Emily Herring, "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" (Basic Books, 2024)
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Whatever you love, find it on eBay. eBay. Things people love. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morten Zaha-Gisard from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I'm here with a very special guest to talk about a fascinating topic, Henry Bergson. The book we are discussing today is called Herald of a Restless World. How Henry Bergson brought philosophy to the people.

to discuss the book is Dr. Emily Herring. Dr. Emily Herring is a writer based in Paris. She studied philosophy at Sorbonne and received her PhD in history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. Her work has appeared in Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Emily, welcome to New Books Network. Thank you.

Hi, thank you so much for having me. It's sort of customary to ask our guests to very briefly introduce themselves and talk about their field of expertise and more importantly, how they became interested in that field. In your case, it's philosophy.

Hmm. So I grew up in France and in France, everyone studies philosophy in high school, which is nice, or at least I liked it. Not everyone enjoys that. And so I then just decided to study philosophy once I'd had a few philosophy classes in high school. That was it. I just was completely hooked.

And it was a very sort of history of philosophy teaching that I had. And so I did encounter Bergson in my studies in France, which I wouldn't have done if I'd studied in the English-speaking world, in an English-speaking country. And then I also got interested in the history of science, kind of by chance, just because I happened to have a few lectures on the topic afterwards.

And for my PhD, I kind of combined my interest in Bergson and my interest in the history of biology. And I wrote my PhD thesis on the reception of Bergson's ideas among the biologists of his time. And after that, I briefly had a postdoc, which I ended up quitting because I was just fed up of moving around and I wanted to move back to France.

And around that same time, I got the contract to write this book, which I was delighted to be able to do because throughout my PhD studies, it kind of became clear to me that, you know, no one in the English speaking world had heard of this guy, Henri Bergson. Or if they had done, it was through the lens of...

Bertrand Russell's critique of Bergson, which is, we might get into that later, but is very sort of unfair or at least biased. Yeah. So I was trying to undo that with this book. Well, you actually made a very interesting point. I have a philosophy of course. My field of study was English literature and I'm originally from Iran myself. So I did my bachelor's

masters in orion then i moved to new zealand to do my phd but i was always interested in philosophy i tried to read about philosophy watch videos on philosophy but you're absolutely right because henry bergson is sort of this i don't remember when i first heard about him that was many many years ago in my phd thesis i did come across the idea of

Alain Vidal, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, the French word, the vitality debate, because I was researching that. And then I realized that even Henry Bergson had also had some thoughts on that. But that's when I read a little bit more about him. But you're right, I guess in the Anglo-Saxon world, he's kind of this figure that some people know, but they don't really talk about him a lot or he's talked about in relation to other philosophers.

And that's why when I was reading the Buddha, I was just fascinated by how famous and influential he was at his time. And I'm sure we'll talk about some of these things as we go ahead. So can you tell us a little bit about his background, his childhood, what drew him to philosophy, what kind of an upbringing or education he had? So he was born in 1859, which is the

coincidentally the same year Darwin published The Origin which is relevant because as you said Bergson goes on to write about life and evolution and he was born in Paris into a Jewish family his father was a struggling musician and composer and so the family moved around a lot to try and basically to follow the father's job search and

And around the age of 10, when Bersan was around 10, the family was in Paris again because they'd moved to Switzerland and back. And they were going to move back. I say back because Bersan's mother was from the UK. So they were going to move to the UK, to London. But Bersan stayed behind because he was doing so well at school. So he's got all these scholarships.

And so he followed sort of the classic French education system in the sort of most prestigious schools, climbed the academic ladder. He was very gifted in all subjects, winning prizes. But he decided to study philosophy because in his own words, he realized it was the subject that wouldn't force him to become a specialist anymore.

It was a subject that would allow him to continue studying sort of all areas of human knowledge, even though he was very gifted at mathematics, for instance, and his math teacher was very disappointed when he found out that Bergson was going to study philosophy. Interesting. And I guess you're right, because in his

And that's, I guess, one of the questions I'm going to ask you later on about his wide range of interests. He wrote about philosophy, math, science, biology as well, and a great interest in literature because you can tell from his style. But what was it that made him so, what is so particular about him that makes him so, made him so famous in the world at that time? And how did that fame influence his personal life?

So, yeah, this is something that is sometimes surprising to people in the English speaking world, because as we've said, he's been forgotten here. But at a time, there was a time in the early 20th century when he was the most famous philosopher in the world, one of the most famous people in the world, including in the US, in the UK, and in many other parts of the world. So he

It's actually around the time he published his book on evolution, Creative Evolution, in 1907 that his fame really starts taking off. So by this point, you know, he's already kind of middle-aged. He's already published quite a few serious works that have been well received in sort of the world of French academia.

