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Emily Herring on Henri Bergson
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Henri Bergson was once one of the most living famous philosophers. Now he is less well known. Emily Herring, his biographer, discusses this and some of his key ideas in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Nigel Warburton is the interviewer.
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A
This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel.
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Warburton, and me, David Edmonds.
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If you enjoy Philosophy Bites, please support us. We're currently unfunded and all donations would be gratefully received. For details, go to www.philosophybytes.com.
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French philosopher Henri Bergson was born in Paris in 1859 and died in January 1941 after waiting hours in the cold to to register as Jewish in Nazi occupied France. The Englishman Bertrand Russell was no fan of Bergson, but the two thinkers nevertheless did have one thing in common. They both won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although his impact is barely felt today, as his biographer Emily Hering explains, Bergson was hugely famous during his lifetime.
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Emily Hering, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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C
Hi, thank you so much for having me.
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A
The topic we're going to talk about today is Henri Bergson. Who was he?
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C
So Henri Bergson was a French philosopher. You may not be familiar with his name, but about 100 years ago he was kind of unavoidable. He was a philosopher, but he was also a celebrity. The lectures he gave at the College de France in Paris on topics such as time and memory and creativity were in extremely high demand. People would climb up the side of the window to listen in. And in the English speaking world, he was extremely famous, which is no longer the case today.
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A
That's true of many French philosophers, actually, that they do somehow break through into the public awareness. But was there something special about him?
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C
There was something about his lecturing style, first of all, that really drew in a lot of people from testimony I've read. There was some kind of really enchanting musical quality almost to his lecturing style. And he lectured without notes as well. I've read lots of testimony of people saying they had the impression he was sort of coming up with the ideas on the spot, which was very impressive. There's also the fact that he was writing at a time when there was a lot of anxiety around both sort of technological progress, the mechanization of the world in the sort of late 19th, early 20th century, and ways in which science was making its way into domains where it previously was, hadn't been so the mind and the origins of human life. And Bergson proposed some kind of alternative to the mechanistic view of the world that a lot of people found very reassuring. I think he wasn't anti science like a lot of people, including Bertrand Russell, have claimed, but he proposed that philosophy could coexist with science and offer sort of an alternative but compatible view of the world in which spirit and mind and human freedom and creativity would not be reduced to mechanistic principles.
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He was a child prodigy as a mathematician and completely immersed in evolutionary theory as well. Very much influenced by Darwin.
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Yes. So the mathematics thing surprises people sometimes, again, because Bertrand Russell depicts Bergson as this sort of mathematically illiterate philosopher. But in fact, when Berkshire Bergson was a high school student, he just happened to solve a problem that the polymath Blaise Pascal had left unsolved in the 17th century. And Bergson's maths teacher was amazed and also extremely disappointed when he found out that his prodigy student would end up studying philosophy instead of becoming a brilliant mathematician. The science of his time was always very important in all of his works. In his book about memory, he studied in great depth different pathologies of the brain and aphasia. And then, yes, he wrote a book about evolution that came out in 1907 and became an international best seller, Creative Evolution. Again, he read all the scientific literature of his day. In a sense, he was better versed in the science of his day than in the philosophy of his day, which again, comes as a surprise to people who've heard that he's this kind of intuitive, vitalist character. He was actually quite rigorous and actually took science very, very seriously.
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A
But he was a real polymath. And he had a musical family background, but also connections with Marcel Proust, which is amazing.
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Yeah, the musical background is interesting because his father was a musician, kind of a failed composer, really. He never knew great success. But he had studied piano with Chopin. He came from Poland as well. And yes, the Proust connection is another very interesting one. When you think that Bersin is a philosopher of time and mem. A family connection. Proust is second cousin by marriage, basically, And Proust was younger than Bergson. He was best man at Bergson's wedding, when. So Proust would have been about 19, I think, at this time. And actually, Proust suffered from the fact that his ideas about memory were being associated with Bergson's, despite him claiming, no, my ideas are completely original. But because Bersen was so famous, that link was automatically made.
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So one of the ideas that Bergson's most famous for is his view about time, specifically under the title of durer, the French word presumably meaning duration does it.
