‘Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People’
By Emily Herring
Basic Books, 320 Pages

Until the beginning of World War I, Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the most famous philosopher in the world. He attracted overflowing crowds of Parisians to his lectures and was greeted with the same enthusiasm in visits to Britain and America. He exercised a profound influence on a diverse range of readers, including a renowned journalist, Walter Lippmann, and novelist William Faulkner. Bergson won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927.

Part of Bergson’s in-person popularity had to do with his voice, recorded only once, which Emily Herring describes as having a musical quality and precision, all the more remarkable because he did not write out his lectures but rather delivered them as though he were spontaneously sharing with his audience the adventure of intellectual discovery. 

Bergson’s best-known book is “Creative Evolution,” an interpretation of a dynamic world in flux — but also in a process of refinement, like the philosopher himself who said he had no system. Thus, each time he began his study of a problem or concept, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, he had to start anew, drawing, of course, on his previous work even as he was unable to say how one thought or book led to another.

As Ms. Herring shows in her lucid and moving biography, Bergson was a revolutionary thinker who stood Plato on his head. The Platonic idea of universal forms, by which the material changing world could be measured, no longer applied. Bergson posited the concept of durée, the “continuous progression of the past, gnawing into the future and swelling up as it advances. … This survival of the past makes it impossible for a consciousness to pass through the same state twice. … As such, our personality constantly sprouts, grows, and matures. Each of its moments is something new added onto what came before.”

Ms Herring provides a succinct elaboration of durée: “Our personality is like a snowball rolling down a hill, accumulating experience as it grows. Time that passes is not lost but rather it is gained. We carry our whole history with us as we advance.”

When Faulkner’s character Gavin Stevens in “Requiem for a Nun” declares that “the past is never dead. It is not even past,” he is expressing a Bergsonian sense of time. Faulkner admitted to a French interviewer that he had been influenced by Bergson, and he stood by the principle that life has to be understood as a world in motion. Those long Faulkner sentences were an effort to carry the whole of history forward into the evolution of his characters.

Ms. Herring laments that Bergson is no longer at the forefront of philosophy, or of popular thinking about time — and that is because of several factors. He had his nemesis, Bertrand Russell, who envied Bergson’s popularity and who despised his philosophy, making every effort to treat the philosopher as a kind of mystic opposed to modern science.

Ms. Herring shows why Russell got Bergson wrong, but also how Bergson himself, so alarmed at the German threat to France in World War I, began to behave as a propagandist — even commandeering the attention of Woodrow Wilson during a meeting in the White House shortly before America entered World War I. 

No notes of that meeting survive, but Ms. Herring is able to show that one of Wilson’s closest advisors, Colonel House, was powerfully influenced by Bergson’s argument that the war gave Wilson, who feared that God would not forgive him for sacrificing so many American lives, the opportunity to save lives, to rescue Western civilization and reshape it.  

After the war, many philosophers could not forgive Bergson for making philosophy partisan — even declaring that it was virtually a French invention. He had, until the war, scrupulously avoided polemics, but with his nation’s existence at stake he capitalized on his influence as a public figure.

Ms. Herring’s biography is an extraordinary portrayal of a man and his ideas. It is difficult to imagine a biography of a thinker better than hers, but I will keep looking.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Sappho’s Fire: Kindling the Modern World.”