It’s telling when you have to start a discussion of a philosopher’s biography with *no spoilers!* But such is the case with Emily Herring’s biography of Henri Bergson, HERALD OF A RESTLESS WORLD.
“The world Henri Bergson was born into was one in which aspects of reality once believed to be stable and eternal were revealed to be subject to continuous and unstoppable change.”(12) Bergson was born in the year Darwin published Origin of the Species and passed away in the first year of World War II. In between, he caused the first ever traffic jam on Broadway, debated Einstein and played a part in Woodrow Wilson joining World War I by suggesting he could “become the first to realize Plato’s dream of a philosopher king”(222). These and many other events in Bergson’s life, combined with Herring’s engaging writing style make HERALD OF A RESTLESS WORLD a philosophical page-turner. Although Bergson himself didn’t consider the story of his life important for engaging with his philosophy, and instructed his wife to destroy all his lectures, correspondence and unpublished papers after his death, I think it is the perfect vehicle to communicate his ideas to the anglophone world where his ideas are unfamiliar or misunderstood.
For me, Bergson is the most inspiring philosopher that I’ve scarcely read. Matter and Memory has been in my bookcase for over twenty years. Each time I start reading it, halfway through the introduction I am inspired to work on my own writing. Even though I have to make do with English translations of his work, Bergson has a way of overturning set ideas about time and reality in a single sentence. For instance, in his introduction to The Creative Mind he writes: “By the sole fact of being accomplished, reality casts its shadow behind it into the infinitely distant past: it thus seems to have been pre-existent to its own realization, in the form of a possible.” Because it happened, it seems that our present reality was contained as a possibility in the past. By analogy, we infer that the future is therefore contained as a possibility in our present. However, this is a stubborn illusion that stems from our analytic way of thinking about time.
Herring writes that “some of the most important thinkers in the Western philosophical canon built their philosophy around the idea that in order to know the world it is better on eternal, unchanging ideas than on the fluctuations and accidents of everyday life.”(14) “In the early twentieth century, Bergson would become the most famous philosopher in the world for reversing this trend, for being the thinker of change.”(15) Similarly to Bjornerud’s concept of timefulness, which we discussed in the introduction and previous installment of this series, Bergson criticized our obsession with eternity. While our intellect is one of the tools at our disposal, and is very useful in its ability to “freeze a world in motion”[i], the old saying applies: if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Just because we can only analyze our world by imagining it at rest does not mean the world is not actually restless.
Challenging time – that is what Bergson did. Imagine the passage of time as pulling a rubber band. The stretching of the band is a continuous motion. Analytically, we may say that the rubber band expands in tiny increments. However, in what is perhaps his most concise expression of a fundamental idea, “time is not space”. Pulling the rubber band is an action, and stopping it, as we do in thought when we divide its movement up in tiny increments, is another action. Just as in the thought experiment, the hare first has to cover half the distance before it can catch up with the tortoise, but then has to cover half the distance of that half, and half of that half, and so on into infinity so that it will never overtake the tortoise. But in real life – and you can see this for yourself in a youtube clip – the tortoise wins not because of geometry, but because the hare gets distracted.
With two world wars and a world grappling with the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Bergson truly lived in a restless world. And so do we. But the world is not restless because of all the events that happen in it. It is restless because everything is in motion, all the time, and has been forever. This is true for our planet as well – as Bjornerud writes, “all geographies are temporary.”[ii]
Bergson is kind of a philosophical role model to me. This may in large part be because Martin Heidegger, whose philosophy I know better and whom I suspect owed more to Bergson’s ideas that he cared to admit, is not a very good role model.[iii] But there is another key difference in Heiddegger’s and Bergson’s approach to philosophy. Bergson was a true public philosopher, in the sense that he claimed that every philosophical idea should be communicable in everyday language. At the same time, he also saw language as a necessary but limited instrument, one that never allows us to say what we mean to say and lets us only suggest it. As an example of this suggesting, in Introduction to Metaphysics Bergson communicates a profound idea by describing how, if we have never seen the colors black and white, it is impossible for us to deduce that the color gray can be achieved by mixing them. But once we know black and white, we can analytically distinguish them in gray.
In HERALD OF A RESTLESS WORLD, Herring discusses Bergson’s ideas, the events in his life, and the events in his world. While these events and ideas fascinate me, in the limited time I had to interview her, I chose to focus on learning more about Bergson’s way of working. How does one go about being a philosopher? I was reminded of the Writer’s Routine Podcast in which Dan Simpson interviews authors about their way of working: What time do they get up? What does their desk look like? Do they outline or not? What font do they use? There should really be a Philosopher’s Routine Podcast.
