Meaning of life

"Herald of a Restless World

By Emily Herring

Basic, 320 pages, $32

In 1901, on a summer day in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Jacques Maritain and his future wife, Raissa, concluded a suicide pact. The two Sorbonne students despaired at the lectures of France's foremost scientists and philosophers, lectures filled with things "visible and measurable" but empty of ultimate meaning. Absolute truth, they were told, did not exist and existence was a mere "accident." Human suffering seemed, in Raissa's words, a "sinister comedy." She and Jacques gave themselves a year to find a path to meaning before deciding whether to kill themselves.

Salvation lay across the street from the Sorbonne, in the College de France. There, in a large, packed hall, a charismatic lecturer in philosophy, Henri Bergson, entranced his audience with an eloquence that was like "perfect and beautiful music," Raissa later remembered. Bergson revealed to the couple the fallacies of "pseudo-scientific" theories of turn-of-the-century positivism. He pointed them to "intuition" as a means of attaining spiritual truth. They left each Bergson lecture carrying, in Raissa's words, "little bouquets of truths." The suicide pact was forgotten; Bergson had saved two lives. Jacques Maritain later became one of the world's foremost Catholic philosophers.

Bergson captivated more than the Maritains. He is a philosopher whose present-day obscurity is inversely proportionate to his contemporaneous fame. Emily Herring's insightful "Herald of a Restless World" recovers the startling popularity of Bergsonism, which propelled the philosopher to worldwide celebrity. Bergson dined with Edith Wharton, met Woodrow Wilson and debated Albert Einstein. To hear his lectures at Columbia University in 1913, 2,000 people requested tickets, and hundreds mobbed the 500-seat hall. In 1927 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Though Bergson's philosophy can be abstruse -- an impatient Bertrand Russell said it was filled with "errors and confusions of the intellect" -- Ms. Herring weaves together biographical detail with lucid accounts of his basic ideas. She has produced a much-needed reintroduction of Bergson to English-language readers.

As a youth, Bergson didn't seem destined to philosophical endeavor, let alone philosophical celebrity. His father was a composer, who chose the family name Bergson upon leaving his native Jewish-Hasidic community in Warsaw. Henri was born in 1859 and raised in a warm family atmosphere until he was sent, at the young age of 10, to an elite French lycee. Short, slender and delicate, he had a quiet, lonely demeanor (his university classmates derisively called him "Miss"). He showed exceptional promise in mathematics and won multiple awards in the subject, which led his math teacher at the lycee to later lament that Bergson had decided to become a "mere philosopher."

Late-19th-century French culture was steeped in what Ms. Herring aptly calls a "religious faith in science." Bergson's mathematical prowess initially led him to explore the philosophy of "mechanism." But after reflecting particularly on the scientific approach to time, he stumbled upon what he called "a surprise." Time was immeasurable unless, as Ms. Herring writes, you "stop it in its tracks."

This insight was elaborated in his concept of "duration," which he introduced to the public in his first major work, "Time and Free Will," in 1889. In a world obsessed with scientific method, Bergson wrote, time is reduced to increments: seconds, minutes, hours. When we "clock" time, we cut it into segments, then place these next to each other, as Ms. Herring explains, "like interchangeable beads on a string." In doing so, we make time into a three-dimensional object. We make time into space.

But time is rarely experienced in this way: A minute can seem like hours; a day can feel like a few short minutes. When we live in time, we observe no border between one moment and the next. Bergson called the human experience of time duree -- time lived as continuous flow.

The concept of duree was arguably Bergson's most influential insight, but his hold over fin de siecle Europe and America was due less to any particular idea than to the radical premise of his methods, which questioned the empiricism and rationalism of the day. His popular 1907 book, "Creative Evolution," argued that there was far more to knowledge than science would allow. Using the "intellect," science dissects evidence and rearranges it into a seemingly logical order, but by so doing it misses the organic truth of life as lived.

Bergson championed "intuition," our human ability to "leap" away from logic, to have "sympathy" with what we wish to know, to perceive life as a totality. He used art to illustrate the point. An artist creates a singular work of art via intuition. Intellect may analyze the work and investigate the mosaic of color and line, but the result is a mechanistic reproduction of the artwork that does not capture the beauty of the whole.

For skeptics, these claims were more mysticism or poetry than philosophy. But for the thousands of spiritual seekers that flocked to his lectures, Bergson reopened a window to the transcendent that had seemingly closed in the modern age. Bergson led many to faith despite the opacity of his own beliefs. In a will written before his death in 1941, he confessed his attraction to Catholicism. But given the rising antisemitism of the time, he never converted, wishing, he wrote, "to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted."

Ms. Herring recovers so much that has been forgotten about Bergson, it seems churlish to suggest that, if anything, she has underestimated his influence. This unclassifiable thinker transformed not just philosophy but literature and art. "Herald of a Restless World" discusses the Maritains and their encounter with Bergson's lectures, delves into the relationship between Bergson and Marcel Proust (Proust was best man at Bergson's wedding), and devotes multiple pages to the debates on time between Bergson and Einstein. But the book could have included so much more. Bergson's ideas end up in Martin Heidegger's concept of "clock time." T.S. Eliot attended Bergson's lectures in Paris in 1910-11, and there are hints of Bergson's "duration" in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and "The Waste Land." Kazimir Malevich, who likely read Bergson in Russian translation, envisaged his 1915 "Black Square" as an experience of formless mysticism, created by "intuitive reason."

Ms. Herring could have expanded on her tantalizing intimation that the disciplinary boundary between "continental" and "analytic" philosophy, persisting to this day, was engendered by resentment of Bergson. Russell, Bergson's rival, was jealous of the fame of his "anti-intellectual" colleague. Russell's insistence on aridly logical, analytical philosophical discourse was intended to banish Bergson from the Anglo-American academy and back to the murky waters of continental thought.

Ms. Herring is surely right to say that Bergson's philosophy is timely and ripe for a revival. Neuroscience and artificial intelligence contribute to a contemporary "religious faith in science," exemplified by new philosopher-preachers every bit as dogmatic as the old 19th-century positivists. Revisiting Bergson can rescue humanism from the "sinister comedy" of a modern world captive to determinism and empiricism. Life, he demonstrated, was more than algorithm.

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Ms. Siljak is a professor of humanities at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Time Recaptured. Siljak, Ana.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 26 Oct 2024: C.10.