastic admirers".

Alfred North Whitehead acknowledged Bergson's influence on his process philosophy in his 1929 Process and Reality. However, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead's collaborator on Principia Mathematica, was not so entranced by Bergson's philosophy. Although acknowledging Bergson's literary skills, Russell saw Bergson's arguments at best as persuasive or emotive speculation but not at all as any worthwhile example of sound reasoning or philosophical insight. The epistemologist Gaston Bachelard explicitly alluded to him in the last pages of his 1938 book The Formation of the Scientific Mind. Others influenced by Bergson include Vladimir Jankélévitch, who wrote a book on him in 1931, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Gilles Deleuze who wrote Le bergsonisme in 1966. The Greek philosopher Helle Lambridis developed an interest in Bergson early in her career, and after two publications in 1929 - a book that introduced Bergson's work to the Greek audience and a translation into Greek of Bergson's book L'Énergie spirituelle (1919) - the second part of her Introduction to Philosophy I & II (1965) included his philosophical work on the concept of 'time', although this part (II) was not published until 2004. Bergson also influenced the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, although Merleau-Ponty had reservations about Bergson's philosophy. The Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis studied under Bergson in Paris and his writing and philosophy were profoundly influenced as a result.

Many writers of the early 20th century criticized Bergson's intuitionism, indeterminism, psychologism and interpretation of the scientific impulse. Those who explicitly criticized Bergson, either in published articles or in letters, included Bertrand Russell George Santayana, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Julien Benda, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Wallace Stevens (though Stevens also praised him in his work "The Necessary Angel"), Paul Valéry, André Gide, Jean Piaget, Marxist philosophers Theodor W. Adorno, Lucio Colletti, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Georges Politzer, as well as Maurice Blanchot, American philosophers such as Irving Babbitt, Arthur Lovejoy, Josiah Royce, The New Realists (Ralph B. Perry, E. B. Holt, and William Pepperell Montague), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake, Roy W. Sellars, C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Roger Fry (see his letters), Julian Huxley (in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis) and Virginia Woolf (for the latter, see Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table).

The Vatican accused Bergson of pantheism, while others have characterized his philosophy as a materialist emergentism – Samuel Alexander and C. Lloyd Morgan explicitly claimed Bergson as their forebear. According to Henri Hude (1990, II, p. 142), who supports himself on the whole of Bergson's works as well as his now published courses, accusing him of pantheism is a "counter-sense". Hude alleges that a mystical experience, roughly outlined at the end of Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, is the inner principle of his whole philosophy, although this has been contested by other commentators.

Charles Sanders Peirce took strong exception to those who associated him with Bergson. In response to a letter comparing their work, Peirce wrote, "a man who seeks to further science can hardly commit a greater sin than to use the terms of his science without anxious care to use them with strict accuracy; it is not very gratifying to my feelings to be classed along with a Bergson who seems to be doing his utmost to muddle all distinctions." Peirce also comments on Bergson in respect to a proposed book on his semiotics (which he never wrote) saying: "I feel confident the book would make a serious impression much deeper and surer than Bergson's, which I find quite too vague." Gilles Deleuze, however, saw much in common between Bergson's philosophy and that of Peirce - exploring the many connections between them in Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. As the Deleuze scholar David Deamer writes: Deleuze sets about "aligning Bergson's sensory-motor schema [from Matter and Memory] with the semiosis of Charles Sanders Peirce from Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903). William James's students resisted the assimilation of his work to that of Bergson. See, for example, Horace Kallen's book on the subject James and Bergson. As Jean Wahl described the "ultimate disagreement" between James and Bergson in his System of Metaphysics: "for James, the consideration of action is necessary for the definition of truth, according to Bergson, action ... must be kept from our mind if we want to see the truth". Gide even went so far as to say that future historians will overestimate Bergson's influence on art and philosophy just because he was the self-appointed spokesman for "the spirit of the age".

As early as the 1890s, Santayana attacked certain key concepts in Bergson's philosophy, above all his view of the new and the indeterminate:

"'the possibility of a new and unaccountable fact appearing at any time,' he writes in his book on Hermann Lotze, 'does not practically affect the method of investigation; ... the only thing given up is the hope that these hypotheses may ever be adequate to the reality and cover the process of nature without leaving a remainder. This is no great renunciation; for that consummation of science ... is by no one really expected.'"

According to Santayana and Russell, Bergson projected false claims onto the aspirations of scientific method, claims which Bergson needed to make in order to justify his prior moral commitment to freedom. Russell takes particular exception to Bergson's understanding of number in chapter two of Time and Free Will. According to Russell, Bergson uses an outmoded spatial metaphor ("extended images") to describe the nature of mathematics as well as logic in general. "Bergson only succeeds in making his theory of number plausible by confusing a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general", writes Russell (see The Philosophy of Bergson and A History of Western Philosophy  ).

Suzanne Guerlac has argued that the more recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Bergson is related to the growing influence of his follower Deleuze within continental philosophy: "If there is a return to Bergson today, then, it is largely due to Gilles Deleuze whose own work has etched the contours of the New Bergson. This is not only because Deleuze wrote about Bergson; it is also because Deleuze's own thought is deeply engaged with that of his predecessor, even when Bergson is not explicitly mentioned." Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard agree with Guerlac that "the recent revitalization of Bergsonism ... is almost entirely due to Deleuze." They explain that Bergson's concept of multiplicity "is at the very heart of Deleuze's thought, and duration is the model for all of Deleuze's 'becomings.' The other aspect that attracted Deleuze, which is indeed connected to the first, is Bergson's criticism of the concept of negation in Creative Evolution ... Thus Bergson became a resource in the criticism of the Hegelian dialectic, the negative." It is this aspect that Mark Sinclair focuses upon in Bergson (2020). He writes that despite the philosopher and his philosophy being very popular during the early years of the twentieth century, his ideas had been critiqued and then rejected first by phenomenology, then by existentialism, and finally by post-structuralism. As Sinclair goes on to explain, over series of publications including Bergsonism (1966) and Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze championed Bergson as a thinker of "difference that precedes any sense of negation". In this way, "Deleuze's interpretation served to keep the flame of Bergson's philosophy alive and it has been a key motivation for the renewed scholarly attention to it."

