The Timeliness of Bergson

Undoing pervasive misconceptions about Bergson's philosophy (I'm looking at you Bertrand Russell)

Dear friends,

Something pretty cool happened last week! The New York Times published a positive review of my biography of Henri Bergson, Herald of a Restless World (you can read the review here)!

The author, Anthony Gottlieb, enjoyed my writing, describing the book as a “lively and deft biography”, despite clearly having very little time for Bergson as a thinker, as shown in the final sentence of the review:

“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.”

While it is truly delightful to be positively reviewed in such a huge outlet, I couldn’t help but feel *ever so slightly* dispirited to read an all too familiar assessment of Bergson as an interesting historical figure who is ultimately utterly dismissible as a thinker.

Such a take is not uncommon in the analytic/anglophone world, partly because it was popularised by a hero of analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell. In a scathing article published in the Monist in 1912, later reproduced in his History of Western Philosophy, Russell painted Bergson as scientifically illiterate and accused him of promoting an “anti-intellectual philosophy” that led to the absurd view that “incapacity for mathematics is therefore a sign of grace.”

These claims are demonstrably false. Bergson was very gifted in mathematics '(see chapter 2 of my book in which I explain that, at the age of 17, Bergson casually solved a problem which polymath Blaise Pascal had left unanswered since the 17th century). In preparation for each of his books, Bergson extensively studied the empirical sciences of his time from experimental psychology, to neurophysiology, to evolutionary biology and physics. In other words, contrary to what Russell suggested, just because Bergson found limitations in the methods of science did not mean that his own understanding of these methods was limited.

Furthermore, it is simply wrong to qualify Bergson’s philosophy as anti-intellectual or anti-science. Bergson viewed science and metaphysics as two different but complementary forms of knowledge, each limited in their own way. According to him, the perspective on reality offered by science would always be relative to its sometimes rigid symbols. For instance, the concepts of biology are often unable to account for the apparently incompatible features of living beings. In the introduction of Creative Evolution, Bergson wrote:

None of the categories of our thought (unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, intelligent finality, etc.) can be unequivocally applied to the things of life— who can say where individuality begins or ends, whether the living being is one or many, or whether the cells come together to form an organism or the organism divides up into cells? It is in vain that we force the living being into one or another of our frameworks. All of the frameworks crack. They are too narrow and, above all too rigid for what we would like to fit into them.

Biologists cannot do away with these symbols and concepts, nor should they. How else would they make quantitative predictions, or make sense of the overwhelming diversity of life, than by classifying, measuring, and conceptualising? But Bergson believed that philosophy, understood as complementing science rather than subjugated to it, might come to the aid of science by making it aware of its own limitations and unconscious metaphysics. He believed that progress in our understanding of reality would only come by putting “more science into metaphysics, and more metaphysics into science.”

These ideas resonated with Bergson’s contemporaries over a hundred years ago, and they still find an echo today. Quantification is seeping into the most intimate realms of our psyches via algorithms that purport to anticipate our desires in a consumerist, capitalist society. Some engineers believe that they are able to replicate human consciousness through machines, while critics point out that current so-called artificial intelligence programs simply rehash pre-existing materials without ever displaying the creativity and freedom inherent in the human experience.

In his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson wrote about the need to inject more spirit— meaning more humanity— into our technology, which is progressing too fast for our ethics to keep up. He also wrote about our need to find ways to open societies that close up on themselves and retreat into increasing authoritarianism and xenophobia.

I would argue that Bergson’s ideas have not only endured, but that they are currently undergoing a revival and I hope that readers of Herald of a Restless World will feel, as I do, that Bergson still has a lot to say to the present moment.

Here are some of the nice things people have said about Herald of a Restless World:

• “The most intellectually stimulating book I read this year” John Banville, New Statesman’s Best Books of 2024

• A “lively and deft biography of Bergson” The New York Times.

  The editors of the New York Times also put my book on a list of “7 New Books We Recommend This Week” which included the first tome of Cher’s memoirs!!!

• "Herring weaves together biographical detail with lucid accounts of [Bergson's] basic ideas. She has produced a much-needed reintroduction of Bergson to English-language readers." The Wall Street Journal

• Written in graceful prose and drawing a clear analogy with contemporary techno-optimism and its discontents, this captivates.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• "A solidly researched and earnestly accessible portrait of a creative, free-thinking intellect." Kirkus Reviews

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you have a creative end of week.

Emily