In Our Time - Bergson and Time

Episode Date: May 9, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and his ideas about human experience of time passing and how that differs from a scientific measurement of time, set out in his thesis on 'Time and Free Will' in 1889. He became famous in France and abroad for decades, rivalled only by Einstein and, in the years after the Dreyfus Affair, was the first ever Jewish member of the Académie Française. It's thought his work influenced Proust and Woolf, and the Cubists. He died in 1941 from a cold which, reputedly, he caught while queuing to register as a Jew, refusing the Vichy government's offer of exemption.WithKeith Ansell-Pearson Professor of Philosophy at the University of WarwickEmily Thomas Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham UniversityAnd Mark Sinclair Reader in Philosophy at the University of RoehamptonProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Henry Berkson, 1859 to 1941, was the most famous philosopher of his time. And crowds for his lectures caused traffic jams in Paris and New York. It was for his ideas about time that he first made his mark

in the 19th century in a book on time and free will, a response to the new idea that science alone could truly predict human emotions, ideas and thoughts. In particular, he argued that the clock time of technology is different from the psychological time we experience, where our present is thickened by our past

and our memories and stretches out a long duration, not a passing second. With me to discuss Berkson and time are Emily Thomas, assistant professor in philosophy at Durham University, Mark Sinclair, reader in philosophy at the University of Roehampton, and Keith Ansel Pearson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Keith Ansel Pearson, what was his background?

What was Andrew Berkson's background? In terms of giving you some details about his life, Berkson was born in Paris in 1859. He will die in that city in 1941 under Nazi occupation. Berkson's parents, both of his parents were Jewish. His father, Michael, was Polish, a gifted composer and pianist. His mother, Catherine, was from England, from Yorkshire, in fact. At the age of 10, his family moved to England and settled there,

and Berkson remains in Paris to complete his education. He's a highly brilliant student. He excels especially in philosophy and mathematics. Prior to going to university, he can't decide whether he wants to become a philosopher or a mathematician, but ultimately he makes the decision. to become a philosopher. He's educated at the École Normale Superior, where he writes his doctoral thesis,

which is then published in 1889 as his first book, Time and Free Will. Berkson marries Louise Neuberger in 1891, and Marcel Proust is the best man at the wedding. He's related to Berkson's wife to be, and they have one daughter in 1896. For several years, he spends time, teaching philosophy at various schools in France

and then he's elected to a position of Professor Philosophy at the College de France. First of all as the Professor of Ancient Philosophy and then several years later as Professor of Modern Philosophy. Bergson becomes in the early part of the 20th century, the first two decades, the most celebrated philosopher of his day.

He attracts enormous audiences to his lectures and his fame and reputation extend well beyond France. Can I ask you, in what ways were the philosophers in France at that time, applying science to their understanding of time and of the mind? Let's say the mind. Well, Bergson, in large part, is responding to what we might call the main dominant intellectual current of his time, which is positivism.

And on the one hand, Berkson welcomes its attention to concrete, facts of experience against what you might see as engaging in overly abstract metaphysical speculation. So he likes the attachment to the empirical sciences. But on the other hand, he's worried that its appreciation of experience

is incredibly limited and it can't do full justice to the richness of human experience. It was a time when philosophy and many other things were privileging science. Science was the answer to everything. Exactly. They could get science as the fundamental maker and breaker of their discipline.

Then they were on the right track. Yeah, that's right. So Berkson is always thinking that philosophy needs to engage with the sciences. It needs to engage in a dialogue with the sciences, but it needs also to find its own sources of knowledge. And basically he's questioning the assumption made at the time that the model of the physical sciences can be simply automatically applied to the psychological realm of human experience.

So you can predict what a mind will do just like you can predict what a machine will be. Exactly. So you treat the mind in the same way that the natural scientist or the physical scientists would treat matter. That matter is subject to predictable laws of movement and of behaviour and of action and we can apply that to an understanding of human thoughts, feelings and ideas.

