Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought
Philosophy to the People
Emily Herring
ISBN-13 : 978-1529371949 Basic Books £12.99
You might feel it mildly ironic to hear of someone being described as ‘the
most famous philosopher in the world’. Philosophers today seem a little too
peripheral to merit such celebrity. And it might seem doubly implausible
when the man in question, Henri Bergson (1859-1941), challenged much about
the zeitgeist. It is Emily Herring’s task, in this cheerful, engaged
and accessible account of Bergson’s life and impact, to explain why this was
so. In keeping with the spirit of her book, Herring’s introduction explains
the history of her fascination with her subject and her desire to write, not
an intellectual biography, but a themed portrait of the man, his ideas and
the adulation with which they were received. It is not, then, intended as a
comprehensive study of Bergson’s philosophy.
As Dominique Kalifa wrote in The Belle Époque: A Cultural History,
Paris and Beyond (2021)*, ‘We commonly see the Belle Époque as
positivist; the period’s picture album features the marvels of science and
technology.’ These were after all the years of the emergence of the
automobile, the aeroplane, the cinematograph, the metro— and of the
transformative Paris Exposition of 1900. Yet in those years immediately
before World War 1, when science was all the rage, the controversial French
philosopher Bergson became the focus of public
adulation. Why?
The answer lies partly in the fact that many people wanted to maintain
belief in the possibilities of the self, while fearing alienation in those
modern times. For them, Bergson addressed philosophy’s big questions—
ones that continue to torment us — in ways that were novel and could be
understood by the layman. His perspectives on time, consciousness, evolution
and religion, invigorated debate, his notions of fluidity challenging
conventional thinking. As Herring explains,‘Bergson’s philosophy as a
philosophy of change, creativity, and freedom, gave many in the years
leading up to World War I ways of channelling their own artistic,
ideological, and political hopes.’ To that eminent philosopher William
James, he was a magician and a poet. Thousands had to be turned away from
his crowded, famously eloquent lectures at the Collège de France.
A friend of Bergson’s gave some idea of the impact of his public presence
when lecturing: ‘ A silence descended on the auditorium, a secret quiver ran
through our souls, when we saw him silently appear at the back of the
amphitheatre and sit under a discreet lamp, his hands free, usually clasped,
never needing written notes… His speech was slow, noble, and regular, like
his writing, extraordinarily confident and surprisingly precise, with
caressing, musical intonations.’
His eloquence extended to the written word and, as Herring notes, he knew
his audience and what interested them. For instance, in line with the
popular late nineteenth century enthusiasm for spiritualism and the occult,
he ‘flirted with the supernatural’. This however, like his poetic language,
was held to be suspect by others. Félix Le Dantec, a biologist, warned that
the poetic effect encouraged mystical tendencies in his followers. Certainly
the fact that he prioritised intuition over analysis brought him the
opprobrium of some of his famous peers, including Betrand Russell and Albert
Einstein (The latter’s Nobel Prize in Physics came not for relativity but
for his work on the photoelectric effect, after Bergson’s influential
criticism of the former).
Bergson was born to Jewish parents in Paris in a century that reeled from
the turbulent effects of revolution. His father was a Polish musician, his
mother English. The bilingual child was educated at the École normale
supérieure, a classmate of Jean Jaurès the future socialist leader, with
whom he vied for excellence. After graduating in 1881 he was appointed
Professor of Philosophy in several lycées (upper secondary schools) and
eventually returned to the École normale as a Reader, began publishing and
was married in 1891. Nine years later he was appointed to the prestigious
Collège de France.
His first important work was on duration (in Time and Free Will: An Essay
on the Immediate Data of Consciousness/Essai sur les données
immédiates de la conscience, 1889). In 1896 he published on matter and
spirit (Matter and Memory/Matière et mémoire). Creative
Evolution/L'Évolution créatrice, his most famous work in which he
vied with Darwin, followed appeared in 1907. Thereafter, he lectured briefly
in England and America. In 1914 his books were prohibited by the Catholic
church; that same year he was elected to the Académie Française. Bergson
took on a diplomatic role during the war, despite being somewhat retiring by
nature and suffering increasingly from arthritis.