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So duration isn't a perfect translation. It's better to stick with Duret in the way that we keep German terms sometimes for German philosophers. But yes, the central idea in his philosophy, that of Duret, comes from a realization he had that time in the way that it is represented in the equations of mechanics and even in everyday language, doesn't carry any temporality at all in general, when we're talking about time, we are in fact borrowing from a category that's external to time, which is space. And that idea is central to Bergson's thinking, and it's something that he came up with as he was preparing for his PhD dissertation. He'd started out as a mechanist, a fan of Herbert Spencer, and it was when he sort of started studying all the different concepts of mechanics, including time, he had this surprise, he says, to find that there's no temporality in time.
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A
From what you just said, Bergson's aim is to get away from a spatial representation of time. So I'm assuming you mean something like if you talk about past, present and future, we see that going from left to right on a scale like a ruler, the present is right in the middle, the future's to my right, and the past to the left. And that's misleading. Could you say if I've got that vaguely right, yes.
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C
There's definitely this sense that scientific concepts, but also just our everyday representations of time, minutes on a clock, points on a line, are all as many sophisticated ways to freeze time, to stop it in its tracks, to freeze the sort of flow of time and cut it up into sort of identical solid units that are interchangeable and that we can measure, because how else would we measure something like time? Scientists have to spatialize time in order to measure. Talk about. Think about time. But Bersen is saying something is lost in that process, and that's what the philosopher should be looking at.
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A
And he says something similar about language in general, doesn't he, that obviously we use words, we generalize, but there's something specific lost in that capturing of something in words.
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So this is, I think it's kind of an obstacle, but also one of the strengths of Berson's philosophy, there's this sense that there's almost an incompatibility between what he understands Durer to be, but also the language that we use to describe Duret and time in general, because the way philosophy and science communicates is to use concepts with well defined contours, and these concepts generalize. We're able to place a vast diversity of phenomena under our concepts, but in doing so, according to Bergson, we lose sight of. Of what is special in particular about certain aspects of reality that we're aiming to talk about and describe. And that's very often the case with our own subjective experience, where if you Think about a concept like anger or happiness. That label is never going to quite express what it is for you to feel happiness, for instance. There's a sense in which something invaluable is lost if we use conceptual tools that are too rigid. And this is where Bergson completely loses the analytic side of philosophy, the Bertrand Russell's of the world, because he sort of advocates for what he calls more fluid concepts, concepts that would be more like tailor made clothes than off the rack clothes, but for portions of reality say.
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So just to get this clear, that may be against the spirit of what he's doing because in some ways he's giving a poetic account that we're supposed to recognize, I think, rather than pin it down precisely. But as I understand it, part of this is about the phenomenology of time, human experience of time, which although it can be cut up into small chunks and measured, that way of looking at things doesn't quite capture what it feels like to experience being in time.
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Yeah, so there's a really helpful, I think, thought experiment that he uses in Time and Free Will, which is his first book, where he imagines an evil genie, not unlike the one Descartes imagines, except this one is more interested in messing with our perception of time. And so Bergson asks what would happen if through some magic the earth rotated on its axis in 12 hours instead of 24 hours? And what if all the other phenomena accelerated proportionally? Bergson says that to the equations of mechanics this would make no difference whatsoever. The proportions would be kept. But to the astrophysicist living in this altered reality, there would be something different. And the astrophysicist or anyone living in this situation would perceive a change, would not necessarily immediately understand that it's a quantitative change. But. But Bergson says, I think I have the quote here, it's really good. He says our consciousness would soon inform us of a shortening of the day. If we had not experienced the usual amount of Durer between sunrise and sunset, there would be a change in the progress usually accomplished between sunrise and sunset. So it's this sense of accumulated experience with no clear cut before and after. That's really what he's talking about with the conscious experience of.
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A
Is Duret all about being in the present, just the present moment, the experience of time as it's passing Now Bergson.
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Thinks of time rather than sort of an arrow moving forward. It might be helpful to think about it as a snowball rolling down a hill and accumulating the snow as it goes. There's this idea that time passed is not lost, but actually gained. We carry our whole experience with us at all time. And this is why it is so upsetting to him. It's so wrong for him to think about time as sort of juxtaposable, interchangeable units. Because in a conscious experience, there are no two identical moments by virtue of the fact that you've accumulated experience. So even if you return to the same place at the same time and the weather is exactly the same, you're not going to be living the same experience because you have been there before. It seems obvious to say, but actually, Berkson is telling us what we're doing when we treat time and when we treat consciousness as sort of these measurable, quantifiable units, we're treating time as though these moments can be plucked out of our conscious experience. And he has another quite helpful, I think, image. He uses the image of a melody and music. Music can be transcribed into a succession of symbols and juxtaposed on a series of lines. And each symbol represents a tempo, a pitch. But that has nothing to do with how the music is going to be experienced. On the sheet of paper, you can erase a note, you can move things around, but when you're listening to the music, the notes melt into one another and form an organic whole. And it's not a succession of present moments in which you know you're hearing each note. It's because of what you've heard before that you're experiencing the present note in a certain way. And if you took a note away, the whole melody would be changed.