So this is a huge movement. Was he sort of alone in, as it were, valiantly standing against it? He's not alone. He's part of a one. wider movement in French philosophy called spiritualism at the time, which is questioning that reduction of the human mind to the model of the physical sciences. Thank you very much. Emily Thomas, how were attitudes to time changing at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century? In terms of popular society, time was on the brain. People were really, really thinking about time

in ways that they hadn't been forced to before. So I'll give you a few examples. examples. One thing that was proliferating were timelines. They were invented in 1765 and by the early 19th century, late 19th century, they were everywhere. People were making timelines of everything they could think of from the movement of empires to the progressive diseases. On top of timelines, people were worried about unifying time. So in the UK, for example, around 1840, we have railway time being introduced where we want to make doubly sure that Glasgow and London have the same time. If it's 5 past 11 in the morning in Glasgow, it must be 5 past 11 in the morning in London. By 1900, we have the introduction of world time zones, which is one we can say that

Amsterdam is one hour ahead of London. On top of worries about clocks in general, clocks themselves... Why were the worries about clocks? Ah, people were worried about clocks. In part because of the railways, they want to make sure that if trains are leaving on time in one place, that they're going to arrive at the right time and another and they're not going to hit another train in the meantime. So clocks became really common. They were erected on churches throughout the land and people began carrying watches so much more than had ever happened in the past. So clocks. became really widespread. People were thinking about them. And on top of that, you have this phenomenon of chrono-photography, which starts being developed from the sort of 1860s.

Where, for the very first time, you could take photographs of, say, a bird in flight, and track every moment. So there'd be several photographs. You can put a bit of a do-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Right the way around. Yeah. And tennis balls and exercises and goodness knows what. Yeah. And people were really thinking about time.

It was in the air. What was a predominant view of time in philosophy? There were two big different movements in philosophy around then. So one older one was known as Newtonian absolutism. And this is the view that time is a kind of container for events. So time is something that exists independently of bodies and moving things. Time is there, even if there was nothing else in the universe. there would be time.

And the other? Kantian idealism about time. So Kant says, okay, let's agree with Newton that even if you remove material bodies from the universe, you can't remove time. That tells us something about our minds, not about the universe. So for Kant, time is a condition of thought. He thinks that we cannot help but perceive the world temporarily.

Thank you. Mark Sinclair, there was another movement in French philosophy, which has a bearing on this. Already we mentioned the word spiritualists, the spiritualists. What do we need to know about them in this context? Okay, well, first of all, it's important to underline that spiritualism in the context of French philosophy is not an interest in communication with spirits beyond the grave

or with the occult. Spiritualism here is a philosophical doctrine that affirms the reality of the human mind. So how does it do that? Well, much of the philosophical tradition from the 17th century onwards argues that we have inexperience, in everyday experience, we have an immediate awareness of ourselves as a principle of agency, freedom and self-determination

that's opposed to the causal, mechanical and necessary laws. So the idea is that the self is free, that it's a function of agency, that it's a principle of activity, whereas the material world doesn't have any spontaneity within it. Something happens in the material world, only because something else makes it happen. So the spiritualist tradition from the 17th century onwards

in different ways at different times has opposed a principle of freedom to the material world. Now, what happens in the 1860s in France is that there's a new spiritualism. And this new spiritualism doesn't rest content, with opposing mind to matter, but it argues even more radically that matter itself is already

an expression of mind. The new spiritualists are advancing what's called a pan-psychic position. Now, Belsan belongs to this new spiritualist tradition and in time free will, it looks like... That's his first book. That's his first book, indeed.

It's his PhD thesis, his doctoral thesis. It looks like he's offering a dualist philosophical thesis. He's opposing time to space, mind to world. But almost 20 years later, in creative evolution,

he's offering a much more full-blown pan-psychic philosophical position, according to which the mind is somehow at the essence of everything that exists. Can you develop the idea of the time, space, relationship or non-relationship? It'll be very important for this discussion.

Okay. One way to approach that is to think about the measurement of time. And Bergson argues that when we measure time, we're treating it in terms of space. Any of the units with which we measure time an hour, a minute, a second, any of these units actually derive from space. Therefore, his argument is that when we measure time... Can you just develop that a bit more? Okay, I mean, that will take some unpacking, but let's just see what the argument is first.

So the argument is that when I measure time, I'm looking at time through the lens of space. I'm treating it through the prism of space. I'm not looking at it in its purity now. So to answer your question, let's take a unit of time, an hour. So Bergson's argument is that a unit of time derives from space. So let's take an hour. What's an hour? It's one 24th of a day.

