When Philosophy Stopped the Traffic in New York City

Alexandre Lefebvre explores Emily Herring’s “Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People.”

By Alexandre LefebvreSeptember 19, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• Biography & Autobiography

I WAS ALWAYS going to be interested in a book like Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People. It’s a biography of the philosopher who has shaped me more than any other, both professionally and personally: Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the preeminent philosopher of early 20th-century France. I’ve written one book about him, three more inspired by him, and edited a half dozen works either by or about him. He has never been more than an arm’s length away. Literally so: On my right bicep is a tattoo of one of his diagrams. (Google “Bergson, cone of time” and you’ll see what I mean.) What I didn’t expect was how much I would love this book. Herald of a Restless World is the best introduction I know of to Bergson’s life and thought, in either English or French. It is also the most delightful book I’ve read about him, written with clarity, joy, humor, and narrative drive.

The best biographies of philosophers—for example, Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990) or Rüdiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (1994)—weave together life story, ideas, and the broader zeitgeist. Herring’s biography does the same, with a crucial twist: in Bergson’s case, he was the zeitgeist of Belle Époque France. The anecdotes of his fame are legendary. Every week at the Collège de France, as many as 700 people tried to cram into a lecture hall built for barely half that number, with the well-heeled dispatching their valets to hold places. When Bergson arrived in New York in 1913, so many poured into Columbia to hear him that Broadway ground to a standstill; the philosopher caused the city’s first traffic jam. His audiences were kaleidoscopic: as poet and number-one Bergson fan Charles Péguy marveled, they included the high bourgeoisie, students of science and literature, engineers, priests, poets, anarchists, and socialists, all jostling in the same room to catch the master’s words.

Herring’s literary talents aside, this is why the book works so well. Bergson’s life and times were inseparable, each the mirror of the other. And from this raw material, she sets out to paint three portraits: “A portrait of a man, with aspirations and contradictions. A portrait of his philosophy, which, in various ways, changed the world around him. And a portrait of the world in which the man and his ideas evolved.”

Henri Bergson was born in Paris on October 18, 1859, the second of seven children of a Polish father, who worked as a musician, and an English mother, both Jewish. From the start, he was a prodigy. At school he excelled across the board—Latin, Greek, history, English, mathematics—and by the age of 17, he had solved a problem in geometry that had stumped even the father of infinitesimal calculus, Pierre de Fermat. His early brilliance propelled him through the elite institutions of the French academy: the Lycée Condorcet, then the École normale supérieure, and finally the Collège de France. It was every rung of the ladder to the very top.

Yet one of the strengths of Herring’s biography is how she holds in view two sides of Bergson’s character. On the one hand, he was modest to the point of self-effacement. He asked that his life be ignored in favor of his philosophy, insisting that “the life of a philosopher sheds no light on his doctrine and is of no concern to the public.” He loathed being pressed to distill his philosophy into slogans, and witheringly told an impatient woman who pressed him for the nutshell version “I simply argue, Madam, that time is not space.” He was, in short, nothing like Jean-Paul Sartre holding court with journalists, or Jacques Derrida building an American academy in his own image, or Bernard-Henri Lévy strutting across television screens. Bergson was the opposite: a pure lover of ideas, a shy and serious philosopher.

But there is another Bergson too, and Herring doesn’t let us forget him. He was a climber, shrewd and ambitious, fluent in the “rules of the career game” and adept at playing them. He was a consummate institutionalist who rose with poise and strategy through the most prestigious posts of the French Republic. Part of that instinct, Herring suggests, came from biography: “He was raised by institutions more so than by his parents.” From a tender age, he excelled and placed himself in boarding schools, and as a teenager, he lived alone in Paris so he could attend the Lycée Condorcet. The result was a man formed by institutions and perfectly adapted to their ways. His personality contained a genuine tension: authentically wary of the limelight, yet authentically ambitious. This doubleness—philosopher and careerist, modest man and smooth operator—is one of the paradoxes that makes Herring’s portrait so compelling. “The quiet Bergson,” she observes, “always had to make concessions to the ambitious Bergson.”

That’s the man. What about the portrait of his philosophy? However reluctant Bergson was to package his thought into a formula, the line he snapped—“I simply argue, Madam, that time is not space”—is as good a starting point as any. As Herring shows, Bergson’s philosophy demanded that we invert the natural order of things and step away from our obsession with eternity. Past philosophers, he thought, had it the wrong way around: permanence is the illusion, and change is the most fundamental reality of all. What shocked him was that the scientific conception of time contained no temporality at all. In mathematics and physics, time is pictured as a line laid out in space, infinitely divisible into points and instants. What disappears in this picture is precisely our lived experience of time, its difference in quality, the flow that Bergson called duration (“durée,” in French).

With this insight, Bergson was a dog with a bone. He gnawed and worked it his whole life. He first developed it in the context of psychology, in how our emotions and experiences are lived and felt in a state of flow. Herring is especially good at showing how Bergson deepened the idea through both intellectual and personal points of reference. Intellectually, in dialogue with the leading brain sciences of his day, which tried to treat emotions like blocks to segment and measure according to intensity. Personally, through the musical background of his childhood and family. Listening to music reveals durée better than anything else. A melody is indivisible: the notes succeed one another, but they are not external to one another, not simply a “before” and an “after.” To really hear a tune is to be carried along in its flow, letting yourself be lulled by the sound and resisting the impulse to break it down into visual images of notes on a page or instruments being played. Music, for Bergson, was the living illustration of real time.