Ilya Prigogine acknowledged Bergson's influence at his Nobel Prize reception lecture: "Since my adolescence, I have read many philosophical texts, and I still remember the spell L'Évolution créatrice cast on me. More specifically, I felt that some essential message was embedded, still to be made explicit, in Bergson's remark: 'The more deeply we study the nature of time, the better we understand that duration means invention, creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new.'"

Japanese philosopher Yasushi Hirai from Fukuoka University has led a collaborative and interdisciplinary project since 2007, bringing together Eastern and Western philosophers and scientists to discuss and promote Bergson's work. This has influenced the development of specific artificial neural networks which incorporate features inspired by Bergson's philosophy of memory.

In The Matter with Things, Iain McGilchrist extensively cites Bergson. "'Bergson arrived', according to philosopher Peter Gunter, 'at insights closely resembling those of quantum physics.' Only Bergson got there first."

Comparison to Indian philosophies
Several Hindu authors have found parallels to Hindu philosophy in Bergson's thought. The integrative evolutionism of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher from the early 20th century, has many similarities to Bergson's philosophy. Whether this represents a direct influence of Bergson is disputed, although Aurobindo was familiar with many Western philosophers. K Narayanaswami Aiyer, a member of the Theosophical Society, published a pamphlet titled "Professor Bergson and the Hindu Vedanta", where he argued that Bergson's ideas on matter, consciousness, and evolution were in agreement with Vedantic and Puranic explanations. Nalini Kanta Brahma, Marie Tudor Garland and Hope Fitz are other authors who have comparatively evaluated Hindu and Bergsonian philosophies, especially in relation to intuition, consciousness and evolution.

Works online

 * Works by Henri Bergson in French at "La Philosophie"
 * Complete works in French on the "Classiques des sciences sociales" website
 * L'Évolution créatrice (in the original French, 1907)
 * of Creative Evolution (HTML)
 * Multiple formats at Internet Archive
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 * Multiple formats at Internet Archive
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 * Multiple formats at Internet Archive
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 * Multiple formats at Internet Archive
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 * Multiple formats at Internet Archive

title: Henri Bergson


text:
Hans Selye

János Hugo Bruno "Hans" Selye (Selye János ; January 26, 1907 – October 16, 1982) was a pioneering Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist who conducted important scientific work on the hypothetical non-specific response of an organism to stressors. Although he did not recognize all of the many aspects of glucocorticoids, Selye was aware of their role in the stress response.

Biography
Selye was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on January 26, 1907, and grew up in Komárom (the town with Hungarian majority in present day Slovakia was cut by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920). Selye's father was a doctor of Hungarian ethnicity and his mother was Austrian. He became a Doctor of Medicine and Chemistry in Prague in 1929 and went on to do pioneering work in stress and endocrinology at Johns Hopkins University, McGill University, and the Université de Montréal. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the first time in 1949. Although he received a total of 17 nominations (1949-1953) in his career, he never won the prize.

Selye died on October 16, 1982, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He often returned to visit Hungary, giving lectures as well as interviews in Hungarian television programs. He conducted a lecture in 1973 at the Hungarian Scientific Academy in Hungarian and observers noted that he had no accent, despite spending many years abroad. His book The Stress of Life appeared in Hungarian as Az Életünk és a stressz in 1964 and became a bestseller. Selye János University, the only Hungarian-language university in Slovakia, was named after him. Selye's mother was killed by gunfire during Hungary's anti-Communist revolt of 1956.

Stress research
Selye's interest in stress began when he was in medical school; he had observed that patients with various chronic illnesses like tuberculosis and cancer appeared to display a common set of symptoms that he attributed to what is now commonly called stress. After completing his medical degree and a doctorate degree in organic chemistry at the German University of Prague, he received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study (1931) at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and later moved to the Department of Biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal in 1932 where he studied under the sponsorship of James Bertram Collip (1892-1965). While working with laboratory animals, Selye observed a phenomenon that he thought resembled what he had previously seen in chronic patients. Rats exposed to cold, drugs, or surgical injury exhibited a common pattern of responses to these stressors. (A stressor is a chemical or biological agent, environmental condition, external stimulus or an event seen as causing stress to an organism.)

Selye initially (c. 1940s) called this the "general adaptation syndrome" (at the time it was also called "Selye's syndrome"), but he later rebaptized it with the simpler term "stress response". According to Selye the general adaptation syndrome is triphasic, involving an initial alarm phase followed by a stage of resistance or adaptation and, finally, a stage of exhaustion and death (these phases were established largely on the basis of glandular states). Working with doctoral student Thomas McKeown (1912–1988), Selye published a report that used the word "stress" to describe these responses to adverse events.

His last inspiration for general adaptation syndrome came from an experiment in which he injected mice with extracts of various organs. He at first believed that he had discovered a new hormone, but was proved wrong when every irritating substance he injected produced the same symptoms (swelling of the adrenal cortex, atrophy of the thymus, gastric and duodenal ulcers). This, paired with his observation that people with different diseases exhibit similar symptoms, led to his description of the effects of "noxious agents" as he at first called it. He later adopted the term "stress", which has been accepted into the lexicon of many languages.

Selye argued that stress differs from other physical responses in that it is identical whether the provoking impulse is positive or negative. He called negative stress "distress" and positive stress "eustress".

The system whereby the body copes with stress, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) system, was also first described by Selye.

