Bergson was born in Paris in the rue Lamartine in 1859, the same year as Edmund Husserl.72 This was also the year in which Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared. Bergson was a singular individual right from childhood. Delicate, with a high forehead, he spoke very slowly, with long breaths between utterances. This was slightly off-putting, and at the Lycée Condorcet, his high school in Paris, he came across as so reserved that his fellow students felt ‘he had no soul,’ a telling irony in view of his later theories.73 For his teachers, however, any idiosyncratic behaviour was more than offset by his mathematical brilliance. He graduated well from Condorcet and, in 1878, secured admission to the Ecole Normale, a year after Emile Durkheim, who would become the most famous sociologist of his day.74 After teaching in several schools, Bergson applied twice for a post at the Sorbonne but failed both times. Durkheim is believed responsible for these rejections, jealousy the motive. Undeterred, Bergson wrote his first book, Time and Free Will (1889), and then Matter and Memory (1896). Influenced by Franz Brentano and Husserl, Bergson argued forcefully that a sharp distinction should be drawn between physical and psychological processes. The methods evolved to explore the physical world, he said, were inappropriate to the study of mental life. These books were well received, and in 1900 Bergson was appointed to a chair at the Collège de France, overtaking Durkheim.
But it was L’Evolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), which appeared in 1907, that established Bergson’s world reputation, extending it far beyond academic life. The book was quickly published in English, German, and Russian, and Bergson’s weekly lectures at the Collège de France turned into crowded and fashionable social events, attracting not only the Parisian but the international elite. In 1914, the Holy Office, the Vatican office that decided Catholic doctrine, decided to put Bergson’s works on its index of prohibited books.75 This was a precaution very rarely imposed on non-Catholic writers, so what was the fuss about? Bergson once wrote that ‘each great philosopher has only one thing to say, and more often than not gets no further than an attempt to express it.’ Bergson’s own central insight was that time is real. Hardly original or provocative, but the excitement lay in the details. What drew people’s attention was his claim that the future does not in any sense exist. This was especially contentious because in 1907 the scientific determinists, bolstered by recent discoveries, were claiming that life was merely the unfolding of an already existing sequence of events, as if time were no more than a gigantic film reel, where the future is only that part which has yet to be played. In France this owed a lot to the cult of scientism popularised by Hippolyte Taine, who claimed that if everything could be broken down to atoms, the future was by definition utterly predictable.76
Bergson thought this was nonsense. For him there were two types of time, physics-time and real time. By definition, he said, time, as we normally understand it, involves memory; physics-time, on the other hand, consists of ‘one long strip of nearly identical segments,’ where segments of the past perish almost instantaneously. ‘Real’ time, however, is not reversible – on the contrary, each new segment takes its colour from the past. His final point, the one people found most difficult to accept, was that since memory is necessary for time, then time itself must to some extent be psychological. (This is what the Holy Office most objected to, since it was an interference in God’s domain.) From this it followed for Bergson that the evolution of the universe, insofar as it can be known, is itself a psychological process also. Echoing Brentano and Husserl, Bergson was saying that evolution, far from being a truth ‘out there’ in the world, is itself a product, an ‘intention’ of mind.77
What really appealed to the French at first, and then to increasing numbers around the world, was Bergson’s unshakeable belief in human freedom of choice and the unscientific effects of an entity he called the élan vital, the vital impulse, or life force. For Bergson, well read as he was in the sciences, rationalism was never enough. There had to be something else on top, ‘vital phenomena’ that were ‘inaccessible to reason,’ that could only be apprehended by intuition. The vital force further explained why humans are qualitatively different from other forms of life. For Bergson, an animal, almost by definition, was a specialist – in other words, very good at one thing (not unlike philosophers). Humans, on the other hand, were nonspecialists, the result of reason but also of intuition.78 Herein lay Bergson’s attraction to the younger generation of intellectuals in France, who crowded to his lectures. Known as the ‘liberator,’ he became the figure ‘who had redeemed Western thought from the nineteenth-century “religion of science.”’ T. E. Hulme, a British acolyte, confessed that Bergson had brought ‘relief to an ‘entire generation’ by dispelling ‘the nightmare of determinism.’79
An entire generation is an exaggeration, for there was no shortage of critics. Julien Benda, a fervent rationahst, said he would ‘cheerfully have killed Bergson’ if his views could have been stifled with him.80 For the rationalists, Bergson’s philosophy was a sign of degeneration, an atavistic congeries of opinions in which the rigours of science were replaced by quasi-mystical ramblings. Paradoxically, he came under fire from the church on the grounds that he paid too much attention to science. For a time, little of this criticism stuck. Creative Evolution was a runaway success (T. S. Eliot went so far as to call Bergsonism ‘an epidemic’).81 America was just as excited, and William James confessed that ‘Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely.’82 Elan vital, the ‘life force,’ turned into a widely used cliché, but ‘life’ meant not only life but intuition, instinct, the very opposite of reason. As a result, religious and metaphysical mysteries, which science had seemingly killed off, reappeared in ‘respectable’ guise. William James, who had himself written a book on religion, thought that Bergson had ‘killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don’t see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer of the nature of reality.’83 Bergson’s followers believed Creative Evolution had shown that reason itself is just one aspect of life, rather than the all-important judge of what mattered. This overlapped with Freud, but it also found an echo, much later in the century, in the philosophers of postmodernism.
One of the central tenets of Bergsonism was that the future is unpredictable. Yet in his will, dated 8 February 1937, he said, ‘I would have become a convert [to Catholicism], had I not seen in preparation for years the formidable wave of anti-Semitism which is to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted.’84 Bergson died in 1941 of pneumonia contracted from having stood for hours in line with other Jews, forced to register with the authorities, then under Nazi military occupation.
Throughout the nineteenth century organised religion, and Christianity in particular, came under sustained assault from many of the sciences, the discoveries of which contradicted the biblical account of the universe. Many younger members of the clergy urged the Vatican to respond to these findings, while traditionalists wanted the church to explain them away and allow a return to familiar verities. In this debate, which threatened a deep divide, the young radicals were known as modernists.