Welcome back to The Deep End. We are diving into
a story today that is honestly a little hard
to believe. Oh, I know this one. Yeah. Mostly
because of how completely the world seems to
have forgotten it. And I don't mean forgotten
like some obscure trivia fact. I mean, forgotten
like, I don't know, imagine if 50 years from
now nobody knew who the Beatles were. That's
surprisingly close to the scale of what we're
talking about. It's a genuine disappearing act
from the public consciousness. It really is.
We are talking about a man who, in the year 1910,
was cited in academic journals more often than
Aristotle. Which is just staggering. More than
Immanuel Kant. More than Hegel. I mean, think
about that. For anyone who follows philosophy
or intellectual history, that statistic is just.
It's mind -bending. Aristotle had a 2 ,000 -year
head start. Kant is, you know, the very bedrock
of modern thought. And this guy. Henri Bergson
was beating them both in the citation metrics
of his day. He was a global superstar. And I
want to set the scene here because the research
notes describe something called the Bergson craze.
And we are not talking about a few dusty academics
nodding in a library. We are talking about gridlock
in Paris. Right. This was at the College of France.
Yeah. The crowds were so enormous that people
were lining up. hours in advance just to get
a seat. Hours. Hours. And you had students, sure,
but you also had these fashionable society ladies
sending their servants ahead of them to hold
seats for them. No way. Yes, you had tourists
putting his lectures on their itinerary right
next to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. It was
a cultural event. The notes even say people were
fainting from the heat inside the lecture hall.
They were. They were packed in like sardines.
People were peering in through the windows just
to try and hear him. And what were they there
for? Not a rock concert. Yo. All to hear a man
talk about metaphysics, time, and the soul. It
wasn't a political rally. It was a philosophy
lecture. That is just, it's bizarre to me. In
today's world, we have celebrity intellectuals,
I guess people with big podcasts or YouTube channels.
But I can't imagine people fainting in a lecture
hall to hear about the nature of time. Why him?
What was going on? That is the million -dollar
question, isn't it? And it really sets up the
mission of this deep dive. To understand why
Henri Bergson became the voice of an era, you
have to look at what that era was feeling. Okay.
1910 is the peak of the industrial age. Everything
is becoming mechanized. The world is speeding
up. You have factories, trains, telegraphs. And
there's this growing anxiety that human beings
are just becoming cogs in a machine. We were
feeling dehumanized by our own technology. Yeah.
The story we know. All too well today. Exactly.
And then Bergson steps onto the stage, literally,
and tells everyone, no, you are not a machine.
You are a creative, flowing force. Wow. He tells
them, the clock on the wall is a lie. Your soul
is free. He offered a philosophical lifeline
to a society that was, frankly, drowning in mechanism.
So he was the antidote to the industrial grind.
He was the champion of life, you know, messy,
unpredictable, creative life against mechanism.
That's the static, rigid, scientific analysis
that tries to freeze everything and pin it down.
I love that framing. Life versus the machine.
It feels incredibly relevant right now, considering
we're all worried about AI and algorithms predicting
our every move. It's arguably more relevant now
than it was in 1910. Bergson is making a massive
comeback today precisely because we are hitting
the limits of that mechanical worldview all over
again. So let's unpack this forgotten giant.
Who was Henri Bergson? Because looking at his
background, he seems like a man who didn't quite
belong anywhere. but also belonged everywhere
at the same time. That's a really great way to
put it. He was a true cosmopolitan before that
was really a buzzword. He was born in Paris in
1859. 1859. That's a significant year, isn't
it? I feel like I should know that. It is the
year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of
Species. Oh, of course. Yeah. Wow. That feels
like destiny, given how much Bergson would eventually
wrestle with evolution. It does seem written
in the stars, doesn't it? But his family background
is this fascinating cocktail of European cultures.
His father, McCasbergson, was a Polish -Jewish
composer and pianist. The family name was originally
Bergson. They were a very prominent, wealthy,
entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. And
his mother. Who is she? Catherine Levinson. She
came from an English Jewish and Irish Jewish
background. And because of her, Bergson spoke
English almost as a first language. So he was
bilingual from the start. Pretty much. The family
actually lived in London for a few years after
he was born, before they settled back in France.