And a day is a revolution of the earth around the sun. Now, a revolution of the Earth around the sun, that's a movement in space. So an hour is a chunk of that movement. So that means that when we try to measure how long a process takes, let's say running a marathon, when we try to measure how long that takes, we may think that we're dealing directly with time, but all we're doing, Bergson argues, by means of a clock, is comparing two spatial movements to each other. We're comparing the locomotion of the runner with the low.

locomotion of the earth that's circling the sun. On that basis, I can then work out the average speed of the runner, for example, by dividing the distance over the time. But what Bergson, the insight at which he arrived is to say that, to recognise that the lived experience of time falls out of the equation. It cannot enter into the physicist's equation dealing with time mathematically because the units with which we measure time presuppose time that has already elapsed, not elapsing time. What's an hour? It's 60 minutes. And if those 60 minutes haven't elapsed, if we've only got 45 or 46 minutes, we haven't got an hour. So any unit of time that we choose, a second, a minute, an hour presupposes that the time has already gone, that it's already passed.

And it says nothing, Bergson argues, about the experience of the passage of time. Can you take up then, Keith, let's develop that a bit, this time-space business, because that was a terrific introduction, just push it forward. Well, in one way, Berks and I think he's trying to think time as duration. And he captures that in the two French words, Tom, for Time and Dure for Duration. And he's saying they're not the same. Duration involves, as he sees it, a kind of a flow, a flux, an interpenetration of the different elements that make up time.

so that we can't think of time in terms of discrete elements, discrete components, like seconds or minutes or hours. They're just spatial markers to mark time, but they don't account for the passage of time, which must have this durational quality to it

as he sees it, which is a kind of qualitative progression, so he says there's succession without absolute distinction. So in some sense, he's saying that the past progresses into the present. There's a coexistence, of the past and the present. Otherwise, we can't account for the passage of time.

Because if we don't suppose that, that there's the kind of interpenetration of the past and present, even the coexistence of passage of past and present, in any experience of time, we're just going to see time as some sort of linear movement of discrete, isolable presence. And we'll never get the movement of time. Everything will perish in the present.

Exactly. You just get perpetual perishing presence on that model of time. So duration is trying to capture, and for Bergson, the idea that time is made up of this particular flow or flux, this interpenetration of past and present. In the world around him, the bigger world, larger than his group, as it were, how was this received? Well, there are some philosophers who think Bergson has changed the whole way we think time. He's made a massive innovation.

It will completely change how we think time. It's a turning point in the history of philosophy. This is the position of William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, who appreciates person enormously in the early part of the 20th century. And then you get detractors and critics, such as notably Bertrand Russell, who thinks this is not logically rigorous enough.

It's too woolly in its thinking, it's too intuitive, etc. So you've got, you've got, on the one of the people like William James, claiming Bergson's made a major contribution, and then he got to attract like Bertrand Russell. Let's divide about Emily, Emily Thomas. What did Bergson draw from the theories of evolution? Because that played a big part in what keeps me talking about,

in this duration, I do have the duration of time, as far as I understand it. It does, absolutely. So I think that when evolution started, getting big in the mid-19th century. People had known for a long time that species come in and out of existence, that extinctions were possible. But something that Darwin really stressed was that time has a role in making this happen.

So if you read Darwin and the people around him, you get lines like, give time long enough and it can make mountains, give time long enough, and it can bring a whole new biological species into existence. And in effect, what's happening there is that time is taking over the role traditionally assigned to God of creation and destruction, creation and extinction. And I think at that point, philosophers went in one of two ways. So lots of philosophers began denying the reality of time altogether as a way of denying the reality of evolution. On the other hand, philosophers like Berkson just embrace this. He just gets on board with this idea that time is an ontological force, a force of being.

And I think this is implicit in his early work, and then it really comes out full strength. And in creative evolution, 1907, and in creative evolution. That's his most popular book. His most popular book. It was the book that really brought him to the masses. And suddenly he's saying that it is through time that evolution brings us wholly new forms, forms that could not have been foreseen or predicted. So therefore he's saying that time is flowing.

It isn't a number of static photographs. Absolutely. So for Bergson, the past is involved in the present, insofar as saying that the past is actually real. So for Bergson, the past is real, but the feature is unreal. It's yet to be written. And as time flows on and moves, we move. The unreal feature becomes real.

