Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People

"Berg- son . Emily is Anglo-French, and she has the perfect pronunciation of the name, not how English people pronounce it. Not that they pronounce his name very often, because Bergson is not well known in the UK and America, although he is still well known in France. Actually, in this biography, Emily gives some possible explanations for that. One is that Bertrand Russell absolutely hated Bergson, was very dismissive of his philosophy, possibly because Bergson was such a popular public speaker. He eclipsed Bertrand Russell in that in some ways. He was very much a public philosopher. Bergson, as Emily discusses, was responsible for the first recorded traffic jam in Broadway in New York when he spoke there. He was that popular! People used to hang onto the windowsills outside the lecture hall, ears pressed against the glass trying to hear what he was saying. So even though he doesn’t look charismatic, he was an extremely charismatic speaker, though sadly no recordings of his lectures exist. Something else that Emily brings out is that he had many, many woman followers. Perhaps this was due to his more poetic approach to philosophy, the language he used, and the openness to hinting at ideas rather than pinning them down in a strict, analytical way. This made him an appealing figure to a general audience, and particularly to women. Okay, so one of his most famous ideas has to do with time. He talked about the notion of durée , which is sometimes translated as ‘duration’ but more or less equates to ‘lived time,’ which is felt time, and very differently from clock time, which is divided into equal length units and measured strictly. He thought that a lot of discussion of time absolutely neglected the most important thing about time, in that it’s something that we live within, not measure, as it were. That’s quite a crude summary, but his notion of durée was in some ways a plea for acknowledging the subjective experience of time in an age of obsessive measurement and quantification. It certainly was influential and, for example, could have had some influence on the best man at his wedding, Marcel Proust. They were distant relatives. Proust was the younger of the two. Proust, according to Emily, was at pains to distance himself from the ideas of Bergson. Because Bergson was so well known at the time, and because people knew of their relationship, the novelist was frightened of his work being thought to be derivative of Bergson’s in his approach to memory and time in Remembrance of Things Past . And there are similarities and probably more influence than Proust suggested. Bergson was also very interested in evolution , and in the latest developments in science of his day too. He was a polymath. As a young man he was, as emerges from this book, a very brilliant mathematician; but he’s usually thought of as at more poetic end of philosophy. I’m no expert on Bergson. What I know about Bergson, I’ve learned from Emily, and I feel that, having read this book, I know enough to approach some of Bergson’s writing in a way that I didn’t before. But I wouldn’t want to summarise Bergson’s ideas only to get them wrong. So I recommend readers to go and read Emily’s book to get a foothold there. “It’s been a good year in the sense that some very good books have been published, but it hasn’t been a golden year” She’s a reliable source. Her PhD was on Bergson. But what I love about the book is she’s a great writer with a light touch. She finds ways of telling stories and relating ideas and thinkers and thoughts and social events that are completely compelling. This book has been very widely reviewed and universally praised. She’s just broken into the publishing world with this, and I expect she’ll write other biographies or philosophically-tinged books after this. It is a really significant debut and she is a writer to watch. I have to say I’ve got a slight vested interest, because I commissioned Emily to write a few essays for Aeon magazine that led to this book being commissioned, so I’m not completely disinterested. But The New York Times , Washington Post, TLS , and many of the major reviewing media have written very enthusiastically about the book. John Banville selected it as one of his books of the year for New Statesman as well."