He didn't even become a naturalized French citizen
until he was nearly nine years old. So he's got
this cross -cultural foundation. Polish, English,
Irish, French, Jewish. He's viewing Europe from
multiple angles simultaneously. And he's sitting
at the intersection of different worlds socially,
too. I mean, did you see the notes on his sister?
I did, and I had to double check it because I
thought it was a typo. Mina Bergson. Yes, Mina.
She also went by the name Moina Mathers. As in
the wife of Samuel Liddell McGregor Mathers.
The very same. The founder of the Hermetic Order
of the Golden Dawn. That is just... That's wild.
The Golden Dawn is legendary in occult circles.
You have W .B. Yeats involved, Aleister Crowley
later on, and Henri Bergson's sister is essentially
the High Priestess. it's an incredible contrast
isn't it on one side of the channel you have
mina exploring the mystical magical hidden side
of reality through ritual and occultism and back
in paris her brother henry is exploring the hidden
side of reality through rigorous academic philosophy
they're both chasing the same thing exactly the
unseen But using completely different tools.
And speaking of connections, there was another
one in the notes that blew my mind. The literary
connection. Oh, the wedding, yes. So Bergson
married Louise Neuberger in 1891. And the best
man at their wedding was none other than Marcel
Proust. The in -search -of -lost -time guy. The
ultimate novelist of memory. The man who wrote
the longest and perhaps most famous novel about
memory and time in history. Louise was actually
Proust's cousin. It really paints a picture of
the Parisian elite. It's like a small town where
the mayor is Proust and the sheriff is Bergson.
It really was. But it makes so much sense, doesn't
it? Proust's work is all about how a smell or
a taste, the madeleine, can trigger this flood
of involuntary memory, which is exactly what
Bergson was theorizing about. They were definitely
drinking from the same cultural well. But before
Bergson became the philosopher of memory and
time, he was almost lost to the sciences. Right.
He was one of those annoying kids who was good
at everything. Stuckles. Yes, exactly. At the
Lycée Fontaine, he was a star pupil. He won a
prize for scientific work. But then at 18, he
wins this prestigious national prize for solving
a mathematical problem. It was so impressive
that it was published in the Nouvelle Annale
de Mathématiques. So he could have been a top
tier mathematician. Oh, easily. He could have
been a physicist or a mathematician. In fact,
his teachers were dismayed when he chose the
humanities. Really? They told him, and this is
a quote, you could have been a mathematician.
You will be nothing but a philosopher. Ouch.
That's a sick burn in 19th century academia.
But this background is absolutely crucial. Bergson
wasn't some airy -fairy poet who didn't understand
science. He understood the math better than most.
He chose philosophy because he felt the math
was missing something essential. And that choice
seems to stem from a crisis he had as a teenager.
Right. It did. A very profound one. Between the
ages of 14 and 16, Bergson lost his faith. He'd
received a traditional Jewish religious education,
but then, like many in his generation, he encountered
the theory of evolution. 1959 bombshell comes
back. Exactly. The idea that humanity shared
ancestry with primates, that we were the result
of natural selection other than some divine molding
to a teenage boy in the 1870s, this just seemed
to imply that there was no creative deity, no
spirit. just biology that's a heavy realization
it's the moment the magic drains out of the world
for a lot of people it was a profound moral crisis
for him and in a way you can view his entire
subsequent career all the books all the lexidim
as an attempt to solve that very problem he wanted
to save the soul from the microscope That's perfectly
put. He wanted to find a way to accept the truth
of evolution and science, but to still find room
for creativity, for spirit, and for freedom.
And to do that, he had to attack the very foundation
of how science measures the world. He had to
attack our concept of time. Okay, let's get into
this. Because this is the core of his philosophy,
and I'll be honest, when I first read about duration,
I struggled to wrap my head around it. It's not
intuitive at first because we are so trained
to think the exact opposite way. Right. To me,
time is a line. It's a ruler. I have a watch.
It ticks. One second, two seconds, three seconds.
They're all the same size. They're all distinct.
If I don't treat time like a line, I miss my
dentist appointment. So what is Bergson's problem
with clocks? Chuckles. Well, he doesn't have
a problem with clocks for catching trains or
going to the dentist. He knows we need... Clock
time to organize society. Okay, good. But he
argues that we have made a fatal mistake. We
have confused the measurement of reality with
the reality itself. Meaning what exactly? Meaning
that the map is not the territory. Bergson calls
our standard view of time spatialized time. Think
about that ruler you mentioned. That is a spatial
object. You are taking the concept of space where
things are separate, distinct, and sit next to
each other, and you are projecting it onto time.