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A
Now, you've written a biography of Bergson, but as I understand it, he was completely opposed to the idea of somebody writing a biography. Why was that?
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Bergson actually, in his will, asked that nothing of his, that he hadn't published himself be published. And he said quite clearly, nothing can be learned of a philosopher's thought by studying their life. And he even asked his wife actually to burn all of his papers, his correspondence, his unpublished papers, which is a nightmare for a biographer. But I think there was genuinely a fear that after his death, his words would be taken out of context in ways that they had been throughout his whole life through his sort of international stature of celebrity. There were constantly sort of newspaper articles taking his words out of context, ascribing to him sort of paternity of ideologies that he knew nothing about or sort of artistic movements even. He was both said to be the father of sort of futurism and cubism. There was revolutionary Syndicalists claiming to be Berksonian when he was actually very sort of middle of the road politically, nothing to do with any of that. So I think he had this fear that it would be even worse after his death and that he knew there would be interest in his life.
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A
But it seems to me what a good biographer can do is actually provide the context which explains what he was really thinking, who his targets were, who his influences were, why he was saying those things at that particular point.
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Right. So in writing a biography of Berkson, I was kind of trying to not be in the position of what we call intellectual biography, sort of explaining ideas through life events in particular, because there are ways in which Bergson actually talks about the sort of dangers of retrospectively recreating a movement from external elements and. Yeah. Purporting to recreate a creative movement that just can't be analyzed and broken down into chunks. So I was trying to remain true to Bergson. And what I say in the intro of the book is that I see the book as three intertwined portraits. The portrait of a man who in many ways is very interesting in his own personality, because you have this figure who is at once horrified by fame, but also quite ambitious professionally. And so there's a contradiction there that's just very interesting for a biographer. It's also a portrait of his philosophy. I've taken what I find to be most interesting and inspiring about his philosophy and I've presented it in the book. And then it's also a portrait of the times, the context in which man and ideas evolved, all of that, to say that it's sort of a point of view on a subject, three subjects.
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A
It turns out one of the fascinating things about Bergson was that he really appealed to women in an age when women were severely restricted in the kind of educational possibilities they had. Why do you think he was so popular with women?
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C
So that was something that was really used against him in his day. He can't be a very good philosopher if women are so interested in him. And, yes, as you said, women didn't typically have access to a formal philosophical education. It turns out that Bertrand was lecturing at the College de France, which is quite an odd institution where all lectures are public lectures, there's no diplomas delivered, so anyone could go. But that's not enough to explain because there were other College de France lecturers that didn't have all these female fans. So not only were his lectures public, there's also a sense in which he believed that philosophy should be conducted in everyday language, and he didn't believe in using overly technical language. So you could see how that would appeal not only to women, but in the sense it would appeal to anyone who hasn't had a formal philosophical education. And then to tie back to some things I've been saying before, that in a time when there were sort of anxieties about general mechanization of the world, there was also a lot of hope in the early 20th century, pre World War I in particular. And if you think about suffragette movements, I think for women in particular, Berson probably represented as a thinker of freedom, as a thinker of creativity, something that they could latch their hopes onto.
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A
Do you think he's got anything to say to us over 100 years later?
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So, researching him and his time, I was particularly struck by the ways in which there are clear parallels between the anxieties of his time, anxieties about mechanization and dehumanization through mechanization, and then our current anxieties through facing various technologies. So the ways in which algorithms can be quite dehumanizing by reducing us to sort of a series of very rigid categories and using those for political or financial gain, and then the way in which we are currently faced with AI as what many perceive to be a threat to human creativity, I think Berson would have a lot, as the thinker of creativity, he would have a lot to say about that.
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Emily, Harry, thank you.
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C
Thank you so much for having me.
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