Selye acknowledged the influence of Claude Bernard (1813-1878), who developed the idea of milieu intérieur, and of the "homeostasis" of Walter Cannon (1871-1945). Selye conceptualized the physiology of stress as having two components: a set of responses which he called the "general adaptation syndrome", and the development of a pathological state from ongoing, unrelieved stress.

While Selye's work attracted continued support from advocates of psychosomatic medicine, many in experimental physiology concluded that his concepts were too vague and unmeasurable. During the 1950s, Selye turned away from the laboratory to promote his concept through popular books and lecture tours. He wrote both for non-academic physicians and an international bestseller entitled The Stress of Life (1956). From the late 1960s, academic psychologists started to adopt Selye's concept of stress, and he followed The Stress of Life with two other books for the general public, From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist (1964) and Stress without Distress (1974). The idea of "stress" resonated with humanistic psychology, and pop psychology generalised the concept.

Selye worked as a professor and director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal. In 1975 he founded the International Institute of Stress, and in 1979, Selye and Arthur Antille started the Hans Selye Foundation. Later Selye and eight Nobel laureates founded the Canadian Institute of Stress.

In 1968 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 1976 Concordia University awarded him the Loyola Medal. In 1976, he received the American Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award at a Banquet of the Golden Plate ceremony in San Diego, California.

Controversy and involvement with the tobacco industry
Although it was not widely known at the time, Selye began consulting for the tobacco industry starting in 1958; he had previously sought funding from the industry, but had been denied. Later, New York attorney Edwin Jacob contacted Selye as he prepared a defense against liability actions brought against tobacco companies. The companies wanted Selye's help in arguing that the recognized correlation between smoking and cancer was not proof of causality. The firm offered to pay Selye $1000 to make a statement supporting this claim. He agreed but refused to testify. Tobacco industry lawyers reported that Selye was willing to incorporate industry advice when writing about smoking and stress. One lawyer advised him to "comment on the unlikelihood of there being a mechanism by which smoking could cause cardiovascular disease” and to emphasize the "stressful" effect that anti-smoking messages had on the US population.

Publicly, Selye never declared his consultancy work for the tobacco industry. In a 1967 letter to "Medical Opinion and Review", he argued against government over-regulation of science and public health, implying that his views on smoking were objective: "I purposely avoided any mention of government-supported research because, being too largely dependent upon it, I may not be able to view the subject objectively. However, I do not use … cigarettes so let these examples suffice." In June 1969, Selye (then director of the Institute of Experimental Pathology, University of Montreal) testified before the Canadian House of Commons Health Committee against anti-smoking legislation, opposing advertising restrictions, health warnings, and restrictions on tar and nicotine. For his testimony Selye was funded $50,000 per year for a 3-year "special project", by William Thomas Hoyt, executive of Council for Tobacco Research, with another $50,000 a year pledged by the Canadian tobacco industry. His comments on smoking were used worldwide; Philip Morris used Selye's statements on the benefits of smoking to argue against the use of health warnings on tobacco products in Sweden. Similarly, in 1977 the Australian Cigarette Manufacturers quoted Selye extensively in their submission to the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Social Welfare.

In 1999, the United States Department of Justice brought an anti-racketeering case against 7 tobacco companies –British American Tobacco, Brown & Williamson, Philip Morris, Liggett, American Tobacco Company, RJ Reynolds, and Lorillard– plus the Council for Tobacco Research, and the Tobacco Institute. As a result, the industry's influence on stress research was revealed.

Former graduate students

 * Roger Guillemin
 * Paola S. Timiras

Publications

 * "A Syndrome Produced by Diverse Nocuous Agents" - 1936 article by Hans Selye from The journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences
 * The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956, ISBN 978-0070562127
 * From Dream to Discovery: On being a scientist. New York: McGraw-Hill 1964, ISBN 978-0405066160
 * Hormones and Resistance. Berlin; New York: Springer-Verlag, 1971, ISBN 978-3540054115
 * Stress Without Distress. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., c1974, ISBN 978-0397010264
 * Stress Without Distress. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., c1974, ISBN 978-0397010264

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Hans Selye


text:
Hacker

A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them. In a positive connotation, though, hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques to collect evidence on criminals and other malicious actors. This could include using anonymity tools (such as a VPN or the dark web) to mask their identities online and pose as criminals.

Hacking can also have a broader sense of any roundabout solution to a problem, or programming and hardware development in general, and hacker culture has spread the term's broader usage to the general public even outside the profession or hobby of electronics (see life hack).

Definitions
Reflecting the two types of hackers, there are two definitions of the word "hacker":

 * 1) Originally, hacker simply meant advanced computer technology enthusiast (both hardware and software) and adherent of programming subculture; see hacker culture.
 * 2) Someone who is able to subvert computer security. If doing so for malicious purposes, the person can also be called a cracker.

Mainstream usage of "hacker" mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1990s. This includes what hacker jargon calls script kiddies, less skilled criminals who rely on tools written by others with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage has become so predominant that the general public is largely unaware that different meanings exist. Though the self-designation of hobbyists as hackers is generally acknowledged and accepted by computer security hackers, people from the programming subculture consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and emphasize the difference between the two by calling security breakers "crackers" (analogous to a safecracker).

The controversy is usually based on the assertion that the term originally meant someone messing about with something in a positive sense, that is, using playful cleverness to achieve a goal. But then, it is supposed, the meaning of the term shifted over the decades and came to refer to computer criminals.

As the security-related usage has spread more widely, the original meaning has become less known. In popular usage and in the media, "computer intruders" or "computer criminals" is the exclusive meaning of the word. In computer enthusiast and hacker culture, the primary meaning is a complimentary description for a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert. A large segment of the technical community insist the latter is the correct usage, as in the Jargon File definition.

Sometimes, "hacker" is simply used synonymously with "geek": "A true hacker is not a group person. He's a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship... They're kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals It's a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment."