Okay. I see that. I visualize time as a timeline,
left to right, past, present, future. Right,
like beads on a string. Bead A is the past, bead
B is the present, bead C is the future. They're
separate little units. But Bergson asks a simple
question. Is that how you actually experience
time? I mean, things happen in sequence, one
after another. They happen in sequence, yes,
but are they separate? Let's use the analogy
he loved to use, a melody. Okay, a melody. When
you listen to a song, say a symphony or even
a pop song, you hear a note. Then you hear the
next note. Do you hear them as isolated, distinct
atoms of sound? Note A, stop. Note B, stop. No,
of course not. If I did, it wouldn't be music.
It would just be noise. The notes blend together.
The feeling of the first note lingers and colors
how I hear the second note. Exactly. They interpenetrate.
They melt into one another. You cannot separate
the past moment of the melody from the present
moment without destroying the melody itself.
The past is flowing into the present. It's a
continuous, well... So it's not beads on a string.
No. Think of it more like a snowball rolling
down a hill. A snowball? Yes. As a snowball rolls,
it picks up snow. The snow it picked up at the
very top of the hill is still there, isn't it?
It's pressed into the center, affecting the shape
and the trajectory of the snowball right now
at the bottom. The snowball is its past, accumulating
into the present. That's actually a really helpful
image. So the past isn't gone. It's not behind
me on the timeline. It's rolled up inside the
now. Precisely. And that continuous, fluid, indivisible
flow, that is what Bergson calls duration, or
in French, la durée. So duration is time as we
live it, inside our own heads. Subjective time.
It is time as it exists in consciousness, yes.
But he would argue it's more real than clock
time. It is, to use his technical definition,
unextended yet heterogeneous. Unextended yet
heterogeneous. Okay, let's translate that into
human speak. Unextended means it doesn't take
up space. You can't lay a ruler next to it. Heterogeneous
means it's full of different qualities. Feelings,
memories, sounds, colors, all mixing together.
You can't freeze it to analyze it without killing
it. If you freeze a melody, it's not a melody
anymore. It's just a dot on a page of sheet music.
Okay, I'm with you on the experience part. I
get it. But why does this matter? Why were people
fainting in the aisles over this specific idea?
Because of free will. In the late 19th century,
science was getting very, very cocky. The determinists
were arguing that because the universe is just
matter and math, Everything is predetermined.
If time is just beads on a string, then bead
A hits bead B, which then has to hit bead C.
It's just cause and effect. Right, the old argument.
If you knew the position of every atom in the
universe at the Big Bang, you could calculate
that I would eat a turkey sandwich for lunch
today. Exactly. That is the mechanical nightmare.
It means you are a robot. Your feeling of choice
is a complete illusion. And Kant, the great Immanuel
Kant, didn't help much with this problem, did
he? Yeah, no. Kant wanted to say free will, but
he basically retreated. He said, OK, science
is right about the physical world. Cause and
effect rules everything here. So free will must
exist in some other realm, a noumenal world outside
of time and space. It was a surrender. He put
free will in a do not touch box that science
couldn't get to. And Bergson comes along and
says they are both wrong. Bergson says the determinists
are wrong because they are using the wrong map.
They are trying to map the fluid snowballing
soul onto rigid spatial time. It doesn't fit.
He says free will is pure mobility. It exists
within duration. Because the snowball is unpredictable.
It's not just following a straight line. Because
the snowball is an act of creation. The present
moment in duration is not just a rearrangement
of the past. It is the accumulation of the entire
past bubbling up into something completely new,
something unforeseeable. The future is not given
in advance. We create it as we go. That is actually
incredibly liberating. It means we aren't just
playing out a pre -written script. It was a radical
defense of human creativity against the machine.
