Laurens Landeweerd - Time, Life & Memory: Bergson and Contemporary Science (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, 38)

The watchmakers philosophy: each moment in time encompasses all events taking place in the universe, whilst each place in the universe can only contain one event at a time: a universe containing all places, and a time containing all events. This is the classical view on the nature of space and time, in which all events, past, present and future, of all things, in their places, are laid down as the parts of a watch on a watchmakers table. But time itself can only be thought as process. From change, all derives, but change itself is not derived. (Anonymous)

In spite of the relative obscurity of his oeuvre after the 1940s, Henri Bergson (18591941) was one of the most widely read philosophers of his era. He was the second child of seven and had a Polish father and Brittish mother. His father, Michal Bergson (18201898) was a composer; his mother, Katherine Levison (18341928) was the daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, and of English and Irish descent. Henri Bergson grew up in both France and England. In 1891 he married Louise Neuburger, a cousin of Marcel Proust. Prousts In Search of Lost Time (French: la recherche du temps perdu (19131927)) was inspired by Bergsons ideas on memory.

The popularity of Bergsons ideas was in part caused by the position he took with regard to the tension between science, metaphysics and religion. The disenchantment of the worldview (a term coined by sociologist Max Weber (18641920) to describe the effects of modern science on society) met with quite some resistance around the turn of the century. The European public was frantically seeking for answers to questions of the soul and the nature of life. The impact of Darwins Origin of Species was immense, and led to a polarisation regarding topics such as the origin of life, evolution theory, religion, the ideals of scientific positivism and the emergence of spiritualism: on the one hand, there was public enthusiasm concerning the promises of scientific knowledge and technological progress, on the other hand, many were critical of the dehumanising effects of these developments. The historicist tradition in philosophy that was established by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831) informed an active opposition to these developments. At the end of the century this opposition was supported by thinkers such as Wilhelm Dilthey (18331911) and Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) specifically because of his endorsement of irrationalism. Fitting in that historical niche, Bergsons writings drew much attention. In the midst of his lifetime Bergson was held in high regard, not only as a philosopher but also as a public celebrity. Not only his philosophical writings resounded with the Zeitgeist of the 1910s, he also received broad acclaim as a political figure. Bergson played an important role in 1917, when French Prime Minister Aristide Briand, being aware of the philosophers reputation of self-critical integrity, asked Bergson to try and convince United States President Woodrow Wilson to join the war effort. And after the war, Bergson was asked to negotiate between the different parties that needed to broker peace; his views on arms control were ahead of his time and he preferred diplomatic solutions over war, although some (e.g. Martin Heidegger) perceived of his diplomatic role after the First World War as flawed.

Bergson was a Frenchman of Polish-Ashkenazi and English-Irish-Ashkenazi descent who spent his childhood in London. In an age when nation-states had come to be seen as natural entities, this background lent him an aura of supranational neutrality. In 1922, he was appointed president of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation, an organisation that was the precursor to UNESCO. Bergson won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927 in recognition of his rich and vitalising ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented. And although this might lead some to believe that his work should be identified with literature and poetry, he was also acutely aware of the state of the art in the sciences of his age.