But there's something about the way he is talking about in all of his works, sort of how consciousness resists quantification, how life itself tends to resist, the phenomena of life tend to resist the rigid concepts that we try to fit all these phenomena into. He has this way of being critical of certain aspects of scientific knowledge

without rejecting science that resonates at a time when people are feeling very anxious about

various ways in which science and quantification and mechanization are kind of seeping into all areas of life in areas where they hadn't, you know, previously been including sort of psychology. So now there's this idea in the late 19th, early 20th century, the idea that, you know, the mind itself is going to be explained. There are going to be laws of the mind in the same way there are laws of physics and,

and we're going to be able to quantify consciousness and evolution was something that also came as quite a shock to a lot of people. So there was this feeling of anxiety, I guess, and Bergson resonated with his work just was timely. It arrived at the right time, it seems.

And the fame aspect of his life was kind of unhinged in the same way that nowadays we talk about celebrity culture being completely unhinged. It was the case for Berkson that people were kind of stalking him and climbing up the side of the building trying to get into his lectures, or listen in at least to his lectures, and people were fainting in the lecture hall because that's how many people were there. And he was quite a quiet...

Apparently he was very charismatic when he gave his lectures, but he was quite a reserved person and he did not enjoy, he was not seeking out this level of fame and he didn't like it and he didn't understand it. And also he felt that it meant that

his philosophy was being widely misunderstood, you know, read too quickly. And he also worried that it would make him look bad, you know, in relation to his colleagues who wouldn't take him as seriously. And to a certain extent, he was right about that. So it was very difficult. There's something about French philosophers. They suddenly become world famous, like Jacques Derrida. And he also attracted a lot of enemies as well. Foucault, you're right. Yeah.

He's more well-known for his philosophy, but I was really... And I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I did not know he won a Nobel Prize in Literature. So I'm interested in why did he win a Prize in Literature given his philosophy? That's true, yeah. That's a good point. I mean, there still isn't a Nobel Prize for philosophy. Maybe there should be. But I think...

So it kind of came as a crowning prize in the late 20s after decades of fame. And actually, it came at a time when his fame was kind of on the down slope.

and it came to kind of celebrate his whole career and his writing style which I think for a philosopher in particular is very beautiful. He's a very clear writer but he also, I guess a lot of the way he conveys his philosophy is to use

somewhat metaphorical or imaged language, imagistic language. Not, you know, not in an aphorism sense or not in the sense that it's open to interpretation, but it kind of belongs to his philosophical method and belief that concepts, rigid concepts often

do not allow us to express, you know, be precise about the reality we're describing. And therefore, as a philosopher, he believed he had to put the reader on the right track of what it was he was trying to describe by using multiple descriptions and multiple sort of images.

And so there's something about that that actually, yeah, it would make sense to give him a literature Nobel Prize, even though he didn't see himself as an author, I guess, in the literary sense or as a poet. But he was often described both by his admirers and his critics to be a poet, which is very interesting, I think. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah. Well, I guess you're right. I was just thinking myself why there's not a Nobel Prize in philosophy. Maybe it's difficult to find a philosopher, influential philosopher every year. I don't know. But a few years ago, I forgot his name, the famous singer, American singer also got Bob Dylan. Yeah, Bob Dylan. Yeah. Also got a prize in literature. Well, but some philosophers have that talent.

to write in even Darwin, Darwin, I read Darwin. I'm not a biologist, but really enjoyed his style of writing. And that's also my next question. What was particular about his style of writing? You did touch upon that, but it would be great if you could kind of expand that and what role did his style of writing and also his style of delivery in lectures have any role in making him famous?

Yeah, absolutely. I think so. And it's interesting you mentioned his also his style of lecturing, because I think that's another piece of the puzzle that's really important. His his the lectures he gave in Paris at the Collège de France were public lectures, which is a bit it's a bit of a weird institution, the Collège de France, where all lectures are public. There's no enrollment. There's some I guess more people would have been able to come to his lectures.

And the people who attended those lectures and wrote about it all kind of describe a kind of, you know, magical experience that they've had where Bergson is speaking without notes and he seems to be tying together in words.

amazing harmony, you know, all these complicated ideas. And they often describe him as a musician almost, you know, there's this musical quality to his voice, but there's also this harmonious quality to the rhythm of his delivery of the lectures, which obviously we, you know, we can only go by these accounts, these secondhand accounts.