And with that, we generate these new forms. Keith wants to film. One example of Berkson likes to give as a way of thinking, the way he's trying to think duration, is the example of music or listening to a melody. So when you think of that example, what are we doing when we're listening to a piece of music? And Berkton would say when we listen to music,

we're not listening to simply a succession of discrete, isolable notes. The notes for us permeate one another. They melt into one another. It's as if they're enveloped in one another. And what we do when we listen to a piece of music, we form an organic whole. And that's how he wants to think both our own experience of time,

as duration, and how we think evolution. Can I come across to you, Mark? What did Berkson understand by a quantitative approach to time, And where does that take him? A quantitative approach to time is to measure time by means of number. But he distinguishes the quantitative approach to time from a qualitative approach to time. He distinguishes between a quantitative multiplicity

and a qualitative multiplicity. I think you have to go over those again. Right. I mean, these seem like mysterious terms. So here's the example. Quantitive multiplicity. Here's the example that he provides, okay, and it's listening to a bell ringing on the hour. Imagine we're in Westminster, we hear Big Ben, and it's five o'clock. Now, I can take this experience in one of two ways, says Bellxon.

If I want to know what time it is, I can count explicitly the number of times that the bell is struck. Now, I can do that by saying one, two, three, four, five, as I hear it. But if at the end of the process, I want to be sure that the bell has been struck really five times, and if I want to count in the fullest sense of the word, Bergson argues that I need to represent the five sounds to myself as simultaneous and in space. Now, I can do that quite obviously by counting on my fingers, one, two, three, four, and my thumb.

Five, I've counted. I can do it in my head also. I can imagine five things next to each other, and I can count those. But Bergson's argument is the first part of his argument here is that when I treat space as time as a quantity, that requires the intervention of space. But if I don't want to know,

if I'm not particularly interested in what time it is, and if I hear the succession of the sounds, as a pure succession without representing that succession to myself in spatial terms, then I remain with what Keith described earlier as the flow of time. and this flow of time is like a stretch that precedes any particular instance that I might be able to abstract and extract from it. Now, so what Belton is trying to get us to see is that there's a multiplicity in the experience of succession,

but it's not quantitative, it's not something that we can add up, it's not composed of isolated individual units that we can add up. Keith, Ansel Pearson Let's talk about clock time then as Big Ben has been introduced into the discussion What's the difference between clock time

and quantum time and human experience of time Let's get back Work towards the human experience of time Which is one of his starting points Well clock time Maybe clock time versus psychological time Yeah

Yeah Well for Berksson I think Berkson would see Clock time As a useful simplification. It's useful because it helps us control, regulate

our social life and organise our social life. So it's got a very practical function. It's got a practical utility to it. There's reasons why we have clock time and we divide time into distinct segments. That doesn't for Berkson capture

the experience of psychological time because it has this qualitative progression to it involving this interpenetration of past and present. So, Berkson's really saying that... So clock time has no past? No.

When it strikes four, don't you remember it struck five? Do you remember it struck four before? Yeah, but I don't have that durational experience of time where the past continues to progress into the present. I'm seeing them as if...

So it doesn't flow into it, you mean? It doesn't flow into it. It doesn't flow into it. But it's in our memory. Yeah, it's in our memory. Yeah, that's right. But it's not the memory of a kind of qualitative progression.

I'm not. Well, if you think of it, let's think of it maybe in terms of some given... Well, what we're doing when we're thinking clock time, we're thinking in terms of quantitative units, seconds, hours, and so on. You could think of it, perhaps, in terms of how Berkson's got a lot to say in Time and Free World's first book, about emotions and how we represent emotions to ourselves. So we tend to think that emotions are intensities in the sense of something I feel more or less happy, more or less sad.

And Bergson says, well, that's kind of mistaken in a way, because emotions are involved in qualitative changes. So if you take something like, let me give you an example, and that would be the experience of some profound inner joy. And that might arise out of some simple astonishment that we have at our, we feel we're alive and we're in the world, and that makes us joyful. And Bergson would say, when you experience that feeling,

it's not as if there's an increase or decrease quantitatively because that emotion is implicated in a series of qualitative changes. So when you feel joyful, it's not or you feel an increasing joy. It's not that you feel it in a quantitative sense. It's not as if it's literally more and more intense. It's that you're feeling your joy is becoming richer and richer. And so it's not simply displaying a difference of degree, a numerical difference or a quantitative difference,

it's actually revealing to you some fundamental qualitative change. Emily, how does what Keith has just said work against the science which Bergson was criticising? How does what he's just said work against the idea, the triumphalist idea at that time, the privileges accorded to science?

I don't think Bergson wants to say that time as science measures it is wrong. He certainly doesn't want to say it's useless. He just wants to say that it's missing the full picture, that if you want to understand the true nature of time, you have to look to our inner psychological experience of true duration. It's not enough to look at the clock time of science.