Fred Shapiro thinks that "the common theory that 'hacker' originally was a benign term and the malicious connotations of the word were a later perversion is untrue." He found that the malicious connotations were already present at MIT in 1963 (quoting The Tech, an MIT student newspaper), and at that time referred to unauthorized users of the telephone network, that is, the phreaker movement that developed into the computer security hacker subculture of today.

Civic hacker
Civic hackers use their security and/or programming acumens to create solutions, often public and open-sourced, addressing challenges relevant to neighborhoods, cities, states or countries and the infrastructure within them. Municipalities and major government agencies such as NASA have been known to host hackathons or promote a specific date as a "National Day of Civic Hacking" to encourage participation from civic hackers. *
 * Civic hackers, though often operating autonomously and independently, may work alongside or in coordination with certain aspects of government or local infrastructure such as trains and buses. *
 * For example, in 2008, Philadelphia-based civic hacker William Entriken developed a web application that displayed a comparison of the actual arrival times of local SEPTA trains to their scheduled times after being reportedly frustrated by the discrepancy.
 * Civic hackers, though often operating autonomously and independently, may work alongside or in coordination with certain aspects of government or local infrastructure such as trains and buses. *
 * For example, in 2008, Philadelphia-based civic hacker William Entriken developed a web application that displayed a comparison of the actual arrival times of local SEPTA trains to their scheduled times after being reportedly frustrated by the discrepancy.
 * For example, in 2008, Philadelphia-based civic hacker William Entriken developed a web application that displayed a comparison of the actual arrival times of local SEPTA trains to their scheduled times after being reportedly frustrated by the discrepancy.
 * For example, in 2008, Philadelphia-based civic hacker William Entriken developed a web application that displayed a comparison of the actual arrival times of local SEPTA trains to their scheduled times after being reportedly frustrated by the discrepancy.
 * For example, in 2008, Philadelphia-based civic hacker William Entriken developed a web application that displayed a comparison of the actual arrival times of local SEPTA trains to their scheduled times after being reportedly frustrated by the discrepancy.

Security related hacking
Security hackers are people involved with circumvention of computer security. There are several types, including:

 * White hat:Hackers who work to keep data safe from other hackers by finding system vulnerabilities that can be mitigated. White hats are usually employed by the target system's owner and are typically paid (sometimes quite well) for their work. Their work is not illegal because it is done with the system owner's consent.

 * Black hat or Cracker:Hackers with malicious intentions. They often steal, exploit, and sell data, and are usually motivated by personal gain. Their work is usually illegal. A cracker is like a black hat hacker, but is specifically someone who is very skilled and tries via hacking to make profits or to benefit, not just to vandalize. Crackers find exploits for system vulnerabilities and often use them to their advantage by either selling the fix to the system owner or selling the exploit to other black hat hackers, who in turn use it to steal information or gain royalties.

 * Grey hat:Computer security experts who may sometimes violate laws or typical ethical standards, but do not have the malicious intent typical of a black hat hacker.

Hacker culture
Hacker culture is an idea derived from a community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The concept expanded to the hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club) and on software (video games, software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. Later, this would go on to encompass many new definitions such as art, and life hacking.

Motives
Four primary motives have been proposed as possibilities for why hackers attempt to break into computers and networks. First, there is a criminal financial gain to be had when hacking systems with the specific purpose of stealing credit card numbers or manipulating banking systems. Second, many hackers thrive off of increasing their reputation within the hacker subculture and will leave their handles on websites they defaced or leave some other evidence as proof that they were involved in a specific hack. Third, corporate espionage allows companies to acquire information on products or services that can be stolen or used as leverage within the marketplace. Lastly, state-sponsored attacks provide nation states with both wartime and intelligence collection options conducted on, in, or through cyberspace.

Overlaps and differences
The main basic difference between programmer subculture and computer security hacker is their mostly separate historical origin and development. However, the Jargon File reports that considerable overlap existed for the early phreaking at the beginning of the 1970s. An article from MIT's student paper The Tech used the term hacker in this context already in 1963 in its pejorative meaning for someone messing with the phone system. The overlap quickly started to break when people joined in the activity who did it in a less responsible way. This was the case after the publication of an article exposing the activities of Draper and Engressia.

According to Raymond, hackers from the programmer subculture usually work openly and use their real name, while computer security hackers prefer secretive groups and identity-concealing aliases. Also, their activities in practice are largely distinct. The former focus on creating new and improving existing infrastructure (especially the software environment they work with), while the latter primarily and strongly emphasize the general act of circumvention of security measures, with the effective use of the knowledge (which can be to report and help fixing the security bugs, or exploitation reasons) being only rather secondary. The most visible difference in these views was in the design of the MIT hackers' Incompatible Timesharing System, which deliberately did not have any security measures.

There are some subtle overlaps, however, since basic knowledge about computer security is also common within the programmer subculture of hackers. For example, Ken Thompson noted during his 1983 Turing Award lecture that it is possible to add code to the UNIX "login" command that would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password, allowing a backdoor into the system with the latter password. He named his invention the "Trojan horse". Furthermore, Thompson argued, the C compiler itself could be modified to automatically generate the rogue code, to make detecting the modification even harder. Because the compiler is itself a program generated from a compiler, the Trojan horse could also be automatically installed in a new compiler program, without any detectable modification to the source of the new compiler. However, Thompson disassociated himself strictly from the computer security hackers: "I would like to criticize the press in its handling of the 'hackers,' the 414 gang, the Dalton gang, etc. The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. ... I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts."

The programmer subculture of hackers sees secondary circumvention of security mechanisms as legitimate if it is done to get practical barriers out of the way for doing actual work. In special forms, that can even be an expression of playful cleverness. However, the systematic and primary engagement in such activities is not one of the actual interests of the programmer subculture of hackers and it does not have significance in its actual activities, either. A further difference is that, historically, members of the programmer subculture of hackers were working at academic institutions and used the computing environment there. In contrast, the prototypical computer security hacker had access exclusively to a home computer and a modem. However, since the mid-1990s, with home computers that could run Unix-like operating systems and with inexpensive internet home access being available for the first time, many people from outside of the academic world started to take part in the programmer subculture of hacking.