But I've read a lot of them. So it sounds like, you know, that was a real factor. And I think a lot of that also comes into his writing that what I just described, you know, the harmonious rhythm. I think you get that in his writing.

Even though a lot of the time he is writing about quite dry topics, you know, in one of his books in Creative Evolution, he goes, he spends a long time sort of going on and on about the different competing theories of evolution of the time of the early 20th century. In another one of his books, he's writing about neurophysiology in sort of painstaking detail. So it's not like it's all poetry. And yet,

It's just, there's something about it, a quality to it that's quite hard to describe, but that you know when you see it, that I guess is the quality of a very good writer, someone who's able to really draw you in no matter what the topic. Yeah, yeah. With an hour before boarding, there's only one place to go, the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club. There, you can recharge before the big adventure.

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And I guess, well, like I said, I don't know much about philosophy, so I might be making an egregious, you know, sweeping generalization that he was one of the few maybe contemporary French philosophers who was really accessible

most of the time is accessible as opposed to other French philosophers. And earlier you mentioned one of his books, Creative Evolution. That book, I guess, was very significant in kind of parachuting into, catapulting into fame. What was that book about? And how did that book make him more famous? Right. So it's...

it comes at a time when, as I already mentioned briefly, the topic of evolution obviously is a relatively new topic, even though, as I said, you know, origin 1859, creative evolution is, you know, 1907. So several decades have passed, but it's a time when

alongside Darwinism, there are all these other theories of evolution, not only sort of neo-Lamarcanism, but also others that are competing. And so Darwinism is far from being the accepted view. And I'm,

And as I also mentioned before, there's a great deal of sort of anxiety around the meaning of evolution. What does it mean for us humans to suddenly see ourselves as part of this very long evolutionary history? What does it mean for concepts like human nature? What does it mean for concepts like freedom or freedom?

the soul or you know people are having anxiety about all of these things and the way Bergson deals with this question and he deals with evolution for for his own reasons he's interested in in the philosophy of knowledge and the philosophy of life and so there's his own reasons draw him to evolution but the way he deals with it is to deal with it as a philosopher rather than as a scientist so he

He goes into great detail discussing the different theories of evolution of his time. And he kind of shows that while they all sort of capture an important aspect of the living or of life as a phenomenon, they all fall short in a certain way. Um,

And he proposes not an alternative, but a kind of metaphysical or philosophical view of how to think about evolution. And rather than trying to save human nature from evolution, he really embraces evolution as a process. He's very into the idea of change and the idea of there's actually, you know, not something like fixed human nature or a fixed world.

anything really. But he integrates the history of the human intellect, human consciousness within the history of evolution and is able to produce, I guess, a picture of evolution that people read as more optimistic than

some of the accounts of evolution, some of the way people understood Darwinian evolution as being life subjected to cold chance and this very violent image. Bergson has this

sort of global picture of evolution as a, as this sort of thrust forward and life trying to liberate itself from its material constraints kind of thing. And that's just kind of the first chapter because actually what he does in the rest of the book is,

You know, as I mentioned, it concerns other questions to do with epistemology and to do with theory of knowledge and the origins of the evolutionary origins of consciousness. But I think people focused on that first chapter quite a lot. It's quite a long book and it's a difficult book. But I think, yeah, there was something like hope. People read hope into creative evolution at a time when they were feeling like mechanistic thinking was giving them despair. Yeah.

So I don't know if that answers the question, but I tried to give a taste at least. No, no, it does. Yeah. And your expertise is the reception of Henry Bergson. I'm really interested. Apparently, even I could be wrong, but even I guess Pope had something to say about his works. Einstein, Bertrand Russell. So first, can you talk about like maybe Bertrand Russell, because she was also a famous philosopher, right?

I don't think he really, really approved of him. And what was Bertrand Ross's beef with him? Yeah. Yeah. So as you said, there was a huge reception, obviously, because these books were becoming bestsellers and because Bertrand was so famous. So he had reception across the board, but

He was admired by people all across the political spectrum and from different ideological and artistic and whatever you want backgrounds. The case of Russell is obviously important and interesting. Important because this particular reception helps us explain partly why Bergson fell out of favor in the Anglophone world.

But one thing I can say to start is that Russell and Berkson have very different approaches to philosophy, in particular where language is concerned. Russell has this idea of sort of producing a formalized language that will allow for no ambiguity, whereas Berkson is interested in using metaphorical or imagistic language to...

because he believes that the more abstract we get, the further away we get from reality. So these are completely different paths faced with a similar problem about language. There's also the fact that Russell, I think there's something a bit like professional jealousy that comes into play as well, where Russell was still up and coming when Bergson was already very famous.