And what's so fascinating is that the physicist
eventually caught up with him. How so? Louis
de Broglie, one of the founders of quantum mechanics,
noted later that Bergson's work in his thesis,
Time and Free Will from 1889, actually predated
the uncertainty principles of quantum physics
by 40 years. Yes. Bergson was saying you can't
pin down a moment of consciousness without changing
it, without killing its mobility. 40 years later,
Heisenberg says you can't pin down an electron's
position and its momentum at the same time without
fundamentally changing it. Bergson sensed the
limits of the mechanical worldview before the
physicists had the math to prove it. Wow. That
brings us to the tool we use to understand all
this. Because if our intellect, our logical,
analytical brain is obsessed with cutting things
into pieces and freezing them, how do we grasp
this fluid, snowballing reality? This is the
great battle in his philosophy, the battle between
intellect and intuition. And he's very, very
specific about what he means by these terms.
Let's start with intellect. Bergson doesn't hate
the intellect, does he? He's not anti -science.
No, not at all. He acknowledges that the intellect
is a brilliant evolutionary tool. It evolved
for our survival. It helps us hunt, build bridges,
organize tribes. It's practical. It's for getting
things done. It is intensely practical. But how
does it work? It works by taking snapshots of
reality. It throws an abstract net over the flow
of things to catch them. It categorizes, this
is a wolf, this is a rock, this is an enemy.
It freezes the world so we can manipulate it.
Like taking a photograph of a bird in flight.
You get the image, the static position of the
wings, but you lose the actual movement, the
flight itself. That is the perfect analogy. You
can study the immobile position of the wings
in the photo, but you cannot reconstruct the
flight from a pile of photos. You can't understand
movement by studying an infinite series of immobile
positions. So the intellect gives us a dead model
of a living world. Correct. And that is fine
for building bridges or doing your taxes, but
it is terrible for understanding life. or consciousness,
or art. If you try to understand your own soul
using only your intellect, you will just find
a pile of dead parts. So what is the alternative?
What is intuition? Because when I hear the word
intuition, I think of a gut feeling. Or, you
know, just guessing. And that is the common misunderstanding
he fought against his whole life. For Bergson,
intuition is not a vague feeling. It is a rigorous,
difficult mental effort. An effort. Yes. It is
the effort to enter into the object of your thought,
to sympathize with it, to experience it from
the inside out. The outline gave a great metaphor
for this. Swimming. It's the perfect example,
I think. Imagine you want to understand what
swimming is. You can stand on the shore and analyze
the water. You can study the physics of buoyancy
and displacement. You can watch videos of Michael
Phelps. You can memorize the mechanics of the
arm stroke. That is the intellect at work. But
you still don't know how to swim. You don't know
what it feels like. No. You can't deduce the
experience of swimming from the laws of physics.
To know swimming, you have to throw yourself
into the water. You have to struggle against
the current. You have to feel the water supporting
you. I'm about to get wet. You have to enter
the element. He says the intellect is for walking
on solid ground. It deals with concepts, logic,
solid objects. Intuition is for swimming, for
entering the fluid nature of reality itself.
There was another metaphor about a city that
I liked that really clicked for me. the city
of paris metaphor yes he says the intellect is
like taking a thousand photographs of paris from
every conceivable angle you can gather all those
photos and build a perfect 3d model but it will
never equal the experience of actually walking
down a street in paris smelling the bread from
a bakery hearing the noise of the traffic the
model is not the reality no matter how good the
model is exactly and bergson says we spend our
whole lives living in the model we live in the
labels and concepts we put on things intuition
is the difficult attempt to rip off the label
and get back to the thing itself. It sounds almost
meditative like a Zen practice. Stop categorizing
the world and just be in the world for a moment.
It is deeply related to artistic and mystical
experience. It's why he won the Nobel Prize in
literature, not in physics. He was asking us
to read the world like a poem, not like an instruction
manual. You can analyze the grammar and the meter
of a poem all day long, but unless you enter
the rhythm and feeling of it, you haven't really
read the poem. This idea of stiff logic versus
fluid life actually leads to one of his most
accessible and, frankly, most fun books, which
is about something we all do but rarely think
about. Laughing. Yes. Larere. Laughter. Published
in 1900. It's kind of funny, pun intended, that
this serious metaphysician who was wrestling
with time and free will also wrote the definitive
book on comedy. What is his theory? Why do we
laugh? Well, keeping in mind his central obsession
with life being fluid and mechanism being rigid,
he argues that laughter is triggered when we
see something mechanical encrusted on the living.
