In the second decade of the last century, The New York Times could not stop writing about Henri Bergson, whom it called “the favorite philosopher of the salons.” There was a gushing interview from Paris, in which the great man explained “his wonderful philosophy of the ‘vital impulse’ working in and through matter.” There were reviews of books by him and about him. A cable from Rome relayed the pope’s condemnation of his “poisonous” errors. A report from uptown counted over a thousand guests at a tea party in his honor at Columbia University. And when Bergson tried to slip quietly into the country in 1917, that, too, was headline news: “French Philosopher Comes on the Liner New York Unheralded.”
In her lively and deft biography of Bergson, “Herald of a Restless World,” Emily Herring tries to explain what all the fuss was about, and why his fame vanished almost as suddenly as it had appeared. Bergsonmania began with his performances at the Collège de France, where lectures are open to the public and the rich were said to have sent their valets to reserve seats. The fad went global when Bergson’s “Creative Evolution” appeared in English in 1911. In that book, Bergson announced that “for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on endlessly creating oneself.” Many conscious beings liked the sound of that. As Herring puts it, Bergson’s descriptions of life in terms of creativity and freedom reassured people who feared that biology “reduced human existence to a cold mechanical process.”
Bergson’s revelation first came to him when he noticed a difference between time as used in physics and time as humans experienced it. An awareness of the passage of time, which he dubbed durée, seemed to be something that science could not capture. Bergson knew that when he tried to explain durée, or some of his other notions, such as élan vital, he was gesturing at what could not be spelled out. It is “very difficult, if not impossible, to express in words something that goes against the very essence of language,” he told one puzzled correspondent.
According to Bergson, our intellect evolved in order to cope with inert matter, not active processes, so we are bad at understanding the latter. Luckily, we can draw on a nonintellectual faculty of intuition, and thereby get to the heart of things — provided, Bergson wrote, we “rush in headlong and, through an act of will, drive the intellect out of its home.” Herring describes Bergson’s nonintellectual “intuition” as “a form of knowledge that apprehends reality from within,” which would indeed be nice work if one could get it.
Some people adored the vibrant language with which Bergson evoked reality from within: “O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel,” William James told him in 1907. Others were exasperated and unimpressed. Bertrand Russell complained that Bergson rarely argued for his views, relying instead on “their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an excellent style.” Some scientists were scornfully skeptical. A British biologist wrote that Bergson was not great, not a philosopher and not even French.
Bergson’s father was a Polish Jew and his mother an English one. His parents left 10-year-old Henri behind when they moved from France to Britain because he had a place at one of the best schools in Paris. Bergson came to revere the institutions that raised him, as Herring explains, and she plausibly suggests it was his love of France that stopped him from speaking out about the Dreyfus affair. He believed Dreyfus, the French Jewish army captain convicted of treason in 1894, was innocent, but also deplored the divisive effect of a national drama played out in public.
In his last years, Bergson was inclined to convert to Catholicism, but did not do so, because of rising antisemitism: “I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted,” he wrote in a draft will. During the German occupation of Paris in 1940, he was offered exemption from the restrictions on Jews, but refused and registered as a Jew, apparently queuing in the cold for hours to do so. He died a few weeks later at the age of 81.
Bergson had ceased lecturing at the Collège de France in 1914, owing to exhaustion and subsequent ill health. The fact that his personal magnetism was no longer on display was one reason his cult withered after World War I. Herring cites a Bergson scholar’s observation that he had become a reminder of an age that people wanted to forget.
He had also become a figure of the establishment rather than the avant-garde; in 1927, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Then there was a damaging spat with Einstein, who shrugged that durée was irrelevant to his work. Herring presents the waning of Bergsonmania as if it were largely a matter of shifting philosophical fashion. Perhaps it’s also true that Bergson’s ideas were not substantial enough to endure.
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