And there was one incident that really made him angry. Russell was meant to give the presidential address for the Aristotelian Society. And this meeting was moved to accommodate Bergson's visit to the UK. And so they moved the address so that Bergson could attend. So this annoyed Russell. And then Bergson did attend. And apparently the discussion was quite heated between the two of them.

They disagreed on a lot of points. And so Russell made it his mission to take down Berkson. And the article he produced in 1912 that was kind of the result of this is, you know, shows that he had quite a superficial reading of Berkson in the sense that he accuses him of

not only being anti-science, but also being bad at science or bad at mathematics, which when you sort of look at the, at Bergson's life story is extremely far from the truth because he was actually something like a math sort of genius almost, you know, he solved a 200 year old problem that the polymath Pascal had left unsolved, you know, in the 17th century. Bergson solved it when he was 16 or 17 and,

And also this idea that Bergson was sort of anti-science, anti-rationality is a gross kind of misconception or caricature. It's true that Bergson was critical or at least

was trying to show the limitations of certain kinds of conceptual thinking, but he was in no way ever pushing for, you know, a return to instinct or intuitional thinking over rational thinking. He believed that, you know, rationality was essential. Science was essential and that alongside scientific thinking and analysis, there could exist,

metaphysical form of reasoning and of knowledge that would coexist and actually be complementary but that could not exist without the scientific reasoning so that's very far from the picture that Russell paints which is he's ignorant of science and also he's against it and it's obscure he's into this kind of obscure medieval thinking almost but that picture that Russell paints of Berkson is

it sticks and he also reproduces it word for word 30 years later in his own best-selling book the history of western philosophy that you know a lot of people still have on their shelf on their bookshelves i think i have it up there my i think it's my granddad's copy but still you know people still still have it i have a copy here too so i know i have the copy

So, you know, that's kind of damaging to Bergson, especially since Russell himself becomes a very famous public figure. And he kind of defines what counts as good philosophy, really, to a certain extent in the Anglophone world.

So he's the main villain of my book. And what about, there's also something with Einstein that you discuss in the book. What was his encounter with Einstein like? So it's a similar problem in a way. So this happens quite late. It happens in 1922 at a time when Bersan is already kind of, you know, very exhausted on the cusp of becoming quite ill and,

Einstein, again, similarly to the story with Russell, is up and coming, not quite as famous as he would be. And he comes to Paris at a time, so just after basically a few years after the end of World War I, when there's a lot of anti-German sentiment. And so the physics society refuses to host Einstein. And so he's invited to give a talk at the philosophy society instead, which is surprising for many reasons. And

And so Einstein is there and he's asked all these questions about

So philosophers, French philosophers are there asking him, so what's the relationship between relativity and Immanuel Kant's philosophy? And so Einstein's kind of like, oh, he doesn't want to answer the questions. He finds clever ways of getting around the questions saying, oh, well, everyone has a different version of Kant. So I don't know what your version is. So I can't answer the question, that kind of thing. So it's not going particularly well for the organizer of the event even. So

Bergson is in the audience, he has no intention of participating in any way, and yet he finds himself sort of dragged into the conversation by the person hosting the event who's kind of like, you know, this isn't, you know, all of Einstein's answers are these very short answers. We need, you know, some more substance for this event. And obviously Bergson

who's written extensively about time at this point, is dragged in and so he kind of reluctantly gives this quite long expose. I guess he's used to doing that kind of thing. So he develops this idea. He has studied relativity, he's studied Einstein's works very closely at this point and very seriously and he's among some of the few people, I guess, who are actually able to read and understand this.

And the gist of what he says is, I have no problem with the mathematics of relativity. But, you know, there's some unconscious metaphysics happening there. Once the physicist is done, the philosopher still has a lot to say kind of thing. So it's, again, you know, always this idea coming back. And Einstein, who...

His French isn't very good apparently, I don't know. And also he hasn't read Bertrand. He has this one line, quite devastating answer where he says, the time of the philosopher does not exist.

And so he goes down as kind of having won the debate. And out of that event comes all sorts of sort of satellite debates between other people. Bergson, who has published, he publishes a book about where he engages with relativity.

There are some areas where he gets things wrong. There are other areas where he engages very subtly with the thought of Einstein. But he kind of goes down as having completely misunderstood, which again is kind of an unfair assessment of

And it kind of contributes to his decline as a thinker. And it comes at the time when Jimena Canales has a book called The Physicist and the Philosopher, which really centers around this debate. And she thinks that it kind of, this kind of pinpoints precisely kind of the moment in the 20th century where the scientist becomes the ultimate figure of authority, of knowledge,

and all the other forms of knowledge combined are seen as inferior. You know, philosophy, we wouldn't go to philosophers to ask their opinion on things anymore, but we would go to physicists. Screwball peanut butter whiskey? Why the hell not? A little salty, a little sweet, a little savory, and always smooth. Screwball, the original peanut butter whiskey that's unexpectedly delicious.