Mechanical encrusted on the living. Unpack that
for me. It's a bit of a mouthful. Okay. A human
being is supposed to be alert, adaptive, and
fluid. We are supposed to have that quality of
duration we talked about. But sometimes people
act like machines. They fall into rigid habits.
They get distracted. They fail to adapt to their
environment. They become stiff when they should
be flexible. Give me an example. The classic
slipping on a banana peel. The absolute classic.
Why is a man walking down the street and slipping
on a peel funny? It's not just schadenfreude,
a pleasure in his pain. It's because a living,
aware human being should see the peel and step
over it. They should adapt. But when he slips,
physics takes over. Gravity and inertia treat
him like a sack of potatoes. For a split second,
the human becomes an object, the soul becomes
a machine, and we laugh at that moment of rigidity.
So we are laughing at the inflexibility, at the
failure to be alive and aware. Precisely. We
are mocking the failure to be human. Think of
a bureaucrat who demands you fill out Form 27B
in triplicate, even though the building is on
fire. That is funny, because he is acting like
a robot, programmed to follow a rule regardless
of the fluid reality of the situation. So laughter
is a social corrective. It's a way to keep people
in line. Yes. And this is the darker side of
Bergson's theory. He says laughter isn't moral.
It's not nice. It's actually a form of social
bullying in a way. Bullying. That's a strong
word. Well, think about it. It's a tool society
uses to force conformity and flexibility. When
we laugh at someone, we are humiliating them.
We were sending a clear and often painful signal.
Wake up. Stop acting like a machine. Be flexible.
Pay attention to the rest of us. That explains
so much about internet culture today. All the
cringe videos. We watch people lacking self -awareness,
people acting weirdly or rigidly in social situations,
and we laugh. We are collectively policing them.
Exactly. We are punishing them for not flowing
with the social rhythm. It's a mechanism to ensure
the group stays fluid and adaptive. It really
fits this whole worldview perfectly. Rigidity
is the enemy. whether it's in our concept of
time, in our philosophy, or in our social behavior.
Precisely. And this battle between the fluid
and the rigid explodes onto the biggest stage
possible in his masterpiece, Creative Evolution.
This book was a monster hit, a bestseller. The
notes say 21 editions in 10 years. This is the
book that really cemented his status as the philosopher
of life. Published in 1907. And here, he takes
on the biggest scientific debate of the age,
evolution. Now, we already mentioned he accepted
evolution. He wasn't a creationist fighting against
Darwin. No, not at all. He fully accepted that
life evolved over millions of years. But he hated
the way the scientists of his day were explaining
how it happened. Who were the main contenders
in this debate? You had two main camps. On one
side, you had mechanism. This was the hardline
Darwinian view championed by people like Herbert
Spencer. They saw evolution as nothing but random
determined forces. The past pushes the present.
It's all accidental mutations and... blind environmental
pressure. So we're just being kicked forward
from behind by a series of accidents. Right.
And on the other side, you had finalism. This
is an older idea that goes back to philosophers
like Leibniz. This is the idea that evolution
is following a pre -written program, that there
is a specific goal, a telos, that is pulling
the present toward the future. Like an acorn
having a blueprint inside it to become an oak
tree. Exactly. So your only two choices are.
Either we are accidental robots or we are puppets
following a script written by God or nature.
And Berkson comes in and says, they are both
wrong. He says there are two sides of the same
bad coin. Why? What's the common error? Because
both of them assume that everything is given
in advance. In mechanism, the final outcome is
determined by the starting atoms. In finalism,
the final outcome is determined by the end goal.
In neither case is there any true surprise. There
is no true creation, no novelty. And Bergson,
as we've seen, wanted a universe where genuine
novelty is possible. He believed that time -real
duration unravels unforeseen possibilities. He
believed that life isn't following a script.
It is writing the script as it goes along. This
brings us to his most famous and probably most
controversial term, the Ellen Vital. The vital
impetus or vital impulse. I feel like this term
gets misused a lot or just thrown around. What
is it exactly? Is it a ghost? Is it some magical
energy beam shooting through things? It's not
a physical force like gravity that you can measure
with an instrument. It's more of a description
of the nature of life itself. Bergson sees life
as a current, an explosive creative tendency
that pushes through matter, organizing it. He's
the symphony analogy here too, didn't he? Yes,
and it's a great one. He says, imagine a composer
writing a symphony. Does the composer know the
entire symphony before he starts writing it?
