Herald of a Restless World. By Emily Herring. Basic Books; 320 pages; $32 and £25
MANY PEOPLE think that there must be something more to the fabric of reality than what science can explain. Four-fifths of Americans believe in the existence of “something spiritual beyond the natural world”, according to Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. But they do not get much support from contemporary scientists or philosophers, who tend to endorse the naturalist view. If Henri Bergson were alive, or even remembered, they would get more.
In his heyday—in the 15 years or so before the first world war—Bergson was the most famous man in the world, Emily Herring, a writer, claims in the first biography of him in English. Fans stole locks of his hair from his barber. A lecture in New York caused Broadway’s first traffic jam. Bergson influenced writers such as T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf and himself received the Nobel prize in literature in 1927.
What entranced audiences at his lectures was the “quiet, mannered voice that rang out to the depths of our troubled lives”, wrote one listener. So, too, the ideas it expressed. The French thinker, well-versed in science himself, challenged scientists’ view that the world is basically a machine. The insight on which he built much of his work is that science misses something important about time by viewing it in terms of space: an hour measures a 24th of Earth’s rotation. Time, on this view, marches on. But that is not how individuals experience it. Bergson used a musical example: a note has meaning only because of the notes that precede it. The “pure present”, he wrote, is “the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future”.
Durée, or duration, as Bergson called this idea, is why the future is not merely a rearrangement of matter. Each moment is unique, and therefore the next one is unpredictable; humanity, and life itself, can creatively shape the future. Bergson did not reject science and its material foundations. He saw life as both dependent on, and engaged in a struggle with, matter. “Intuition” joins the intellect as a means of apprehending the world.
Bergson was reviled as much as he was celebrated: by antisemites (who considered him not French), by leftists (who deplored his patriotism during the first world war) and by the Roman Catholic church, which banned his books, partly because he was progressive Catholics’ favourite philosopher. Logically minded philosophers accused Bergson of mushiness and mysticism. In 1922 at an event headlined by Albert Einstein, Bergson was asked to share his views that challenged Einstein’s conception of time. The physicist slapped him down with a curt riposte: “The time of the philosopher does not exist.”
“Herald of a Restless World” is the story of Bergson’s life more than a definitive analysis of his philosophy. But it is also a good primer on his ideas, which are needed more than ever, Ms Herring argues, at a time when intelligent machines are becoming more powerful. She views him as a corrective to a way of thinking that puts too much faith in science. His work is also a useful challenge to spiritual folk who have too little faith in it. ■
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