I had only come across Henri Bergson recently—a friend had fleetingly mentioned that his text on memory was difficult to grasp, perhaps.
Thanks to Emily Herring, I now know that Bergson was once the most famous philosopher in the world. His popularity peaked at the height of the start of the 20th century. It had once caused a traffic jam on Broadway Street. People flocked in numbers across all sections to listen to him. Women mainly. The New York Times would go on to write heaps of praises for this philosopher. So did other newspapers and periodicals. Within the philosophical circles, Creative Evolution, Bergson’s 1907 book (translated to English in 1911), was compared to the likes of Immanuel Kant’s Critique.
But, just as quickly as his popularity soared, it faded in no time. And by the start of the Second World War, barely anyone spoke of Bergson. There was no taker for Bergson’s philosophy. He was resented by the Left and was admonished by the Right. His staunchest critiques called him a poet who need not be taken seriously. Bertrand Russell took it upon himself to uproot whatever Bergson was left in Western tradition. And to one’s dismay or delight (this depends, honestly!), Bergson would go on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
What happened?
Herring, herself a philosopher, had just read Bergson for her PhD, and then she thought a story needed to be told about this philosopher. In her own evocative narration in Herald of a Restless World, Herring tells us the story of Bergson and everything that made him so popular.
So, sometime in the mid-1910s, when a woman walked up to him after his class and asked him what his philosophy was, Bergson replied: “I simply argue, Madam, that time is not space”. What did it mean? When philosophers theorised time, they treated it as something stable—frozen in symbolic representations of a clock, calendar, or the points on the graph. Bergson’s conceptualisation of durée refutes this.
For him, time is qualitative in the sense that when one is in the company of a lover, an hour feels like minutes, and when one is waiting for a bus, minutes feel like an hour. Bergson would write in his deft style: “Durée is the continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances” (p. 57).
Later on, in his Matter and Memory, Bergson argues that memories contain a condensed version of our past and our lives. Our habits are informed by our memories through repetitions—often unconscious. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of habitus brings sophistication to this notion. Elsewhere, in Laughter, Bergson cautions us about the power of language to help generalise things all the while they are not. Later on, in Creative Evolution, Bergson downgraded intelligence by giving weight to intuition.
Herring sums up: “Bergson’s philosophy demanded that we invert what feels like the natural order of things, the habitual direction of our thinking, and step away from our obsession with eternity… [For Bergson,] permanence is the illusion, and change is the most fundamental reality of all” (p. 18).
Bergson’s notions—fluidity, creative evolution, intuition, and élan vital—attracted the French, the British, and the American crowds. Wherever Bergson went, people were waiting to listen to the philosopher. Between 1909 and 1911, over two hundred articles and books were written about Bergson in Britain alone. His books were translated across languages: English, Spanish, Polish, German, and others. There were schools inspired by the philosopher across the continents, with the Chinese and Japanese taking inspiration. As his friend Gilbert Maire recalled: “It became fashionable to proclaim oneself a Bergsonian. Every salon became Bergsonian. Every society woman became a Bergsonian” (p. 155). And the New York Times wrote: “Bergson is a popular philosopher of the day” (p. 162).
Russell would begrudgingly tell his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell, that Bergson “is the antithesis of me; he universalises the particular soul under the name of élan vital and loves instinct. Ugh!” (p. 169). Russell never really liked Bergson—jealousy, perhaps, as you see in the pages of this book. But Bergson would very soon go out of fashion. Because nine out of ten members of Bergson’s audience were women, misogyny triumphed: women were irrational, and therefore, Bergson’s ideas were influential to women. Bergson himself never truly engaged with his critics. And this, his long-time follower, Charles Péguy, would call pettiness and cowardice of the philosopher. But, perhaps more than anything, his lustre was fading.
By the start of the First World War in 1914, Bergson had divorced himself from philosophy—and engaged in war propaganda. He would speak of how the French civilisation was under threat and how Germans needed to be defeated in the world. He would go on a mission to America to summon Woodrow Wilson to join the war efforts. And he succeeded. But, as a philosopher, he had become less and less relevant. Bergsonism became less fashionable.
In his last few years, Bergson contemplated converting to Catholicism but decided against it. And by the time he died, there were just a few family members to bid adieu—and no one else.
Herring tells Bergson’s story with sheer brilliance. In tracing his life, Herring creatively draws on the lives and stories of people around him to portray the life of the philosopher. By opening each chapter with engaging anecdotes about Bergson, Herring places him in the limelight and foreshadows him, just as his conception of durée would inform us about time. By doing so, Herring brings Bergson—the man and the philosopher—to the people.