His fame eventually dulled, his influence and health declined, though he
continued to publish, for example on the mind-body problem and on
relativity. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. And in
1932 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les Deux Sources de
la morale et de la religion) appeared: ‘Bergson wrote about the need to
inject more spirit—meaning more humanity—into our technology’ to bring us
closer to the Creator. There were other books and papers including his final
work, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (La
Pensée et le mouvant, 1934), an autobiographical study of his methods
and philosophy. He inclined to Catholicism but, in reaction to the
increasingly anti-Semitic thirties, he would not desert his birth faith. He
died from pneumonia contracted during the severe cold in occupied France in
January 1941, his death attributed to his standing for hours to register as
a Jew, a requirement he might have avoided had he chosen, given his
international status.
Emily Herring’s book gives some idea of the central tenets of Bergson’s
philosophy. His first epiphany was to recognize the flaw that science and
mathematics shared in dealing with time. He told one admirer sharply, ‘Time
is not space.’ One could measure space, but time posed a problem of
subjectivity: ‘It is precisely this experience of the passing of time, the
perceived difference in its quality, that is erased in the way science
treats time. And it was this qualitative temporality that Bergson called
durée.’ As Bergson’s wife’s
cousin Proust put it in Le Figaro, ‘Perhaps days are equal for a
clock, but not for a man.’
Matter and Memory
was the book which led to Bergson’s election to the Collège de France. It
had taken five years of study on the available literature on memory (and
aphasia—language loss). He determined through this study that —to quote
another authority — ‘memory, and so mind, or soul, is independent of body
and makes use of it to carry its own purposes’. In Herring’s words, ‘In
Matter and Memory, he provided support for the idea that the mind
survives the death of the body.’
His ideas now brought the philosopher to wide attention, given their
optimistic nature allied to the creative potential they suggested. Bergson’s
open lectures soon became events and that fact that they were enormously
popular with women, Herring suggests, is also attributable to the fact that
women were not otherwise granted access to philosophy in the universities at
that time (This issue offered fuel to his chauvinistic male detractors who
reckoned that his openness to irrationality proved congenial to women who
were themselves be irrational beings.)
Bergson never lacked confidence in his own judgements. The otherwise shy
philosopher, in a 1903 article, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, argued the
need for philosophy to take a completely new direction. It was followed by
his most famous book, Creative Evolution, one in which his lifelong
antipathy to reducing life to mechanism— the idea that our actions are
determined by blind physical/chemical causes —led him to the notion of the
creative life force, the élan vital.
He saw that evolution, in missing the notion of durée, left
out the uniqueness of living. It was through bursts of vitality, he
believed, that evolution developed and change happened. To Bergson life was
dynamic, creative and unpredictable —and welcomed as such. George T. W.
Patrick, an American psychologist declared, ‘Now we have a philosophy of
life, in which life is loosed from all its physico-chemical limitations
and shown to be reality itself. It is only that which endures, which
flows, which creates, that is real. Such is life, or, going still
deeper, consciousness, a self-creative, unforeknowable stream.’
Among Bergson’s admirers some felt he offered escape from a scientific world
view, but he himself did not share that attitude. Rather, he wanted to
liberate its philosophy, being a metaphysician in an age of positivism.
Although frequently misrepresented, there were contradictions that
followed from his having no philosophical system but only questions
requiring different methods of approach. Herring does not dwell so much upon
this. To Bergson, on the one hand man is a free and freely creative
individual unique in his experience of time; yet he is also a product of the
divine will. Leszek Kołakowski, the Polish philosopher, took this up in
Bergson (1985).
Here he explored the philosopher’s ideas. His conclusion was that, ‘Starting
with inner experience he discovered consciousness as an absolute creator and
he made time its property; then he asserted it as a work of the divine
artist. To have it both ways within the same discourse proved to be
impossible.’ Taken separately the two strands, the Cartesian and the
Christian, could prove a path for fruitful deliberation; together they were
not. (Those interested in an academic assessment of Bergson’s philosophy
might turn to Kołakowski’s short book in the Past Masters series.)
Today Bergson has faded from view. Not until Jean Paul Sartre was French
philosophy to have another superstar. A.C. Grayling concluded, ‘His lack of
philosophical influence is doubtless connected with his valuing of intuition
and non-rationalism over science.ergman’ But I think perhaps it would be
better to say that his spirit endures. Sartre himself, as well as
Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze all acknowledged his
influence, and many will seize upon something like it, fearing the
technological future. Emily Herring’s book is timely —a pleasure to read
and a necessary reminder that before Sartre came Henri Bergson, the timid,
slight philosopher who bestrode the thinking world like a Colossus in the
years before that world imploded.
*[ see Jim Burns review of The
Belle Époque: NRB September 2021]