Since the mid-1980s, there are some overlaps in ideas and members with the computer security hacking community. The most prominent case is Robert T. Morris, who was a user of MIT-AI, yet wrote the Morris worm. The Jargon File hence calls him "a true hacker who blundered". Nevertheless, members of the programmer subculture have a tendency to look down on and disassociate from these overlaps. They commonly refer disparagingly to people in the computer security subculture as crackers and refuse to accept any definition of hacker that encompasses such activities. The computer security hacking subculture, on the other hand, tends not to distinguish between the two subcultures as harshly, acknowledging that they have much in common including many members, political and social goals, and a love of learning about technology. They restrict the use of the term cracker to their categories of script kiddies and black hat hackers instead.

All three subcultures have relations to hardware modifications. In the early days of network hacking, phreaks were building blue boxes and various variants. The programmer subculture of hackers has stories about several hardware hacks in its folklore, such as a mysterious "magic" switch attached to a PDP-10 computer in MIT's AI lab that, when switched off, crashed the computer. The early hobbyist hackers built their home computers themselves from construction kits. However, all these activities have died out during the 1980s when the phone network switched to digitally controlled switchboards, causing network hacking to shift to dialing remote computers with modems when pre-assembled inexpensive home computers were available and when academic institutions started to give individual mass-produced workstation computers to scientists instead of using a central timesharing system. The only kind of widespread hardware modification nowadays is case modding.

An encounter of the programmer and the computer security hacker subculture occurred at the end of the 1980s, when a group of computer security hackers, sympathizing with the Chaos Computer Club (which disclaimed any knowledge in these activities), broke into computers of American military organizations and academic institutions. They sold data from these machines to the Soviet secret service, one of them in order to fund his drug addiction. The case was solved when Clifford Stoll, a scientist working as a system administrator, found ways to log the attacks and to trace them back (with the help of many others). 23, a German film adaption with fictional elements, shows the events from the attackers' perspective. Stoll described the case in his book The Cuckoo's Egg and in the TV documentary The KGB, the Computer, and Me from the other perspective. According to Eric S. Raymond, it "nicely illustrates the difference between 'hacker' and 'cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha, and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live and how they think."

Representation in media
The mainstream media's current usage of the term may be traced back to the early 1980s. When the term, previously used only among computer enthusiasts, was introduced to wider society by the mainstream media in 1983, even those in the computer community referred to computer intrusion as hacking, although not as the exclusive definition of the word. In reaction to the increasing media use of the term exclusively with the criminal connotation, the computer community began to differentiate their terminology. Alternative terms such as cracker were coined in an effort to maintain the distinction between hackers within the legitimate programmer community and those performing computer break-ins. Further terms such as black hat, white hat and gray hat developed when laws against breaking into computers came into effect, to distinguish criminal activities from those activities which were legal.

Network news' use of the term consistently pertains primarily to criminal activities, despite attempts by the technical community to preserve and distinguish the original meaning. Today, the mainstream media and general public continue to describe computer criminals, with all levels of technical sophistication, as "hackers" and do not generally make use of the word in any of its non-criminal connotations. Members of the media sometimes seem unaware of the distinction, grouping legitimate "hackers" such as Linus Torvalds and Steve Wozniak along with criminal "crackers".

As a result, the definition is still the subject of heated controversy. The wider dominance of the pejorative connotation is resented by many who object to the term being taken from their cultural jargon and used negatively, including those who have historically preferred to self-identify as hackers. Many advocate using the more recent and nuanced alternate terms when describing criminals and others who negatively take advantage of security flaws in software and hardware. Others prefer to follow common popular usage, arguing that the positive form is confusing and unlikely to become widespread in the general public. A minority still use the term in both senses despite the controversy, leaving context to clarify (or leave ambiguous) which meaning is intended.

However, because the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized, "hacker" can therefore be seen as a shibboleth, identifying those who use the technically-oriented sense (as opposed to the exclusively intrusion-oriented sense) as members of the computing community. On the other hand, due to the variety of industries software designers may find themselves in, many prefer not to be referred to as hackers because the word holds a negative denotation in many of those industries.

A possible middle ground position has been suggested, based on the observation that "hacking" describes a collection of skills and tools which are used by hackers of both descriptions for differing reasons. The analogy is made to locksmithing, specifically picking locks, which is a skill which can be used for good or evil. The primary weakness of this analogy is the inclusion of script kiddies in the popular usage of "hacker", despite their lack of an underlying skill and knowledge base.

Computer security

 * Dey, Debabrata, Atanu Lahiri, and Guoying Zhang. "Hacker behavior, network effects, and the security software market." Journal of Management Information Systems 29.2 (2012): 77-108.

 * Logik Bomb: Hacker's Encyclopedia (1997)
 * Revelation: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Hacking & Phreaking (1996)
 * Logik Bomb: Hacker's Encyclopedia (1997)
 * Revelation: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Hacking & Phreaking (1996)
 * Revelation: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Hacking & Phreaking (1996)

title: Hacker


text:
Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad in which the sailor Charles Marlow tells his listeners the story of his assignment as steamer captain for a Belgian company in the African interior. The novel is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa, whilst also examining the themes of power dynamics and morality. Although Conrad does not name the river on which most of the narrative takes place, at the time of writing, the Congo Free State—the location of the large and economically important Congo River—was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is given a text by Kurtz, an ivory trader working on a trading station far up the river, who has "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition.

Central to Conrad's work is the idea that there is little difference between "civilised people" and "savages." Heart of Darkness implicitly comments on imperialism and racism. The novella's setting provides the frame for Marlow's story of his fascination for the prolific ivory trader Kurtz. Conrad draws parallels between London ("the greatest town on earth") and Africa as places of darkness.