To any future students interested in Bergson, Herring’s book is the one I will recommend they read first. (And for curious readers, the next stop should be Bergson’s short, charming introduction to his work, a lecture titled “The Possible and the Real.”) She is a reliable and engaging guide to his major works—on memory and perception (Matter and Memory), biology and evolution (Creative Evolution), the limits of the human intellect (The Creative Mind), and morality and religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion). She also gives generous attention to his more occasional writings—such as his essay on laughter and comedy, “Le Rire”—to show that even these playful forays spring from the same profound engagement with human experience as his most systematic works.

Finally, what do seasoned readers of Bergson gain from this book? The answer is Herring’s third portrait, “of the world in which the man and his ideas evolved.” Philosophers often forget this. We get wrapped up in the ideas and, to borrow a Bergsonian phrase, treat them as if they just fell from the sky. But Bergson’s brilliance was inseparable from his moment. He shaped his times, but only because he was so deeply shaped by them. To borrow a line from The Big Lebowski: “Sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.”

Herring is a marvel at this task, attuned to Belle Époque France and the cultural currents that carried Bergson along. Some, like impressionist painting or the novels of his cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust, shared his preoccupation with subjectivity and the search for representations of reality truer to lived experience. Others reflected the wider social and political transformations of the age. To conclude this review, I will highlight two of these currents that Herring brings to life.

The first is feminism, and the uncanny degree to which this movement and Bergson’s writing—and especially his lectures—were entwined. It would be misleading to call Bergson an advocate for women. Rather, his philosophy was claimed, by friends and foes alike, as a particularly feminine style of thought, and this association became a central part of his celebrity. In the 1910s, as more and more women flocked to his lectures, the press mocked the perfumed chattering “Bergsoniennes” as fashion-seekers rather than seekers of truth. One writer for The New Age was brutal: “True, Bergson was nearly suffocated by scent when women attended his lectures; but had Bergson really been a philosopher, no woman would have listened to him.” For his critics, the feminization of his audience was evidence that his style—poetic, metaphorical, intuitive—was itself feminine, and therefore unserious.

And yet, the same association could be claimed as a strength. In 1913, the feminist writer Marian Cox argued that Bergson’s emphasis on intuition and creativity offered a “female-method” for the future of knowledge. A decade later, Simone de Beauvoir recorded the “great intellectual intoxication” she felt at 18 when she first read his work. For Herring, the feminization of Bergson’s style and audience was inseparable from his cultural impact. His philosophy was not only about change and freedom; it also became, for a generation of women, a living emblem of both.

The second major cultural current running through Herald of a Restless World is politics. It is a story of extremes—both in the world and in Bergson himself. For most of his life, he was the consummate professor, a man who seemed to exist only to think and to write. Yet in the darkest days of the Great War, at the age of 57, he was dispatched by the French government on an unlikely mission: to cross the Atlantic and persuade President Woodrow Wilson, a man he had never met, to bring the United States into the war.

On its face, the plan was crazy. Bergson was a career philosopher with no diplomatic experience, literally shipped into a world-historic pivot point. But it was crazy in just the right way. A few weeks into his trip, he was granted an audience with Wilson himself. No record of the meeting survives, but Bergson’s notes reveal how he pitched his case. Wilson, he suggested, could become the first to realize Plato’s dream of a philosopher-king, leading the United States into the war so that it might shape the peace to come and anchor a new League of Nations. Bergson was the perfect envoy precisely because he could mirror—or, more cynically, play on—Wilson’s self-image as a philosopher destined to bring perpetual peace.

The story doesn’t end there. After the war, Bergson was a key player in establishing the League of Nations. In 1922, he was appointed the first president of the League’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which was precursor to UNESCO. But let’s fast-forward two decades because we all know things didn’t end well for the League of Nations.

Bergson’s last years were spent in dark times. By 1941, France was under Nazi occupation and antisemitic laws had come into force. Testimonies suggest that the Vichy regime, embarrassed by the Jewish heritage of its most famous philosopher, offered to exempt him by declaring him an “honorary Aryan.” Bergson refused. Despite being crippled by arthritis and reliant on nurses for support, he insisted on queuing in the winter cold to register publicly as a Jew—a gesture of solidarity that may have cost him his life, for it was likely then that he contracted the bronchitis from which he never recovered. Finally, though the letters have been lost, he is said to have renounced in writing all the official honors France had bestowed upon him, decorations he had once valued deeply. It was a somber end for a man who had devoted himself to the cause of international cooperation and whose philosophy was so often criticized for its optimism.

Read through his biography, Bergson’s final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), is poignant. It swings between high hopes for international peace and cooperation, and sober recognition of nationalism and the threat of war. Strictly speaking, Bergson didn’t believe in any cyclical conception of time, whether historical or metaphysical. Time flowed onward and no one stands in the same river twice—or even once. All the same, he knew that certain periods were marked more by openness and unity and others by closure and division. Indeed, he lived through both kinds.

Bergson died in 1941, at a moment of closure and nationalism. A century later, in 2025, we, too, find ourselves living through a time when borders are hardening, illiberalism is on the rise, and dreams of international cooperation feel precarious. In that sense, we are still in Bergson’s era. He remains what Herring so aptly calls him: a “herald of a restless world.”