New issue of Science up online.
And, of course, as is my Jones, I head straight for the book reviews.
Bergson is all but forgotten today, a situation Emily Herring hopes to redress with her new biography, Herald of a Restless World. Herring points out that Bergson’s ideas, which included subjective experience, nuance, and open-endedness, appealed to a populace frightened by the increasing mechanization quickly transforming everyday life...
Indeed.
...A few years after his fateful decision to study philosophy, Bergson started his first teaching job. He was asked to give a speech before an assembly of students and teachers during the traditional end-of-term awards ceremony. Barely out of school himself, the young man invited the students to reflect on the “severe disadvantages of what we call ‘specialisation.’” He argued that great men of science of the past, such as the illustrious Frenchmen Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, and Louis Pasteur, had made sure to consider problems from all sorts of different angles and perspectives, using methods from a variety of disciplines. But as the nineteenth century ended, this became more and more difficult to do. The accumulation of knowledge seemed to have reached a tipping point that fragmented the sciences into increasingly narrow fields and subfields and drove a wedge between science and philosophy. In his speech, Bergson warned that this fragmentation, this loss of big-picture, synthetic thinking, impoverished human knowledge as a whole. Bergson conceded that the impulse towards specialisation was a natural one, prompted by the “miserable discovery that the universe is greater than our mind; that life is short, education time-consuming and the truth infinite.” But he urged the students to resist this impulse, to put off committing to one specialised subject for as long as possible, and instead to broaden their minds as much as they could.
The young Bergson’s aversion to specialisation had started at some point in the late 1870s, when he discovered that, unlike other academic disciplines, philosophy was not limited to a specific object but opened up an infinity of theoretical avenues. It represented an opportunity to encompass all areas of knowledge, to look at the biggest, most important problems, to embrace every aspect of reality in one sweeping gesture. By choosing philosophy, he would not have to abandon any of his interests but could keep them all under investigation. Conceivably, Bergson had also realised in that moment that mathematical problems, though fascinating, were too narrow for his intellectual ambitions. By specialising as a mathematician, he would be willingly cutting himself off from whole areas of human knowledge, whereas, as a philosopher, the entirety of human knowledge would be his subject matter.
A “BAD” SCIENTIST
Desboves was devastated when he found out about Bergson’s decision. His young prodigy, the teenager who had bested his hero Pascal, was squandering his incredible mathematical gift, and for what? To pursue his interest in an inferior subject. The teacher wrote to the boy’s parents, stating in no uncertain terms that their son was committing an irreparable folly. But Bergson did not budge, and his parents stood by his decision. The next time Desboves caught sight of Henri, he grumbled: “You could have been a mathematician; you will be a mere philosopher.” Of course, the teacher could not have foreseen that his student would in fact grow up to be anything but a “mere” philosopher.
Desboves’s comment nevertheless ended up haunting Bergson. Throughout his career, Bergson would find himself repeatedly accused of being a philosopher who rejected science because he misunderstood it. As the American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote: “Though his thinking has been about biology, mathematics, and psychology, people call Bergson an artist.” Such misconceptions about him would stick. In a scathing article published in the Monist in 1912, the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell would paint Bergson as mathematically illiterate and accuse him of promoting “anti-intellectual philosophy” that led to the absurd view that “incapacity for mathematics is therefore a sign of grace.” This view, Russell added sarcastically, was “fortunately a very common one.” In 1922, Albert Einstein dismissed Bergson’s interpretation of relativity, claiming that the philosopher did not have a sufficient grasp of the physics at play. The following year the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley wrote that Bergson was a “good poet, but a bad scientist.”
Of all the misconceptions about his philosophy, the idea that Bergson was promoting an anti-science agenda was the one that exasperated him the most. Although he was critical of certain aspects of scientific thought, he did not reject science through and through. Just because he found limitations in the methods of science did not mean that his understanding of these methods was limited.
Bergson viewed science and metaphysics as two different but complementary forms of knowledge, each limited in its own way. The perspective on reality offered by science would always be relative to its own symbols. Metaphysics, on the other hand, could aspire to absolute knowledge but would never produce the practical results of science. Yet, if both forms of knowledge came together in a way that recognised their fundamental differences, they could progress by pushing each other forward.
This had not, however, always been Bergson’s belief. In 1878, when he became a student at the prestigious École normale supérieure, he leaned towards the side of those who placed absolute faith in the power of science, thanks in large part to the English philosopher Herbert Spencer…
Herring, Emily. Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (pp. 25-27). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
Just getting fully underway. In Chapter 4 now.
Love it.
BLUESKY UPDATE
Also in the Science Magazine issue.
Very cool.
I continue to build my bsky.social footprint.
BACK TO MUSING ON SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY...
Lordy Mercy. Recall the tiresome subjectivist bane of undergrad Phil101—"there is no such thing as objective truth."
More shortly...
_________