What this led to, of course, was clashes with scientists, most famously Einstein. So for Einstein, clock time is the nature of time. And although Berkson is perfectly happy to allow that clock time is useful to science, he was really interested in physics and praised Einstein's theories. He just thinks that that is not the true nature of time. He doesn't think it's the true nature of the way, just to stick to this point, the true nature of the way that we experience time. So he does he saying there are distinctions.

there's this scientific idea of how science, let's be very straightforward about, simple maybe, experience this time, but then there's how we experience time. We experience different from a clock. That's definitely true. We're starting at the beginning here. Absolutely. I really hope that we experience time differently from clock. You can use it any time you want.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I, okay. here's one way you could go. You could say time is used in certain ways in science and a whole different enterprise is asking how humans experience time. You could just divide them off. I don't think that's Berksson's project.

I think his project is asking what is the true nature of time and I think he's saying the physicist is missing stuff out. So in... Mark, you want to come here. Yes, Emily mentioned Einstein there. And what Bergson wants to show is that when, with relativity theory in the 20th century,

we start to treat time as a fourth dimension of space, there's nothing particularly surprising in that for Bergson, because the mathematical measurement of time has already spatialised time. It's already seeing time through the prism of space, so we shouldn't be surprised that in the development of the sciences, we treat time as something akin to a fourth dimension. Berksney uses the word confusion in a positive way. He does indeed, yes.

What does it mean by now? Well, he does want, I think it's just wanting time and free will. He characterises the experience of duration as an experience of confusion. What's confused? Right, our experience, first of all, but to put this in context, let's think of Descartes in the 17th century when he's trying to establish what it is we can know for certain. He says that we should rely only on those ideas that are clear and distinct.

That's the essential element of Descartes' philosophical method. But Bergson arrives at the insight that the most fundamental aspects of our lives, that which makes us who and what we are, is neither clear nor distinct. It's not clear because duration is not, an object for the mind. It is the mind. And I can't know it by means of the spatial categories with which I already, by which I normally grasp spatial things. So duration is, is confused in the sense that it's not clear. But duration is confused in another sense. If we look at the word confused, it says fused with. And what Bergson is driving at is that there is a fusion of the

of the present with the past and the future, which is prior to my imagining time according to a timeline and separating very clearly the future from the present and the past. That requires space. The idea of a timeline requires space.

Prior to the intervention of space, we have this fusion into penetration and the past melting into the present. This brings in a... memory, doesn't it? Which is a big part of his argument. Yeah. It's certainly in time and free will. Berkson, I think, is implicit

that memory is doing a lot of work here in order to think time as duration, but he only has maybe one reference to memory in the book. And that then becomes the focus of his second book, published in 1890s, Matter Memory. And I think Berkson is making, again, a number of

key innovations to our thinking of memory. So he's one of the first philosophers to say we need to distinguish between different types of memory. So there's habit memory on the one hand and then there would be something like that he would call independent psychological recollection. So habit memory would be like how we learn to ride a bike

through repetition and that we contract various habits and we form some memories of how we learn that process. And then there might be something like the recollection of my first experience of going out on the bike into the countryside. Listen to the birds having very emotional feelings and so on. So that would be, those would be different kinds of memories.

Bergson's also highly innovative in how he construes the relationship between perception and memory. So he would say typically when we think of the relation between the two, we think like this. We think we have a perception in some actual present and then maybe at a later point in time will form a recollection of that perception. But Berkson, because of his thinking of duration, which he involved, this coexistence of past and present, wants to say that memory is coterminous with perception. But we're not normally aware of that

in our comportment in the world. So when we see something, we at the same time see it and remember it. Exactly. And the memory goes back to the unconscious, sort of stored up for another day. Exactly. And this is how he thinks you can explain

the experience of deja vu. Obviously, the experience of deja vu is an uncanny experience, I've experienced it, maybe you've experienced it, and it's the feeling that you're living through something that you've already lived through before. Now, Berger says that can't be true. It's an illusion.