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didn't find Chomsky's critique of him. I mean, he didn't really have a critique. He was just a passing comment, I guess, somewhere. But anyway, I guess there's something about them that attracts a lot of enemies. Yeah. I'm not interested to know more about

ideas on science because he has been, it's a stereotype that he's been labeled as an anti-science. He had some thoughts about Max Weber's idea of disenchantment. But why did he get that reputation that it was anti-science? And he did also talk about, like I mentioned at the beginning of the interview,

vitality or Elan Vittal. Do you believe in spiritualism or maybe there are too many questions into one here? No, no, I can do my best. So I think some of what I've already mentioned about kind of he views science and metaphysics as two different but complementary forms of knowledge and I think too often he was understood as pushing for an entirely metaphysical view.

You mentioned the Élan Vidal, which I always find really interesting to discuss because too often, I think because he engages so seriously with the science of his time and in creative evolution, he engages really seriously with the different theories of evolution of the time. I think he's often read as proposing his alternative replacement theory, you know, the theory that will replace all of these ideas, which would be the theory of the Élan Vidal theory.

The Élan Vital, the way Bergson introduces it, is as an image. He introduces it as the image taken from the physical world that best expresses the idea of life that he's trying to get at. And there's no sense in which he's claiming that this image should replace life.

our conception of natural selection or our conception of any other form of mechanism of evolution. What he is saying is that it might point us, it gives us this metaphysical view of life that the scientists are unable to produce because, and so this is a really important point and I find really interesting,

what scientists do and science and sort of all rational, um, all rational productions are practice oriented. There's nothing like this kind of pure, uh, endeavor of rationality for better. And when we're using, um,

reason it is because we are oriented towards practical results we aim to measure we aim to build and this kind of he even come comes up with an evolutionary explanation for this our intellect has come about as the product of an evolution in which we had to adapt to the outside world the material world and we

as a result have kind of produced concepts that are very similar to the inanimate objects that we were trying to control. So there's this idea that science is necessarily limited in what it can say because it is bound to this sort of

to these practical results. But if you're no longer interested in measuring, if you're no longer interested in having these practical results, then you can offer this kind of more intimate view of what reality is, but it won't produce the results that are very important for our daily life and for our civilization. All the technology that we have is thanks to science. So metaphysics is not meant to replace science.

But it is kind of something like a different point of view, almost like an internal point of view, whereas the points of view of analysis are all sort of relative to the symbols that they use and the practical needs that are being expressed. So I don't know if that makes sense, but I think.

Just to wrap up this idea, Bertrand is misread as attempting to take down science when what he's doing is saying science is important. What they're doing, they, you know, they're limited in what they're doing, but they have to be because that's the very nature of what they're doing. As a philosopher, as a metaphysician, I don't have the same practical constraints. Therefore,

I can sort of produce a completely different vision of reality. And both visions, the sort of deeply empirical vision of science and the metaphysical vision can complement one another and actually push one another forward because the metaphysician can provide glimpses, insights into reality, but also empirical research actually guides the metaphysician as well. So it's kind of a...

yeah sorry that was a long I feel like I went all over the place there but it's it's important for me that people understand that yeah yeah you're right he's not this kind of anti-rationalist is a word that's used against him a lot um

It's not really a good describer of what he's actually trying to say. And I think you've done a great job in the book describing how it's a mis-stereotype or misunderstanding of him. And I think it also ties well with what you said earlier about a lot of his critics hadn't really studied him or hadn't really read him for whatever reason.

So we have talked about many different aspects of his philosophy and his life, but I'm interested to know about philosophy itself.

about Henry Bergson as a philosopher. So what are some of his most important philosophical contributions? I know they may be a lot, so just feel free to mention a couple. And I'm interested to know if he had a systematic approach to philosophy, like other philosophers such as Karl Marx, when we know what he wrote about, his focus was. Did he have that one? Because to me, as an outsider, it seems that he wrote a lot about a wide range of topics.

