Metaphysics to die for

An excerpt from Herald of a Restless World

Dear friends,

I am very happy to share a second excerpt from my biography of Henri Bergson, Herald of a Restless World!

And now, an excerpt from Chapter 8 of Herald of a Restless World, “Snowballing”:

One afternoon in the early years of the twentieth century, a young woman named Raïssa and her fiancé, Jacques, lost the will to live. Standing in the shade of a cedar of Lebanon in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, the two students had come to a grave conclusion: life without meaning was not worth living. They decided that if they could not discover whether existence was “an accident, a blessing, or a misfortune,” then “the solution would be suicide; suicide before the years had accumulated their dust, before our youthful strength was spent. We wanted to die by a free act if it were impossible to live according to the truth.” Raïssa later attributed their youthful despair to the unbearable dissonance they had perceived between what they had been yearning to understand about the universe and what their institution of learning, the Sorbonne, had been willing to teach them.

Raïssa circa 1905• Coll. BNU Strasbourg

At seventeen, bursting with a desire to make sense of existence, Raïssa had enrolled at the Sorbonne’s Faculté des sciences, where she was to learn the principles of physiology, geology, and embryology. She was confident that her professors would teach her how to conduct her life based on “faultless truth” and help her understand her place in the universe. She later realised that these ambitions would have called for a more philosophical education, but at the time she “believed that the natural sciences held the key to all knowledge.” One day in class she boldly proclaimed that she wanted to understand nature “in its causes, in its essence, in its end,” only to hear her professor exclaim, horrified, “But, that is mysticism!” She soon learned that the metaphysical questions that animated her were held in contempt by most of her Sorbonne professors, who maintained either a materialistic philosophy that eliminated spirit from the world entirely or a cautious scepticism that did not allow for any kind of belief beyond empirical observation.

It was at the Sorbonne that she had met her future husband Jacques Maritain, in whom she found a companion in her growing despair. He was studying the natural sciences to complement his philosophy degree, and they had bonded over their search for deeper meaning. Raïssa remembered that the various teachings they received at the Sorbonne had left them feeling desperately empty and hopeless:

“[We] swam aimlessly in the waters of observation like fish in the depths of the sea, without ever seeing the sun whose dim rays filtered down to us. . . . Being too weak to struggle against these giants of science and philosophy, or to defend the rightness of my deepest intuitions, I took refuge in sadness.”

But then, when they had almost given up all hope, something miraculous happened. On a Friday afternoon, encouraged by their friend Charles Péguy, a staunch critic of what he saw as the Sorbonne’s sclerotic ways, Raïssa and Jacques exited their official place of learning, crossed the rue Saint-Jacques, took a few steps down the rue des Écoles, and entered the Collège de France. What they heard that day in Bergson’s lecture theatre restored their faith in a meaningful existence. In a sense, the philosopher brought them back to life.

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You have just read an excerpt from my forthcoming biography of Bergson, Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024 Basic Books).

You can order the book here.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you have a creative week!

Emily