No. If he knew it, he wouldn't have to write
it. The act of writing is the act of discovery.
Exactly. The creation of the symphony is a journey.
The effect creates its cause, as he puts it.
Life invents new forms to solve problems it encounters.
It pushes out. It runs into obstacles. It splits
into contradictory tendencies. Contradictory
tendencies. What does that mean? Think of a shell
exploding. One fragment goes left, one goes right.
Bergson says life itself split early on. Plants
went one way. decided to store energy from the
sun and stay still. Animals went another way.
They decided to expend energy and move around.
And then animals split again. Yes. He saw another
great split. One path went toward instinct. That's
the insects, the bees, the ants. They are perfectly
programmed. They build incredible societies,
but they are rigid. An ant can't decide to become
a poet. The other path went toward intellect.
That's us, the vertebrates, and especially humans.
Flexible, tool -making, but disconnected from
our intuition. So humans aren't the goal of evolution.
We aren't the peak of the pyramid in his view.
Absolutely not. We are just one successful path
that the Elan Vital blasted open. We are the
path where life figured out how to liberate consciousness
from the automatic reflexes of matter. But we
aren't the point of the universe. An ant colony
is just as much a triumph of the Elan Vital as
we are, just in a different direction. It's a
beautiful, chaotic image. Life is this sprawling,
tree -like explosion. But I can see why it upset
a lot of people. Oh, it upset everyone. The scientists,
the hardline biologists thought it sounded too
mis - Vital impulse sounds like magic to a biologist
who wants to study genes and proteins. The Catholic
Church banned all his major books in 1914. They
put them on the index of prohibited books. Which
is so ironic because he was trying to save spirituality
from materialism. The problem for them was that
they accused him of pantheism. They thought he
was saying that God is the process of evolution,
that God is making himself up as he goes along.
The church wanted a God who sits outside of time,
perfect and unchanging. Bergson's God was too
active, too involved in the messy, unpredictable
business of creation. So he's got the scientists
mad at him for being too spiritual, and the church
mad at him for being the wrong kind of spiritual.
He must have been doing something interesting.
And despite the academic and religious critics,
the public absolutely loved it. It gave them
a sense that their lives had cosmic meaning,
that they were part of a grand creative unfolding.
It made people feel alive again. This fame brought
him into contact with the other giants of the
age. We mentioned Proust, but he also had a fascinating
relationship with William James, the great American
psychologist and philosopher. That was a true
intellectual bromance. They met in London in
1908. James was 17 years older. a legend in his
own right, the father of American psychology.
But he hailed Bergson as a modern -day genius.
I read a quote where James said Bergson led him
to renounce the intellectualist method. And to
give up logic. Can you imagine a world -famous
philosopher saying, I gave up logic because of
this guy? James felt that Bergson had finally
provided the rigorous philosophical language
for the stream of consciousness that Jitten had
been studying in psychology. They reinforced
each other's work perfectly. But then... There
was the collision. The moment the music for Bergson
kind of stopped. The Einstein debate, April 6th,
1922. We have to dramatize this because it feels
like a turning point, not just for Bergson, but
for 20th century intellectual history. It really
was. You have the Société Française de Philosophie
in Paris, a packed room. On one side of the stage,
you have Henri Bergson, the reigning king of
philosophy, Nobel laureate to be. On the other,
you have Albert Einstein, the new superstar of
physics, fresh off his proof of general relativity.
What was the beef? What was the disagreement
about? Well, Bergson had written a book called
Duration and Simultaneity. He was trying to reconcile
his concept of duration with Einstein's special
relativity. And he wasn't saying the math was
wrong. He was trying to say, look, Professor
Einstein, your theory is brilliant physics, but
it is a theory about clocks. It's about how we
measure time from different frames of reference.
It doesn't explain the time we actually live.
He was trying to save a space for human experience.
alongside the cold hard physics. He was arguing
that before you can measure time with a clock
you have to have a consciousness that experiences
the passage of time. A single universal flowing
time. He said with no consciousness there is
no time. The physicist's time is a concept derived
from this primary experience. And how did Einstein
take that? Not well. It was all very polite and
academic, but it was brutal. Einstein stood up
and delivered a line that, in many ways, put
a nail in Bergson's popular coffin. He said,
quite simply, the time of the philosophers does
not exist. Ouch. That's a direct hit. He effectively
said, there is psychological time, which is just
a subjective illusion happening in your head,
and there is physical time, the time of the physicist.