So how do we explain that experience? And Berksin would say that what's happening in that experience of Dejaude view is that you're experiencing something you do not normally experience, which is that you experience in some actual perception you're experiencing the formation of the memory of that perception at the same time. Maybe time has the feeling that it's slowing down for you and that could be part of the experience but what you're doing, Bergson says,

is that you're forming a recognition to come. You're forming a memory of the present in the present itself. A lot of what's been said, a great deal of what's been said, Amnoy Thomas must have annoyed the positivists very much indeed because he's given an entirely different view of time using psychological and human experiences compared with mathematics, although both involved,

mathematics. So can you develop that place? I can. The positivists were certainly not happy with Berkson. For the positivists, we should be basing our philosophical views on science, on mathematics, on calm, clear, rational reasoning. And here's Bergson

saying that we should be basing our philosophy on intuition. I mean, that's the word that he himself happily uses. And that doesn't sound scientific or mathematical. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing that the positivists were so opposed to. They were very unhappy with Bergson,

but not everybody was. Why would they so opposed to the word intuition? Because you couldn't prove it. I actually have more sympathy with Berkson than the positivist did. So it seems to me that what Bergson wants to do is use our experience of introspection. And that seems to me to be something that actually we use all the time in science and life. And so the idea, I actually think he doesn't help himself by calling it intuition. I think it would be better if he called it internal experience, something like that. You know, we'll know what it is to see a colour. We'll have that shared experience. And that doesn't seem to be an intuition. I think Bergson could argue that experiencing the flow of time is the same as that.

was encouraged to use the word intuition, in fact, by his students. And in the first book, in Time and Free Will, he does talk about an immediate apperception and an internal experience. So the word itself, intuition, is more or less accidental. He says he could have not used it at all. But using it did open him to accusations of irrationalism. I mean, that's the response to your question. Why were scientists and positivists unhappy with his approach?

because in essence it's saying there's a fundamental aspect of experience that goes beyond reason and can't be accounted for by means of reason. And that was unacceptable to the positive. Yes, yes, in different ways I imagine, but yes. Yeah. Sorry, you want to come back. But of course, that wasn't the only reason scientists were unhappy with him. The row with Einstein also had a huge part to play.

So if Einstein's general theory of relativity is true, then what time it is depends on your frame of reference. It means that there is no universe-wide now moment. There's no universe-wide simultaneity. And Bergson seems to just flat out deny that consequence of relativity. And for that, he was really ridiculed by physicists. I think it's a little more complex than that in the sense that I think Bergson, understands the implications of what Einstein's done with his theory of relativity,

but there's no absolute time, there's no universal time, but he wants to defend an alternative conception of universal time, saying that if we take time serious as an experience, it must have a durational dimension to it. Whatever your frame of reference is, it must have a durational dimension. So what Bergson's trying to do,

in his discussion, his argument with Einstein, and he's in fact trying to affect a reconciliation of science and philosophy. It's not an affirmation of philosophy against science at all, but it's a spirit of reconciliation. And that permeates a lot of his work, his work on memory, whenever he's engaging with the scientific literature. Sometimes there's a critical note, but often it's an attempt to bring the two discourses together.

We mustn't escape from the fact that he was, He was extremely highly regarded through Europe and in America by other philosophers, very widely read. Even Bertrand Russell, who was very against him, said he was an extraordinary popular and so on and so forth. There was that period in his life for 30 and 40 years. Yeah. Certainly between 1907.

And great influence on writers, for instance. Oh, yeah, between 1907 and 1917, I'd say when Berkson's in his prominent element, and his influence on literary and cultural modernism is just enormous. So there's all kinds of writers at the time that are soaking up Berksin's ideas and applying them to novels. So we've got a whole set of American writers who are inspired and influenced by Berkson, such as Willa Kather, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner. And then there's certain modernist movements inspired by Berkson's celebration of time as flow or flux, such as the futurists. and then you've got novelists who I think are primarily novelists of time

and it's an open question to what extent they're deploying Berkson's ideas to what extent they kind of denied their woodbergsonian novelists but certainly they're influenced by him the two best examples I can think of are obviously Proust in search of lost time, it's concerned with memory and Virginia Woolf. We have a man of his height here and then in certainly the late 20 years,

And certainly after World War II, he fell from Glace, the Grace. I mean, faster than Icarus, didn't he? I mean, it was over, it seemed then. Why did that happen, do you think? I think the row with Einstein had a lot to do with it. They engaged together in a public debate in 1922, and Berksson, I think, was perceived to be the loser. You're absolutely right that there are alternative readings of his views on relativity,

but not many people read him that way, I think it's fair to say. What really didn't help either was Birch and Russell. You know, the biggest Anglophone writer at the time. He literally wrote the history of Western philosophy. And then he slams Bergson. You know, he writes that Bergson is a heaving sea of intellect. He compares Bergson to the advertisers of OXO, you know, OXOCubes. It's saying that,

