Herald of a Restless World

October 15, 2024
An illuminating study of the life and work of the acclaimed French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). In what is marketed as the first English-language biography of Bergson, Herring (Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds) diligently aims to reinvigorate Bergson's central philosophical concepts for a contemporary readership. His ideas garnered widespread attention in the early 1900s, establishing Bergson as an intellectual celebrity. His expanding orbit included such notables as Albert Einstein, William James (a close friend), and his not-yet-famous second cousin Marcel Proust. Herring explores how Bergson's philosophy resonated with a society transitioning into the modern world. Bergson's emphasis on the time-altering distinctiveness of personal experience, particularly his concept of dur�e, deeply connected with individuals grappling with rapid technological and social transformations. Bergson once summarized this concept as "time is not space." Herring notes, "It was the idea to which he returned in all of his works, and that made him famous." This notion of duration profoundly connected with those navigating the accelerating pace of modern life, helping to explain Bergson's popularity during this era of sweeping change. Herring later observes, "In many ways, the concerns of people at the beginning of the twentieth century echo our twenty-first century anxieties, and Bergson might well offer some solutions." Though Bergson would receive numerous honors throughout the 1920s, including a Nobel Prize in 1927, and write one final work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), Herring sympathetically traces how Bergson's popular appeal began to wane after World War I. He also faced antisemitic critics who viewed him as a "barbarian." Herring chronicles how health issues and changing intellectual currents would eventually lead to his relative obscurity. A solidly researched and earnestly accessible portrait of a creative, free-thinking intellect.

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Starred review from September 16, 2024
This scintillating debut depicts Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the Belle Époque philosopher of “flux,” as a countervailing force against turn-of-the-century certainties about technological progress. Herring, who has a PhD in the history and philosophy of science, moves fluidly through Bergson’s life and career—taking on with some chagrin the highly “un-Bergsonian” task of biography-writing, a process she notes is deeply “at odds with description of the flow of time as gradually ripening a person’s existence from within.” With his famous concept of durée (the idea that time is not simply another dimension of space, but an ineluctable flow), Bergson sought to convey—in contradiction to the machine-obsessed positivism of his day—the notion that life is an irreducible state of motion, accessible only through direct intuition, and not scientifically measurable. He achieved an unprecedented popularity, attracting massive—and primarily female­—audiences to his public lectures, which frequently courted scandal, much to the ascetic Bergson’s embarrassment. Herring uses Bergson’s rapturous reception as a window onto his era, diagnosing a disenchantment with secular modernity and a profound desire to return to a sense of the world’s mutability. (Meanwhile, other philosophers were making stultifying proclamations like “that it would soon be possible to discover mechanically regular” laws governing the mind.) Written in graceful prose and drawing a clear analogy with contemporary techno-optimism and its discontents, this captivates.