Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, by Emily Herring

Time and Henri Bergson 
A little more than a century ago, the French philosopher Henri Bergson was one of the most famous people in the world. The statistics are not on hand, but I think it could be quite possible that for a time back then, he was the most famous person in the world. Today, in our age of social media ‘influencers’ and global mega-celebrities, such acclaim doesn’t bat an eye. To understand how extraordinary Bergson’s celebrity was, we have to put ourselves back to a time when newspapers and word of mouth were the main disseminators of fame, and geographical distance and language differences still posed considerable barriers. Yet that would still not be enough to truly grasp the phenomenon that was Bergsonmania. Because the object of this acclaim was not, as it would be today (or most any time since the rise of popular culture) a film star, pop idol, or sex symbol, but a philosopher. No philosopher prior to Bergson was a household name and I don’t believe any have been so since. The closest to come to such notoriety was his countryman Jean-Paul Sartre, one of his readers, whose existential exploits amongst the rive gauche demimonde reached the pages of Le Figaro and other Parisian dailies in post-war France. But the French have always honoured their intellectuals (unlike the British) and even name streets after them. Bergson’s fame reached far beyond his homeland, and at its height, his ideas, or some version of them, could be found informing contemporary art, radical politics, progressive social movements, and much more. What makes his fame even more odd is that Bergson hated it and often did what he could to avoid it.

Like others who have had an unwelcome fame thrust upon them, Bergson soon discovered that it is not always a benefit. He also learned, as the once popular do, that the public is fickle. Nothing is as unfashionable as what had only recently been the rage, and following the catastrophe of the Great War, Bergson’s celebrity faded and any significance his once ubiquitous philosophy had was quickly consigned to the historical waste basket.

 

Emily Herring’s biography is a very readable if overly cautious survey of Bergson’s life, which, aside from a few dramatic incidents – secret diplomatic missions and an encounter with Einstein - was almost entirely devoted to rising through the ranks of French academia. I say her account is cautious for two reasons. One is that she is at pains to show that while Bergson’s ideas did pose a threat to the scientific dogmas of the day – as well as our own – he wasn’t really anti-science, as some of his critics maintained. The other reason is that, although early on in the book she makes the disclaimer that what she is presenting isn’t an account of Bergson’s philosophy, but of its extraordinary impact, one can’t help but feel that a book about a philosopher has to be about his ideas. And while the author presents them clearly, she doesn’t really engage with them. She tells us what Bergson said, but we don’t get an idea of what she thinks about what he said.

 

Nonetheless, reservations aside, she presents a lively picture of an oddly contradictory character. Bergson himself was a shy, introverted, delicate, cautious, one might almost say timid soul, whose graceful, muted demeanour earned him the sobriquet ‘Miss’ among his early schoolmates. Yet his philosophy was considered disruptive, revolutionary and dangerous by more than one of his contemporaries. He annoyed practically everyone, from atheist logical positivists like Bertrand Russell, to the Vatican, which put his books on their infamous Codex of banned works. Aside from an uncharacteristically bellicose spirit he presented during the Great War, urging his countryman to save civilization by defeating Germany (Thomas Mann, on the other side, was saying practically the same thing, except against the French), for the most part, Bergson kept a low profile regarding the pressing issues of the day, focusing his energies – always, it seems, overtaxed – on his philosophical work.

And what was so disruptive, revolutionary and dangerous about that?

Bergson’s answer, one he gave to a fan who importuned him to provide her with a simple account of his philosophy, was this: time is real. To most of us, rushing from one thing to the next and always getting there late, this doesn’t seem news, let alone anything revolutionary. But it upset the applecart of western metaphysics. This, since the day of Plato, has always favoured the solid, stable, and stationary over the permeable, changing, and fluid. Heraclitus said that panta rhei, “everything flows,” but he was an outlier, and the main body of western thought has favoured the fixed over the flux, and, through this, the general over the unique. It was through the grasp of the unchanging that we acquire true knowledge of the world, and the evidence of this in Bergson’s day, as in ours, is the successful manipulation of the world we call technology.