Originally issued as a three-part serial story in Blackwood's Magazine to celebrate the 1000th edition of the magazine, Heart of Darkness has been widely republished and translated in many languages. It provided the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness 67th on their list of the 100 best novels in English of the 20th century.

Composition and publication
In 1890, at the age of 32, Conrad was appointed by a Belgian trading company to serve on one of its steamers. While sailing up the Congo River from one station to another, the captain became ill and Conrad assumed command. He guided the ship up the tributary Lualaba River to the trading company's innermost station, Kindu, in Eastern Congo Free State; Marlow has similar experiences to the author.

When Conrad began to write the novella, eight years after returning from Africa, he drew inspiration from his travel journals. He described Heart of Darkness as "a wild story" of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the (African) interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of natives. The tale was first published as a three-part serial, in February, March, and April 1899, in Blackwood's Magazine (February 1899 was the magazine's 1000th issue: special edition). Heart of Darkness was later included in the book Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories, published on 13 November 1902 by William Blackwood.

The volume consisted of Youth: a Narrative, Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether in that order. In 1917, for future editions of the book, Conrad wrote an "Author's Note" where he, after denying any "unity of artistic purpose" underlying the collection, discusses each of the three stories and makes light commentary on Marlow, the narrator of the tales within the first two stories. He said Marlow first appeared in Youth.

On 31 May 1902, in a letter to William Blackwood, Conrad remarked,

"I call your own kind self to witness ... the last pages of Heart of Darkness where the interview of the man and the girl locks in—as it were—the whole 30 000 words of narrative description into one suggestive view of a whole phase of life and makes of that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the Centre of Africa."

There have been many proposed sources for the character of the antagonist, Kurtz. Georges-Antoine Klein, an agent who became ill and died aboard Conrad's steamer, is proposed by literary critics as a basis for Kurtz. The principal figures involved in the disastrous "rear column" of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition have also been identified as likely sources, including column leader Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, his Scottish colleague, James Sligo Jameson, slave trader Tippu Tip and the expedition leader, Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Conrad's biographer Norman Sherry judged that Arthur Hodister (1847–1892), a Belgian solitary but successful trader, who spoke three Congolese languages and was venerated by Congolese to the point of deification, served as the main model, while later scholars have refuted this hypothesis. Adam Hochschild, in King Leopold's Ghost, believes that the Belgian soldier Léon Rom influenced the character. Peter Firchow mentions the possibility that Kurtz is a composite, modelled on various figures present in the Congo Free State at the time as well as on Conrad's imagining of what they might have had in common.

A corrective impulse to impose one's rule characterises Kurtz's writings which were discovered by Marlow during his journey, where he rants on behalf of the so-called "International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs" about his supposedly altruistic and sentimental reasons to civilise the "savages"; one document ends with a dark proclamation to "Exterminate all the brutes!". The "International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs" is interpreted as a sarcastic reference to one of the participants at the Berlin Conference, the International Association of the Congo (also called "International Congo Society"). The predecessor to this organisation was the "International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa".

Summary
Charles Marlow tells his friends the story of how he became captain of a river steamboat for an ivory trading company. As a child, Marlow was fascinated by "the blank spaces" on maps, particularly Africa. The image of a river on the map particularly fascinated Marlow.

In a flashback, Marlow makes his way to Africa, taking passage on a steamer. He travels 30 mi up the river where his company's station is. Work on a railway is taking place. Marlow explores a narrow ravine, and is horrified to find himself in a place full of critically ill Africans who worked on the railroad and are now dying. Marlow must wait for ten days in the company's devastated Outer Station. Marlow meets the company's chief accountant, who tells him of a Mr. Kurtz, who is in charge of a very important trading post, and is described as a respected first-class agent. The accountant predicts that Kurtz will go far.

Marlow departs with 60 men to travel to the Central Station, where the steamboat that he will command is based. At the station, he learns that his steamboat has been wrecked in an accident. The general manager informs Marlow that he could not wait for Marlow to arrive, and tells him of a rumour that Kurtz is ill. Marlow fishes his boat out of the river and spends months repairing it. Delayed by the lack of tools and replacement parts, Marlow is frustrated by the time it takes to perform the repairs. He learns that Kurtz is resented, not admired, by the manager. Once underway, the journey to Kurtz's station takes two months.

The journey pauses for the night about 8 mi below the Inner Station. In the morning the boat is enveloped by a thick fog. The steamboat is later attacked by a barrage of arrows, and the helmsman is killed. Marlow sounds the steam whistle repeatedly, frightening the attackers away.

After landing at Kurtz's station, a man boards the steamboat: a Russian wanderer who strayed into Kurtz's camp. Marlow learns that the natives worship Kurtz and that he has been very ill. The Russian tells of how Kurtz opened his mind and admires Kurtz even for his power and his willingness to use it. Marlow suspects that Kurtz has gone mad.

Marlow observes the station and sees a row of posts topped with the severed heads of natives. Around the corner of the house, Kurtz appears with supporters who carry him as a ghost-like figure on a stretcher. The area fills with natives ready for battle, but Kurtz shouts something and they retreat. His entourage carries Kurtz to the steamer and lays him in a cabin. The manager tells Marlow that Kurtz has harmed the company's business in the region because his methods are "unsound". The Russian reveals that Kurtz believes the company wants to kill him, and Marlow confirms that hangings were discussed.

After midnight, Kurtz returns to shore. Marlow finds Kurtz crawling back to the station house. Marlow threatens to harm Kurtz if he raises an alarm, but Kurtz only laments that he did not accomplish more. The next day they prepare to journey back down the river.