just in the same way that the advertisers of OXO rely on their adverts to be sort of intrinsically picturesque and desirable. Berkson does exactly the same. There's no arguments for his views. He just thinks that they're appealing. I mean, Russell goes to town on Berkson, and I think that has a huge part to play in his downfall. That's certainly true in the case of the Anglo-American reception of Berkson,

but I think there's other reasons as to why Berkson's influence wanes, especially after the Second World War. number of reasons I can think of. One is that Berkson never establishes a school. There's no Berkson archive set up after the war, which can often make sure philosophers' ideas endure and are taken up by new scholars and new researchers. And I think Berkson is a very optimistic philosopher,

and that doesn't fit well with the mood in Europe at the end of the Second World War when existentialism becomes the most fashionable philosophy and is a larger philosophy of despair. Yes, and to the existentialism. Well, if I could just take up that last point, I mean, I think all of that is right, but there's one point that we've not mentioned

that's really obvious in France, but not discussed elsewhere, and that's Bergson's interventions in the First World War. In 1914, he's making bellicose, anti-German discourses, and he's also mobilising his own philosophical categories in order to do that. Now, he was savage for this in the 1920s. He's the subjects of several bitter, critical pamphlets.

Why? Why? Because there was a whole new generation of more internationalist, anti-imperialist and sometimes Marxist thinkers, for whom this sort of nationalism was just chauvinism. An example is Julianne Bondar, The Treason of the Intellectuals, a book written in 1927. And not only for Bondar is Bergson, and one of the vast majority of European intellectuals succumbing to nationalism and chauvinism.

But he argues that there's a direct line between the supposed irrationalism of Bergst's philosophy and the nationalism in 1914. Nevertheless, whining up, he's now coming back into favour. He's much more studied by persons like your good selves around this table. He's coming back into fashion. But I also want to add that he was in fashion in the Anglo-American world as well. So Russell was a huge figure who decimated his reputation, but Russell was not the only philosopher working in early 20th century, Britain and America. And there were several other philosophers who really took up Berksonian ideas.

So, for example, people like Arthur Eddington, Samuel Alexander, C.D. Broad, Susan Stebbing, these are all early analytic philosophers that borrowed Bergson's idea that time really flows. some of them go so far as to adopt his view that the past is real and the future is unreal. And sometimes they name Bergson, sometimes they don't, but he's definitely at the root of their thinking. And that's also true of several women philosophers in particular. Well, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much, Emily Thomas, Marks and Claire, Keith Ansel Pearson. And next week, Gothic horror meets romance in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,

written when she was 18. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Although Berkson's some extent is not the fashionable philosopher anymore in France after the Second World War, all French philosophers, major French philosophers of the 20th century, however critical they are, are responding to Berksin, feel compelled to respond to Bergson's ideas.

So it's true of Sartre, it's true of Melo Ponzi, and then obviously the most perhaps important French philosopher of the post-second moral period is Gilles de Lurz and he's large responsible for the revitalisation today of interest in Berksum because he's fundamentally a Berkssonian in his thinking. You correct me if you think I'm wrong but it seems to me this resurgence is almost entirely within the world of French and then continental philosophy.

I think Anglophone philosophy, Berkson is. still fairly unknown. Well, yes, people can write textbooks on the philosophy of times without mentioning Belgzarnan and still now at the moment, which is fairly remarkable. But I think I get the sense that that that is changing, that there's a meeting of different traditions now and that it won't quite be so possible to ignore Bergsanen entirely. I hope that's true. And certainly in my own work, I want to show how he's at the root of so many of these early analytic views about. the passage of time, for example. But it begins with McTaggart, doesn't it?

I mean, McTaget writes an essay, a famous essay on time in 1908 called On the Unreality of Time. On the Unreality of Time, which does what it says on the tin. And he doesn't mention Belkson, and it's really odd. To be fair to McTaget, I don't think he's into Bergson's world at all. I think for McDaget, it's all about Kant and Hegel and Leibniz. Yeah, but Belcine derives from that tradition too. He does, but McTaggart isn't engaging with it.

What was going on in the early 20th century, I think McTaget was a very small part of. The problem is that when we're writing textbooks now, McTaget becomes huge. And I think that's a distortion of the history. I mean, maybe one of the point, just to pick up a bit further, say something further on, is how books and influences modernism

and the literary modernists. So a novel is like Virginia Woolf, you see in her novels, for example Mrs. Dalloway from the 1920s, this interest in clock time and psychological time. So Mrs. Dalloway, you know, you get all the sounds of Big Ben punctuating the various events that make up the narrative of the novel. At the same time, you get these incursions of experiences of psychological time where the characters are experiencing the past and memories of the past,

completely encroaching upon their own. perceptions of reality or the present at any point in time. And she's a serious novelist of time, I think. And Birchon had a great respect for novelists because he thought novelists, unlike scientists, could actually deal with the details of human experience and actually show the singular quality to character of human experience. They can twist language in a certain way.

