Playing Defense, Yet Again

No, not football (sorry, Lions fans!), but ah yes, philosophy. If a book review in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section, a review of a new book on Henri Bergson, is any indication of the contents of the book, I can certainly skip ordering Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, by Emily Herring. As it is, I’m only worried that too many people will read either the review or the book or both and never read Bergson to realize how inaccurately his philosophy is too often portrayed by others. 

 

(I see that the reviewer of Herring’s book, Anthony Gottlieb, a British historian of ideas and admirer and defender of Leibniz, has a book on Wittgenstein coming out in the coming year. Will he also find the later Wittgenstein “nonintellectual”? We shall see.)

 

Gottlieb quotes Bertrand Russell:

 

Bertrand Russell complained that Bergson rarely argued for his views, relying instead on “their inherent attractiveness, and on the charm of an excellent style.” 

- Anthony Gottlieb, in New York Times Book Review, "The French Philosopher Whose Romantic Theory of Time Was All the Rage," 11/23/2024 review of Herald of a Restless World, by Emily Herring 

Is Russell’s accusation itself an argument? I think not. (Was he jealous of Bergson’s style? Perhaps.) Russell’s critiques have always made me wonder if he ever read Bergson at all. He certainly did not do so carefully. Russell once wrote that Bergson’s views on duration based on sensory perception were all vision-based. Absolutely false. Possibly because Bergson’s artist daughter, his only child, was deaf, he focused more than once on auditory perception, one example involving a clock chiming the hours. We don’t have to have begun counting with the first sound, Bergson notes, to have a sense of the final number, because we have retained the whole in memory (as we hear a melody, not simply one note and then another).

 

As for Einstein and Bergson, working in very different domains, neither one understood the other’s concerns.

 

Gottlieb winds up his review of Herring’s book by speculating that the reason for Bergson’s falling out of fashion was (“Perhaps”) that his “ideas were not substantial enough to endure.” It’s true there is no school of “Bergsonism,” but careful reading of the French existentialists and phenomenologists reveals a strong debt to Bergson, all too frequently unacknowledged. Merleau-Ponty, for example, takes great pains to distinguish his views from those of Bergson, but methinks he doth protest too much. Read Bergson first, then Merleau-Ponty, and the genealogy of the ideas is clear. 

 

 

Bergson was not “nonintellectual” or anti-intellectual. He did not denigrate intellect at all but recognized its essential function in our daily, practical life. His concern, as a philosopher, was that our mind’s analytic powers, equipping us brilliantly to deal with the material world, were misplaced when called on for answers in areas outside its expertise. 

 

Similarly, he was an admirer of physical science and all its (intellectual) achievements but opposed to what we now call ‘scientism,’ a worship of the scientific method that leads us astray when we seek to apply it outside its domain. Chemistry, for example, rests on a base of discrete and separable elements, physics on invariable laws, but human psychology as a subject of study, particularly as applied to human emotions and motivation, can only be deformed if submitted to rigors such as found in chemistry and physics laboratories. So must the intellect, in order to act effectively on the material world, deform time by representing it as a series of intervals (le temps, time as objectively measured in segments) rather than a continuous flow (la durée, time as intuitively experienced).