Herald of a Restless World: On the Life and Philosophy of Henri Bergson

The Following video is a continuation of my series on Classical German philosophy and Post-Kantian thought. The Title of today's episode is: Herald of a Restless World: On the Life and Philosophy of Henri Bergson with Dr. Emily Herring.

In this special episode of the Young Idealist Series, we fly over to France, and in order to experience the life and philosophy, of the pivotal French thinker Henri Bergson (1859-1941).

For this episode on Henri Bergson I invited Dr. Emily Herring who is a writer based in Paris. Dr. Herring studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and received her PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. Her work has appeared in the TLS and Aeon. In October of 2024, Emily published Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People. The first English-language biography of Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who defined individual creativity and transformed twentieth-century thought. In celebration of Emily's new book, I knew she would be the perfect guest to help navigate the viewer through Bergson's rich philosophy and complex life.

In Herald of a Restless World, Dr. Emily Herring recovers how Bergson captivated a society in flux. She shows how his celebration of the time-bending uniqueness of individual experience struck a chord with those shaken by modern technological and social change. Long after he faded from public view, his insights into memory, time, laughter, and creativity continue to shape how we see the world around us.

In this Episode: Dr. Emily Herring discusses Bergson's life and his philosophical influences. Emily also gives detailed accounts of how Bergson came up with his central notion of durée (duration) and how it differed from other conceptions of time (both scientific and philosophical). We also discuss Bergson's exciting originality on memory, freedom, the brain, the evolution of life, and morality.

It really is incredible to see Dr. Herring bring Bergson back to life with her knowledge, passion & rigorous understanding of his work.

You can purchase Emily's book here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/tit...

In 1922, Albert Einstein and the great French philosopher Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. In The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, historian of science Jimena Canales tells the remarkable story of how this clash impacted fields from logical positivism to quantum mechanics and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today. Further, she explains how then-new technologies—such as wristwatches, radio, and film—helped shape people’s conceptions of time.

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Clock time contra lived time

Evan Thompson

Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein fundamentally disagreed about the nature of time and how it can be measured. Who was right?

..We usually imagine time as analogous with space. We imagine it, for example, laid out on a line (like a timeline of events) or a circle (like a sundial ring or a clock face). And when we think of time as the seconds on a clock, we spatialise it as an ordered series of discrete, homogeneous and identical units. This is clock time. But in our daily lives we don’t experience time as a succession of identical units. An hour in the dentist’s chair is very different from an hour over a glass of wine with friends. This is lived time. Lived time is flow and constant change....

...For Einstein, the ‘time’ of an event is ‘that which is given simultaneously with the event by a stationary clock located at the place of the event, this clock being synchronous, and indeed synchronous for all time determinations, with a specified stationary clock’. This definition uses simultaneity between a local event and a local clock to define the time of the event. But what counts as so-called local simultaneity depends on the direct experience of someone perceiving both the event and the clock together in one subjective ‘now’. As Bergson argued in the 1922 debate, local simultaneity is always something that is perceived by conscious beings. Clocks don’t read themselves....

...these third-person descriptions do not suffice to explain the first-person experience of duration. There remains an unexplained gap between brains and consciousness.

Duration helps us make sense of this gap. To produce their descriptions, neuroscientists rely on their own first-person experience of time..

...Bergson had argued for two things, one incorrect and the other correct. It was a mistake to claim that time dilation is not physically real, but he was right in claiming that no one experiences the time dilation of their own reference frame...