They can use language in a creative way to get back to our own experience, as ordinary language, the generality of the noun, for example, kind of floats above the particularity of things. Something to add perhaps just to reinforce the view that Bergson is not anti-science is how involved he was with the psychology of his day. So his view that perception is largely memory sounds really peculiar,

but actually it's a view that is really widely held today in philosophy and psychology. The very notion of what's called a spacious present that any present moment we experience is not some instantaneous fraction of a second. It's a moment that actually has duration

and that's how, for example, when we see a traffic light change from red to green, that's how we see the change because any one moment of our perception takes a little bit of time. I mean that idea is really widely held now and he was, this was one of

the points of confluence with William James who is a huge defender of the spacious present building on the work of people like Shadworth Hodgson. Berkson was really involved with these sorts of things. You didn't mention T.S. Eliot, Keith, when you were going. No, that's right. I think Elliot, if I've got this right, he's one of those writers who goes through a Bergsonian phase, Berksonian phase, and then goes through an anti-Bergsonian phase.

Another example I give is T-U-U-U-M-H-U-L-M-E from the early part of the 20th century, was an avid berksonian, then becomes an avid or rabid, anti-vergsonian. So people are working through Berkson, moving through Berkson, but ending up sometimes opposed to his thinking. Another writer of that generation is May Sinclair, who was a philosopher as well as a novelist. She's adopting huge numbers of Vagsonian ideas into her house.

That's right. What's her main novel? There's a couple of famous ones. The one that made her rich and famous was the Divine Fire. Is that one about the life of Mary Oliver? Oh, there is, yeah, absolutely. And three sisters, which is based on the... Got some resonances with Bergson's ideas. Yeah.

So there's... People, your peers in various places, well, seem more obdurally against him, that the name was given to understand by what I read of the notes. You think he's a permanent outcast now? Well, I mean, philosophy is not of one piece in British universities.

It can be taught in different ways, and there are distinct traditions. So there's a European tradition of philosophy, Well, Bergson, he might not be paid sufficient attention, but he's an important figure in the tradition. There's no Martin Heidegger, there's no being in time. Heidegger argues that there's a temporality prior to clock time. That's not possible without Bergson's distinction of duration and a spatialised time. So he's important within the tradition of European philosophy, but his ideas about time, no, they're not discussed within

English language approaches in the philosophy of time. Well, at least they're discussed but not acknowledged to be his. Right, okay. Okay, good. That's a good way putting it. Right. Why is that? Why don't they acknowledge it? I thought, you're academically acknowledged everybody inside. We try.

But I think history of philosophy is written by the people that want to write it. There's very little history of philosophy on the early 20th century, surprisingly little compared to the armies of scholars who are working on Aristotle or early modern philosophy. And one of the big works is Russell. And I think that's a problem. I think that's really distorted what went on.

Is Russell still regarded as an influential and defining figure? Yes, absolutely, I would say. I think one of the reasons that we're now speaking about Bergsan is because there's sufficient distance between now and then. It's as if Bergson has finally and properly entered the canon of the history of philosophy. and we're now treating the beginning of the 20th century as an object of historical inquiries in philosophy. What do you think about Russell's attack on Berkson?

It sounds intemperate. It is intemperate. I think a lot of it reveals Russell's own philosophical prejudices. I don't think he was a very careful or diligent reader of Berksson. I think he does misrepresent his ideas. It renders them very superficial. And he calls Berkson, he says, I'm not surprised that Bergson's lectures are attended largely by women

because he sees him as a very female philosopher because of what Emily was saying about, the importance of intuition to Berkson, as if this was some sort of essential feminine or female quality. And I think he doesn't get the richness of Berkson's thinking of intuition as a specific mode of attentiveness and perception. It's not intuition in the sense of something vague, like a hunchier you have. It's quite a rigorous method in Berkson, a method of attentiveness to what you're experiencing,

what you're observing. But is Russell's position at the moment very steady? Yes, I think so. I mean, he's certainly extremely well known. He's well read. He's still cited on undergraduate reading lists. Well, thank you all very much again. The producers pushing open the door.

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