Jonathan Emmesedi

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https://wellreadherring.substack.com/p/herald-of-a-restless-world-out-now

I've just finished Emily Herring's "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People", which the author hopes will inspire a Bergson revival.

I doubt that any such revival is in the offing. Consider the three most important terms of Bergson's philosophy:

-- Élan vital. Bergson came up with this in his 1907 "Creative Evolution" to name a force that he thought of as driving evolution forward. In spite of Herring's claims to the contrary, I find little significant difference between Bergson's notion and the life forces posited by Bergson's vitalist contemporaries. Bergson published his work during late C19/ early C20 "eclipse of Darwinism", and his views on biology are of the same vintage and degree of relevance to today's concerns as disagreements over home rule for Ireland, prohibition, or the dangers posed by bicycling to women's health.

Follow the thread for the other two!

#Philosophy #IntellectualHistory #History #HenriBergson #EmilyHerring #HeraldOfaRestlessWorld #Modernity #France

Herald of a Restless World out now!!!

The first biography of Henri Bergson in English is available everywhere you get your books!

Well-Read Herring
Dec 29 at 8:02pmWeb
Show threadJonathan EmmesediDec 29

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-- Intuition. Much of Herring's early philosophical education took place in France, so it is no surprise that she is unsympathetic to the analytic tradition in philosophy in general and to Bertrand Russell's criticisms of Bergson in particular. Although she rightly points out that Russell was uninformed and unfair in suggesting that Bergson was mathematically incompetent, she does not succeed in refuting Russell's larger accusation that Bergson was propounding a kind of irrationalism. Herring is unable to give an account of Bergson's intuition" as a kind of knowledge other than a mysterious and mystical "entering into" the object of knowledge, to be contrasted with the merely "external" understanding offered by "analysis", by which I understand the always provisional claims furnished by reason and empirical evidence.

I doubt that the fog of Bergsonian "intuition" will clear the way for a Bergsonian revival.

Perhaps I am not doing justice to either Bergson or Herring here, as Bergson's notion of intuition depends in part on his concept of ...

Show threadJonathan EmmesediDec 29

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.... la durée, or duration. By this Bergson meant the subjective experience of time which he thought of as an indivisible stream, rather than the quantifiable time of the natural sciences.

I'm not going to consider the metaphysics of time here, but will instead note that Bergson's emphasis on the importance of the durée is his assertion of the priority of our lived experience as a source of understanding the world over the claims of the natural sciences.

In asserting this priority, I think that Bergson shares something with his pragmatist contemporaries like William James, the neopragmatists of more recent times such as Richard Rorty, the later Wittgenstein, Heidegger, some feminist philosophers, many of those broadly described as "postmodernist"....and therein lies the obstacle to any Bergson revival: that "lived experience" territory has been subsequently occupied and built upon, and Bergson is now redundant.

Show threadThomasDec 29
@jemmesedi Thanks once more for your review. Is my guess correct that Brouwer's metaphysics, grounded in the perception of time, is worth comparing with Bergson?
Show threadJonathan EmmesediDec 29

@tg9541

I'm sorry I can't help with your query, but I am nowhere near well informed enough on Brouwer or the metaphysics of time in general to be able to even hazard a guess.

Show threadThomasDec 30
@jemmesedi Thanks, since I'm not familiar with Bergson I was just curious. I began to be interested in Brouwer a little while ago. While his mathematical work is widely used, his philosophical legacy, a radical subjectivism, isn't as well known. Brouwer used the intuitive and immediate understanding of before and now, "a perception of time" by the subject as the foundation of all reasoning, which he called intuition. Here is a quick introduction from On Brouwer by Mark van Atten: