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

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 [Bergson’s] 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 [the] mechanically regular” laws governing the mind.) Written in graceful prose and drawing a clear analogy with contemporary techno-optimism and its discontents, this captivates. (Oct.)