Sure. So I guess it probably would make most sense to talk about Duret a little bit, because this is one of the central ideas of Bergson's philosophy. And so it has to do with time. And it kind of stems, this idea of Duret stems from his realization that he had quite early on in his career, that time as it is represented in history,

scientific equations often represented by the letter t you know he's looking at the mechanics of his time so so you know late 19th century we're talking so time is represented in these equations or even in everyday language or even in most of philosophy does not contain any temporality at all and so what does he mean by this there's a

quite useful thought experiment he uses in his first book, Time and Free Will, where he imagines a kind of powerful genie who is able to accelerate time. So the earth will rotate on its axis in 12 hours instead of 24 hours and everything else will accelerate proportionally. Bergson says that to the equations of time,

the astrophysicist, this makes no difference whatsoever because the proportions are preserved. But to the

person experiencing this change in tempo, it makes quite a significant difference. And the difference has to do with our perception of the storing up of experience that happens between sunrise and sunset. And so Bertrand is saying this is precisely what is removed from our concept of time.

It's this storing up of experience and what we get instead is something more akin to our concept of space. We treat time and we treat our units of time and we treat the way we represent time as if we were dealing with objects in space with clear defined boundaries.

clearly defined boundaries, where when you look at how change and how time are experienced in consciousness, these clearly defined boundaries do not exist. You can't pinpoint exactly when someone stops being a child and becomes a teenager, for instance. It's not like it's a clear...

That's just one way of thinking about it. And another way of thinking about it is, you know, time that passes is not time lost. It is time gained. We are, you know, it's like a snowball rolling down a hill, accumulating snow as it goes down. We are sort of constantly carrying our whole experience with us. And this is important because often people,

in science and in everyday language, we also think about time, moments in time as kind of interchangeable, when actually, you know, no two experiences can be the same in one consciousness because of the accumulation of experience. So that's a tiny taste of what Bergson means by durée. I could go into, you know, I could go into a lot more considerations, but I think

It's interesting to just, as you mentioned, how do we get from that to creative evolution, for instance? Where is the systematic thinking here? Well, there isn't any systematic thinking. Dachshund quite explicitly says he does not believe in having a system of philosophy. He believes that every new problem,

the philosopher studies, the philosopher should start from scratch. And so there's this idea that every time he does, he returns to Duret, you know, Duret, this idea that I think maybe one other thing I should underline, and it's sort of the big philosophical move that Bergson makes is he

brings into question one of the main tenets of Western philosophy, which is from Plato to other major thinkers, there's always this idea that what is immobile, what is static, what is unchanging has more value, epistemic value than things that change. Change is often represented as decay, as

corruptible as something relative to sensory knowledge when actually what is pure and what is real are sort of eternal ideas and concepts. And Bertrand says, no, actually it's change that is more real and

And it is, you know, the ways in which we freeze change, the ways in which we have to stop time and spatialize time. These are this is the artifice. And this is, you know, an abstraction that we that is useful. But that's not what reality is. Reality is sort of this perpetual change.

And it's not like there's a solid thing on which the change is happening. No, the change is reality itself. And you see it through evolution, the evolution of life. And you see it in our consciousness at every instant. And so I jumped to that. I'm going to now jump back to the idea that Vaxen doesn't have a system. He also, I think, very interestingly believed that...

A serious philosopher can only study about three or four problems in their entire lifetime. You choose your problem you want to study and then you spend a decade reading everything, researching everything, thinking about it, and then you will produce your ideas. And anyone who claims to be able to do more than that is not doing very good philosophy. I think that's kind of cool because it's this idea that

you know, quality over quantity, I guess, in a way. You know, if you think about what academia is like currently, where you have to publish, publish, publish, publish. I quite like this idea of, no, you publish every 10 years. And so, no, he's not producing a system in the sense that you could get a principle from his ideas that you could then apply to any other problem. He says, you know,

I start anew with each problem. This always brings him back to a certain vision of Duret, but...

He's sort of starting fresh every time. And Brixen was also involved in politics somehow. I'm guessing it was because of his fame. So I'm sure that's another aspect of his life that our listeners are interested to know more about. So what was his involvement in politics, especially the mission that he was sent to the U.S. to convince President Wilson to join the war? Can you talk about that aspect of his life, please?

Of course. Yeah. So before World War One, he says nothing about politics. He's not, you know, he's not publicly involved in politics. And it kind of goes along with this, this idea of not wanting to apply his ideas. You know, he didn't feel like he could because he hadn't spent 10 years thinking about the question. But during World War One, what happens is

that the French government are trying to find ways of convincing the United States to join the war on their side. And they're thinking about how they could do this. And they decide that sending a diplomat would be seen as too obvious, too aggressive in a way.