Kurtz's health worsens during the trip. The steamboat breaks down, and while stopped for repairs, Kurtz gives Marlow a packet of papers, including his commissioned report and a photograph, telling him to keep them from the manager. When Marlow next speaks with him, Kurtz is near death; Marlow hears him weakly whisper, "The horror! The horror!" A short while later, the manager's boy announces to the crew that Kurtz has died (the famous line "Mistah Kurtz—he dead" would become the epigraph of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men"). The next day Marlow pays little attention to Kurtz's pilgrims as they bury "something" in a muddy hole.

Returning to Europe, Marlow is embittered and contemptuous of the "civilised" world. Several callers come to retrieve the papers Kurtz entrusted to him, but Marlow withholds them or offers papers he knows they have no interest in. He gives Kurtz's report to a journalist, for publication if he sees fit. Marlow is left with some personal letters and a photograph of Kurtz's fiancée. When Marlow visits her, she is deep in mourning although it has been more than a year since Kurtz's death. She presses Marlow for information, asking him to repeat Kurtz's final words. Marlow tells her that Kurtz's final word was her name.

Critical reception
The novella was not a big success during Conrad's life. When it was published as a single volume in 1902 with two novellas, "Youth" and "The End of the Tether", it received the least commentary from critics. F. R. Leavis referred to Heart of Darkness as a "minor work" and criticised its "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery". Conrad did not consider it to be particularly notable; but by the 1960s it was a standard assignment in many college and high school English courses.

Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that Heart of Darkness had been analysed more than any other work of literature that is studied in universities and colleges, which he attributed to Conrad's "unique propensity for ambiguity". In King Leopold's Ghost (1998), Adam Hochschild wrote that literary scholars have made too much of the psychological aspects of Heart of Darkness, while paying scant attention to Conrad's accurate recounting of the horror arising from the methods and effects of colonialism in the Congo Free State. "Heart of Darkness is experience ... pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case". Other critiques include Hugh Curtler's Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness (1997). The French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe called Heart of Darkness "one of the greatest texts of Western literature" and used Conrad's tale for a reflection on "The Horror of the West".

Heart of Darkness is criticised in postcolonial studies, particularly by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. In his 1975 public lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness", Achebe described Conrad's novella as "an offensive and deplorable book" that de-humanised Africans. Achebe argued that Conrad, "blinkered ... with xenophobia", incorrectly depicted Africa as the antithesis of Europe and civilisation, ignoring the artistic accomplishments of the Fang people who lived in the Congo River basin at the time of the book's publication. He argued that the book promoted and continues to promote a prejudiced image of Africa that "depersonalises a portion of the human race" and concluded that it should not be considered a great work of art.

Achebe's critics argue that he fails to distinguish Marlow's view from Conrad's, which results in very clumsy interpretations of the novella. In their view, Conrad portrays Africans sympathetically and their plight tragically, and refers sarcastically to, and condemns outright, the supposedly noble aims of European colonists, thereby demonstrating his scepticism about the moral superiority of European men. Ending a passage that describes the condition of chained, emaciated slaves, Marlow remarks: "After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings." Some observers assert that Conrad, whose native country had been conquered by imperial powers, empathised by default with other subjugated peoples. Jeffrey Meyers notes that Conrad, like his acquaintance Roger Casement, "was one of the first men to question the Western notion of progress, a dominant idea in Europe from the Renaissance to the Great War, to attack the hypocritical justification of colonialism and to reveal... the savage degradation of the white man in Africa." Likewise, E.D. Morel, who led international opposition to King Leopold II's rule in the Congo, saw Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a condemnation of colonial brutality and referred to the novella as "the most powerful thing written on the subject."

Conrad scholar Peter Firchow writes that "nowhere in the novel does Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference". If Conrad or his novel is racist, it is only in a weak sense, since Heart of Darkness acknowledges racial distinctions "but does not suggest an essential superiority" of any group. Achebe's reading of Heart of Darkness can be (and has been) challenged by a reading of Conrad's other African story, "An Outpost of Progress", which has an omniscient narrator, rather than the embodied narrator, Marlow. Masood Ashraf Raja has suggested that Conrad's positive representation of Muslims in his Malay novels complicates these charges of racism.

In 2003, Motswana scholar Peter Mwikisa concluded the book was "the great lost opportunity to depict dialogue between Africa and Europe". Zimbabwean scholar Rino Zhuwarara, however, broadly agreed with Achebe, though considered it important to be "sensitised to how peoples of other nations perceive Africa". The novelist Caryl Phillips stated in 2003 that: "Achebe is right; to the African reader the price of Conrad's eloquent denunciation of colonisation is the recycling of racist notions of the 'dark' continent and her people. Those of us who are not from Africa may be prepared to pay this price, but this price is far too high for Achebe".

In his 1983 criticism, the British academic Cedric Watts criticises the insinuation in Achebe's critique—the premise that only black people may accurately analyse and assess the novella, as well as mentioning that Achebe's critique falls into self-contradictory arguments regarding Conrad's writing style, both praising and denouncing it at times. Stan Galloway writes, in a comparison of Heart of Darkness with  Jungle Tales of Tarzan, "The inhabitants [of both works], whether antagonists or compatriots, were clearly imaginary and meant to represent a particular fictive cipher and not a particular African people". More recent critics like Nidesh Lawtoo have stressed that the "continuities" between Conrad and Achebe are profound and that a form of "postcolonial mimesis" ties the two authors via productive mirroring inversions.

Radio and stage
Orson Welles adapted and starred in Heart of Darkness in a CBS Radio broadcast on 6 November 1938 as part of his series, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. In 1939, Welles adapted the story for his first film for RKO Pictures, writing a screenplay with John Houseman. The story was adapted to focus on the rise of a fascist dictator. Welles intended to play Marlow and Kurtz and it was to be entirely filmed as a POV from Marlow's eyes. Welles even filmed a short presentation film illustrating his intent. It is reportedly lost. The film's prologue to be read by Welles said "You aren't going to see this picture - this picture is going to happen to you." The project was never realised; one reason given was the loss of European markets after the outbreak of World War II. Welles still hoped to produce the film when he presented another radio adaptation of the story as his first program as producer-star of the CBS radio series This Is My Best. Welles scholar Bret Wood called the broadcast of 13 March 1945, "the closest representation of the film Welles might have made, crippled, of course, by the absence of the story's visual elements (which were so meticulously designed) and the half-hour length of the broadcast."