Bergson said: Yes, we have achieved much through our fixation on the fixed. But in reality, Heraclitus was right. Everything flows. The stable, stationary world upon which we have built an imposing scientific edifice is not the truth. The brain, Bergson said, is an organ attentive to life, and the intellect it houses is in the service, not of truth, but utility. It’s job is to help us survive and it is very good at it. But its success is predicated on its ability to falsify reality; in this Bergson was echoing Nietzsche who said that ‘truth’ is a form of error which a certain species needs in order to survive. Given this, no matter how useful our ideas about a fixed, stationary world, they are unable to tell us anything about reality. For that we require a different means, what Bergson called ‘intuition’. The intellect is very good at taking pictures of the outside of things, snapshots from all angles and perspectives, which we put together like a mosaic. But to really get to know something, we need to be taken inside it. This is what intuition does.

Bergson came to his insight while a school teacher. Trying to explain the meaning of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, in which, no matter how fast he runs, the great hero can never overtake the reptile, Bergson had a breakthrough. According to Zeno, given a head start, the tortoise will always be ahead of Achilles, because in order to cover the distance between them he first has to cover half of it, then half of that, then half of that and so on ad infinitum. The space between Achilles and the tortoise is infinitely divisible. So, according to Zeno, the apparent motion Achilles would display in ‘real’ life (if Achilles were real, that is) is an illusion. Parmenides, Heraclitus’ great opponent, was right. The true is motionless. The same applies to Zeno’s arrow which never hits its target.

Bergson’s insight was that the paradox is only a paradox if we think of time as a kind of space, which we do, instinctively. But in reality, it isn’t. Time is real and very different from space. It is not divisible. Our sectioning it into seconds, minutes, and hours is a product of our inveterate habit of treating time as if it were space. We even call it the ‘fourth dimension’. But time is nothing like this and neither is reality. To get an idea of what the world is really like, Bergson said, we need only look into ourselves and recognise the constant flow of what his friend and fellow philosopher William James called the “stream of consciousness.” Here we experience reality first hand; we ‘intuit’ it. Our inner experience of time Bergson called durée, of which our English “duration” is a pale approximation.

Bergson got much out of his durée. Free will (Time and Free Will (1889)); that the mind is independent of matter (Matter and Memory (1896)); that evolution is driven by a purposive, inner intention, the elan vital, and not, as Darwin’s epigones had it, mechanical necessity (Creative Evolution (1907)); and that the universe was “a machine for the making of gods” (Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932)), were some of the bounty of his intuition. The positive, optimistic character of his thought, with an ever new, ever creative force at work in life, society and the cosmos, was a metaphysical tonic to a civilization labouring under the burden of a science that denied any meaning to existence and which spoke with confidence of its eventual ‘heat death’ through the inexorable second law of thermodynamics. That he lectured in the open, public, co-educational atmosphere of the Collège de France, and not the cloistered precincts of the Sorbonne, made Bergson and his philosophy an agent of democracy and the overall progressive character of what I call the “positive fin-de-siècle.” But with the Great War, all that was gone.

SPR members will, of course, be interested in the author’s account of Bergson’s interest and involvement in psychical research. Alas, the one chapter she devotes to this almost exclusively focusses on Bergson’s encounter with Eusapia Palladino. Her she is her most cautious, downplaying Bergson’s acceptance of the reality of the phenomena and emphasizing his prudent scepticism, a necessity for the career-minded academic he was. In a manner not too dissimilar to that of C G Jung, another of his readers, and one who carefully defended his standing as a scientist, Bergson kept one eye on the elan vital and another on his peers, making sure his pronouncements on recherché matters like telepathy did not overstep the bounds of academic good manners. One would have hoped that here, the author might have allowed more of the dangerous and disruptive Bergson to appear. The present writer can take issue with him on at least one point of parapsychology. Bergson’s vision of an ever creative universe inexorably advancing into the new and unpredictable did not allow for perhaps the most challenging of paranormal phenomena: precognition. From his perspective, the notion that some mind could have access to some event before it happened, either upended his metaphysics of absolute novelty, or was impossible. As the subject of many precognitive experiences, both in dreams and waking consciousness – and the author of a book about them  - and a long time reader of Bergson, I admit it is difficult to accommodate the two. This is, of course, a version of the free will/determinism debate, the scope of which unfortunately exceeds the bounds of this review.