And because of who President Wilson was, the U.S. president, he was, you know, he had been president of Princeton, if I'm not mistaken. You know, he was someone who was interested in philosophy. They decided to send Berkson.

on a kind of secret mission. So he's not officially there for political reasons. And so he crosses the Atlantic at a time when it's very dangerous to do so because there is kind of submarine warfare going on at this point. And he arrives in, he goes to, to,

to New York and to Washington and he meets all the right people, he makes these connections, he's able to get closer and closer to the inner circle of the president and become friends with these influential people. And he eventually ends up meeting Wilson a few times, I believe, and there's no real record of what was said, but

We know from Bexen's sort of preparatory notes that his arguments had to do with, for instance, the idea that if the US wanted to have anything to do with the creation of the Society of Nations, the League of Nations after the war, then they would have to be part of the war to be able to participate in kind of rebuilding the national international order after the war.

And we know that those kinds of arguments, you know, were among those that Wilson used to justify entering the war. So that is fascinating. And, you know, it's a very unknown aspect of World War One history, I guess.

And interestingly enough, after the war, Bergson was also part of an advisory organization for the League of Nations that was called the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Marie Curie was also there. Einstein briefly, but Einstein didn't really get along with for various reasons. It didn't work out well.

So yeah, there's this kind of diplomatic role and also kind of, I guess, furthering French propaganda, you know, at this time, you know, furthering the message that the French government wanted furthered at this point. So it's a very important role for someone who is a mere philosopher, I guess. And...

What about his religion, his Jewish identity? I think in the book you talk about how he wanted to convert to Catholicism, but he decided not to. What was the role of his religion in his personal life and also in his philosophy? Right. So, yeah, as I mentioned, he's born Jewish. He...

Unfortunately, you know, in the early 20th century, France is an extremely anti-Semitic place. There's a lot of really sort of vile anti-Semitic rhetoric in the press. And this was grounds on which Vaxen was relentlessly attacked.

when he was at his most famous sort of when he was at the top of French institutions, there was sort of the far right anti-Semitic royalist Catholic press would attack him on the grounds that

He was subverting French culture. He wasn't properly French because he was Jewish. And he was undoing the important work of, you know, Cartesian rationality with his, you know, wishy-washy philosophy. Basically, those were the arguments and they were extremely violent and vile.

So he definitely had a complicated relationship with being Jewish in the sense that he didn't want to advertise the fact that he was Jewish too much. And also he didn't really, as far as I can tell, practice that much Jewishness.

he wasn't into the practice of religion until later in his life when he, for various reasons, becomes interested in mysticism and in particular Christian mysticism. But the term mystic he uses, he applies to a wide variety of figures, including Socrates. And he has very interesting reflections on the figure of the mystic as opposed to kind of dogmatic religion.

But he comes to the conclusion that Christian mysticism and in particular sort of Catholicism, that's for him the highest expression of what he is interested in at the time. And he befriends sort of figures, a lot of his friends and towards the end of his life, sort of Catholic as well.

and he, as you said, he, he considers converting to Catholicism. Um, but on the one hand, he's not that bothered about the kind of ritualistic aspect of any of this. He's more interested in, in, I guess the ideas behind what he, behind the religion. Um,

And also, so by this point, you know, 1930s say, you know, Hitler has arrived in power in Germany. He does not want him converting to be misconstrued as a kind of rejection.

of his own people, of Jewish people. He sees the sort of wave, you know, the unstoppable wave of antisemitism that's, you know, crashing all over Europe. And he just does, he thinks this is not, you know, good timing. Yeah.

And interestingly, so he dies in 1941 in Paris, occupied by the Nazis at this point. And he is offered exemption by the collaborationist Vichy government. So they offer him, you know, as this Nobel Prize winner, as this famous philosopher, they offer him exemption from the anti-Semitic

laws in place and he refuses. So he maintains this level of solidarity, I guess, with his people in a sense. And this is actually kind of what kills him because he then stands in line for hours and hours and hours in the cold as a very elderly man to register as a Jew because that was, you know, that's what they had to do.

And then he got pneumonia and died quite soon after that. So it's interesting, this ambivalence there. Yeah, that's the gist of it, really. So at one point in time, he was

most famous philosopher maybe in Europe or in the world. But did his fame start to decline towards the end of his life and career? Yeah, even before that, really, it was...

post-World War I is when it starts to decline, I would say, not only because he stops lecturing. So he stopped lecturing in 1914, intending to return. But then, you know, the events of the war and his role in that, and then, you know, his diplomatic and his role continues after the war. And so he just simply does not have time to keep lecturing. But there's also the fact that

I guess what was seen as subversive, as interesting, as exciting, as important before the war completely changed after the war. Not only was a whole generation of young people kind of lost literally, but also for the people who remained, there was this sense that what counted as hopes and dreams and ideals and ideas just shift after the war because the war was so cataclysmic that it just shifts everything.