In 1991, Australian author/playwright Larry Buttrose wrote and staged a theatrical adaptation titled Kurtz with the Crossroads Theatre Company, Sydney. The play was announced to be broadcast as a radio play to Australian radio audiences in August 2011 by the Vision Australia Radio Network, and also by the RPH – Radio Print Handicapped Network across Australia. In 2011, composer Tarik O'Regan and librettist Tom Phillips adapted an opera of the same name, which premiered at the Linbury Theatre of the Royal Opera House in London. A suite for orchestra and narrator was subsequently extrapolated from it. In 2015, an adaptation of Welles' screenplay by Jamie Lloyd and Laurence Bowen aired on BBC Radio 4. The production starred James McAvoy as Marlow. Another BBC Radio 4 adaptation, first broadcast in 2021, transposes the action to the 21st century.

Film and television

In 1958, the CBS television anthology Playhouse 90 (S3E7) aired a loose 90-minute television play adaptation. This version, written by Stewart Stern, uses the encounter between Marlow (Roddy McDowall) and Kurtz (Boris Karloff) as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. The cast includes Inga Swenson and Eartha Kitt.

Perhaps the best known adaptation is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, based on the screenplay by John Milius, which moves the story from the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. In Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen stars as Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a US Army Captain assigned to "terminate the command" of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. A film documenting the production, titled Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, was released in 1991. It chronicles a series of difficulties and challenges that director Coppola encountered during the making of the film, several of which mirror some of the novella's themes.

A 1993 television film adaptation was written by Benedict Fitzgerald and directed by Nicolas Roeg. The film, which was aired by TNT, starred Tim Roth as Marlow, John Malkovich as Kurtz, Isaach de Bankolé as Mfumu, and James Fox as Gosse. James Gray's 2019 science fiction film Ad Astra is loosely inspired by the events of the novel. It features Brad Pitt as an astronaut travelling to the edge of the Solar System to confront and potentially kill his father (Tommy Lee Jones), who has gone rogue.

In 2020, African Apocalypse, a documentary film directed and produced by Rob Lemkin and featuring Femi Nylander portrays a journey from Oxford, England to Niger on the trail of a colonial killer called Captain Paul Voulet. Voulet's descent into barbarity mirrors that of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Nylander discovers Voulet's massacres happened at exactly the same time that Conrad wrote his book in 1899. It was broadcast by the BBC in May 2021 as an episode of the Arena documentary series.

A British animated film adaption of the novella is planned, directed by Gerald Conn. It was written by Mark Jenkins and Mary Kate O Flanagan and is produced by Gritty Realism and Michael Sheen. Kurtz is voiced by Sheen and Harlequin by Andrew Scott. The animation uses sand to better convey atmosphere of the book. A Brazilian animated film (2023) also adapts the novella. It is directed by Rogério Nunes and Alois Di Leo and moves the story to a near future Rio de Janeiro.

Video games
The video game Far Cry 2, released on 21 October 2008, is a loose modernised adaptation of Heart of Darkness. The player assumes the role of a mercenary operating in Africa whose task it is to kill an arms dealer, the elusive "Jackal". The last area of the game is called "The Heart of Darkness".

Spec Ops: The Line, released on 26 June 2012, is a direct modernised adaptation of Heart of Darkness. The player assumes the role of Delta Force operator Captain Martin Walker as he and his team search Dubai for survivors in the aftermath of catastrophic sandstorms that left the city without contact to the outside world. The character John Konrad, who replaces the character Kurtz, is a reference to Joseph Conrad.

Literature
T. S. Eliot's 1925 poem "The Hollow Men" quotes, as its first epigraph, a line from Heart of Darkness: "Mistah Kurtz – he dead." Eliot had planned to use a quotation from the climax of the tale as the epigraph for The Waste Land, but Ezra Pound advised against it. Eliot said of the quote that "it is much the most appropriate I can find, and somewhat elucidative." Biographer Peter Ackroyd suggested that the passage inspired or at least anticipated the central theme of the poem.

Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is Achebe's response to what he saw as Conrad's portrayal of Africa and Africans as symbols-- "the antithesis of Europe and therefore civilization". Achebe set out to write a novel about Africa and Africans by an African. In Things Fall Apart we see the effects of colonialism and Christian missionary endeavours on an Igbo community in West Africa through the eyes of that community's West African protagonists.

Another literary work with an acknowledged debt to Heart of Darkness is Wilson Harris' 1960 postcolonial novel Palace of the Peacock. J. G. Ballard's 1962 climate fiction novel The Drowned World includes many similarities to Conrad's novella. However, Ballard said he had read nothing by Conrad before writing the novel, prompting literary critic Robert S. Lehman to remark that "the novel's allusion to Conrad works nicely, even if it is not really an allusion to Conrad".

Robert Silverberg's 1970 novel Downward to the Earth uses themes and characters based on Heart of Darkness set on the alien world of Belzagor. In Josef Škvorecký's 1984 novel The Engineer of Human Souls, Kurtz is seen as the epitome of exterminatory colonialism and, there and elsewhere, Škvorecký emphasises the importance of Conrad's concern with Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe.

Timothy Findley's 1993 novel Headhunter is an extensive adaptation that reimagines Kurtz and Marlow as psychiatrists in Toronto. The novel begins: "On a winter's day, while a blizzard raged through the streets of Toronto, Lilah Kemp inadvertently set Kurtz free from page 92 of Heart of Darkness." Ann Patchett's 2011 novel State of Wonder reimagines the story with the central figures as female scientists in contemporary Brazil.

title: Heart of Darkness