Bergson had a peculiar way of working, not revealing too much of his ideas before publishing them. Herring describes that when Bergson developed his early ideas, he was careful not to reveal them:
“Perhaps the young Bergson had been all too aware of the paradoxical nature of his discovery, of an idea that was better ‘suggested’, like the emotions evoked by musicians, rather than conceptualized. He knew that, as a philosopher, he could hardly do away with the constraints of language, and yet language was working against him. It was as though putting dureé into words at such an early stage might somehow compromise it, as though the constraints of language could cost his ideas their novelty and flexibility, strip away their unique nuances, and squash them into ready-made boxes.”(58)
His fame and success came with a price. Everyone ran with his ideas so that they were hardly recognizable to him. The philosopher Bertrand Russell was perhaps the one that misunderstood him most publicly, but he was in good company as Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein showed. In his own time, Bergson was misunderstood as arguing that we should only focus on intuition (or, more misogynistically, described as a ‘philosopher of women’).
“But contrary to what Russell suggested, Bergson was well aware of the limitations of intuition, and he did not present intuition as superior to intelligence. In fact, without intelligence, he argued, there is no intuition.” “Though Bergson was smeared as an anti-rationalist, his most fundamental point was actually much more straightforward: our intelligence is not the only tool at our disposal to apprehend reality, and science alone should not always get the last word. But this was one of many of Bergson’s ideas that would end up misunderstood and unrecognizable after being stretched out of the initial shape he had given it.”(137)
Another challenge that Bergson was dealing with, which connects directly to the theme of this series, is how to balance the stillness required for writing and research with his success. Herring describes how Bergson struggled with his fame, taking him longer and longer to produce his next philosophical work. In our own time, everything is so urgent and there are so many distractions that it seems almost perverse to hide away and write a book. I think this challenge is one that many who want to do public philosophy recognize. Since the previous installment in this series, I published my first public philosophy book. Even though it’s short and the ideas in it were formed long ago, it took me years to write. I even took a pause from writing for lack of time, instead interviewing others about their interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Which turned into the Life From Plato’s Cave podcast for which I interviewed Herring about HERALD OF A RESTLESS WORLD.
Bergson was also truly an interdisciplinary philosopher in the way in which I describe interdisciplinary philosophy here. He spent over a decade reading everything there was to read about a topic before writing a single word of his book. For Creative Evolution, for instance, he read everything that was available on evolution and biology in his time.
What fascinates me most is that Bergson was able to do all this without even deciding on a topic:
“Asked what he was currently working on, Bergson told Bernstein that he had a “special,” “anarchistic way of working” in which he explored “several avenues,” many of which ended up leading nowhere. For this reason, it was difficult for him to indicate the form his future study would take”. “In art, as in philosophy, Bergson believed that the final product should not result from the application of a predefined method or system, but rather that it should strive to tap into the creative process itself. New rules and methods, said Bergson, should emerge from creative genius, not the other way around.”(191)
New rules and methods – this is what we need now in the art of education. So far in this series, we have discussed SAD PLANETS and our human predicament in times of unprecedented (even from the earth’s perspective) climate and ecological crises, and the climate feelings that go along with it. Then, TURNING TO STONE helped us view ourselves from a geocentric worldview, attempting to heal an ego bruise inflicted when Copernicus and the likes flung us as only a pale blue dot in a boundless universe. On a planet that has never truly been at rest, we all need to read or reread Bergson, teaching us that change does not happen on top of a still reality, but that change is reality. But now the question is: how do we actually deal with being in this challenging time, in 2024?
If humanity had acted on scientific evidence a few decades ago, we would not be in a climate emergency. But now that we are, it places us in an uncomfortable position in relation to the next generations – the children and grandchildren of this world. They face a choice between a voluntary radical transition, or an involuntary collapse. How do we start telling them this story, and how honest can we be? This indeed requires new rules and methods. Next month, we will discuss Ginie Servant-Miklos’ Pedagogies of Collapse: a hopeful education for the end of the world as we know it, which is available for preorder but will be available open access for free. My interview with Servant-Miklos is already available here.
In other news, Sabine, myself, and all the other wonderful people at Future Based are cooking up a plan to meet and discuss these books physically in 2025. We are planning at least three reading group sessions. If you are interested, let us know!
Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson brought philosophy to the people is available here. Hoe Plato je uit je grot sleurt is available here or at your local Dutch bookshop. You can listen to my interview with Emily Herring here.
Previous installments:
TURNING TO STONE: What is it like to be a planet?
Editor: Lara Parodi
[i] Dixon-Román, E. J. (2017). Regenerative Capacities: New Materialisms, Inheritance, and Biopolitical Technologies in Education Policy. Equity & Excellence in Education, 50(4), 434–445. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2017.1399098
[ii] https://futurebased.org/climate-madness/turning-to-stone-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-planet/
[iii] Being a nazi and all