And so he goes from being seen as exciting and, you know, and subversive to being seen as something of a classic, which kind of means someone that everyone's heard of, but no one's really read. You know, he becomes a monument rather than, you know, someone who's actively inspiring people. And there's also the fact that he becomes very ill from the mid 20s. He gets sort of really horrendous rheumatoid arthritis and,

So that means that he's, even though he does work on his final book that comes out in 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, he's just not, you know, he's not engaging. He's not visible to the public. Yeah.

And then obviously there's the Einstein debacle that doesn't help. There's the fact that people like Bertrand Russell are gaining in prominence in their own careers. And so all of this kind of contributes to him slowly disappearing from view until my book. And I'm joking. There have been other instances of him being revived, not least Deleuze in France. And then even recently in the English speaking world, there have been quite a few good examples

attempt to bring him back. So I'm not solely responsible. But it's interesting because I think it was today that I was going through my Twitter account and I saw Nigel Warburton, if I'm not mistaken, or his famous philosopher in England. He had chosen five, his top five philosophy books of 2024 and your book was the first.

So on his Twitter, your book was the first. And I must admit that for somebody who doesn't know much about Bergson, I really enjoyed this week because you learned something about, first of all, the history of the time that he was born and lived. You learned something about his philosophy. It's sort of an intellectual history, intellectual biography, and also history as well, which is a great, I guess, gateway for the uninitiated who wants to learn more about Bergson.

Well, that's great to hear. Thank you. And I guess that's a perfect segue to my final question, which is, you've talked about Brickson, you've kind of brought him back to the Anglo-Saxon world with this really popular book. But I'm interested to know how we in the 20th century, with all these economic and environmental problems that people have, how can Brickson help us to deal with all these existential angst or questions we face today?

Throughout the research for this book, I was really surprised and interested to see parallels between the anxieties of the people in the early 20th century and our current anxieties

A lot of those anxieties have to do with ways in which we're being dehumanized through technology, in a sense, or dehumanized through ways of thinking about ourselves in strictly quantitative terms. So that was the worry of people of Berkson's time. But I think this comes back now with, it may be in an even more worrying way with, you know,

ideas of algorithms that fit us into neat sort of well-defined boxes and in a quite dehumanizing way that can then be used to earn money or, you know, capitalistic gain or political manipulation, even the ways in which

There are claims that sort of generative AI is creative when actually when you look at it closer, what is happening is that it's rehashing pre-existing human endeavors and then presenting it as kind of new. So Bertrand is the thinker of AI.

and the thinker of, you know, um, qualitative experience rather than, than quantitative, um, I think has a lot to say to the present day. And if I can just quickly find there's a passage, which I think is from his Nobel speech. Um, it might be in the epilogue, um,

of the book and you can edit out me looking for this passage, but which I just really think, yeah. So he says this in the 1920s.

But I think it's amazing how it really kind of applies 100 years later. He says, if the 19th century made tremendous progress in mechanical inventions, it too often assumed that these inventions would raise the moral level of mankind. Increasing experience has proved on the contrary that the technological development of a society does not automatically result in

in the moral perfection of the men living in it, and that an increase in the material means at the disposal of humanity may even present dangers unless it is accompanied by a corresponding spiritual effort. To take only the most striking example, one might have expected that the use of steam and electricity by diminishing distances would by itself bring about a moral rapprochement between peoples.

Today, we know that this was not the case and that antagonisms far from disappearing will risk being aggravated if a spiritual progress, a greater effort towards brotherhood is not accomplished. So if you replace steam and electricity with the Internet, it kind of is scarily accurate. And that's in resonance with themes he develops in his final book, actually. But

I yeah all of this to say that I think he still has a lot to say to the present day you're absolutely right you're absolutely right and with a beautiful passage you just read and I think it is correct what the issues that he was dealing with it was concerned with 100 years ago still resonates with us the whole as you mentioned you know the whole AI technology robotics automation

But at the end of the day, there's something else that makes life more meaningful. And I guess that's where Bergson can also help us better understand our place in the world. It was a beautiful passage you read, so I'm not going to talk more. I'm going to end it here. But I do want to reemphasize that it's such a wonderful book. It's highly accessible. So I do strongly recommend it to our listeners and viewers.

to read the book. The book we just discussed was Hero and Love of a Restless World, How Henry Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, published by Basic Books, 2024. Dr. Emily Herring, thank you very, very much for taking the time to talk with us on New Books Network about this wonderful book. Thank you so much for having me. I've had a lovely time.