And physical time is the only one that is real.
And the room sided with Einstein. The zeitgeist
sided with Einstein. The world sided with Einstein.
This was the moment the 20th century decided,
if you can't measure it, it isn't real. Physics
became the queen of the sciences and philosophy
was demoted. That is a tragedy in a way. Because
we gain nuclear power and GPS and space travel
from Einstein's view. But did we lose something
essential in the process? We lost the philosophical
validity of our own experience. We started trusting
the instrument more than the user. If you feel
sad but your brain scan says you're fine, we
are trained to trust the scan. Bergson would
say that is a form of insanity. It feels like
we are still living in the wreckage of that debate.
We prioritize quantifiable data over qualitative
intuition every single day in almost every field.
We absolutely do. And for Bergson, Personally,
it was a disaster. Critics started saying he
didn't understand the math, which was only partly
true. He understood it. He just interpreted its
philosophical meaning differently. But the narrative
set in. Bergson was a relic of the past. Einstein
was the future. But Bergson didn't just disappear
into a hole. He was still a major public figure.
It was. He pivoted. In a way, he became a diplomat.
He was the first president of the International
Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which
was the direct ancestor of UNESCO. He worked
with Einstein and Marie Curie on international
peace and scientific collaboration. So he worked
with the man who bested him. He did. He even
helped negotiate the U .S. entry into World War
I on a mission for the French government. He
was a man of the world. But his final years.
This is where the story stops being about philosophy
and starts being about profound moral character.
It really does. By the 1930s, Bergson is an old
man. He's suffering from severe rheumatism. The
notes say he was half paralyzed. He wins the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, but he can't
even travel to Stockholm to accept it in person.
And then the dark clouds of World War II gather
over Europe. He wrote his last great work, The
Two Sources of Morality and Religion, in 1932.
In it, he moves toward mysticism. He basically
argues that the ultimate expression of the Ellen
Vital is love, universal charity, the open soul
versus the closed society. And in his personal
life, this intellectual journey was leading him
toward Catholicism. Yes. In his will, which he
wrote in 1937, he revealed that his thinking
had brought him very, very close to converting
to Catholicism. He called it the perfect complement
to Judaism. He felt it was the spiritual completion
of his own philosophy. But he didn't convert.
No. And the reason he gave is just. It's heartbreakingly
noble. He saw the rise of Nazism in Germany.
He saw the virulent anti -Semitism sweeping across
Europe. And he wrote in his will, I wanted to
remain among those who tomorrow will be persecuted.
That is profound solidarity. He chose to stay
with his people in their darkest hour, even though
his own spiritual beliefs were shifting. It gets
even more powerful. 1940. The Nazis occupy Paris.
The collaborationist Vichy government takes over.
They immediately pass these vile anti -Semitic
laws. Jews have to register with the police.
They are fired from all academic posts. But Bergson
is a national treasure. He's the most famous
French philosopher alive, a Nobel laureate. Exactly.
The French government, embarrassed, offers him
an exemption. They tell him, you don't have to
register. You don't have to resign your honors.
You are Henri Bergson. These laws don't apply
to you. And what does he do? He refused. He said
he would not accept any treatment different from
that of his people. He renounced all his honors.
He resigned all his posts. And then in December
of 1940, completely frail, sick, barely able
to stand without excruciating pain, he had himself
carried to the police station. To register as
a Jew. To register. He stood in that long line
in the freezing cold and on the form under the
line for occupation, he wrote. Academic, philosopher,
Nobel Prize winner, Jew. That gives me chills.
That is such a powerful act of defiance, asserting
his identity at the very moment it was most dangerous.
It was his final argument, wasn't it? He lived
his philosophy. Life is action. Life is affirmation.
He died just a few weeks later, in January 1941,
of bronchitis that the doctors said was caused
by that exposure to the cold. A Catholic priest
said prayers at his funeral, to his request,
but he died as a Jew. in solidarity it's a heroic
end to an incredible life but after the war he
kind of faded away the intellectual climate changed
the existentialists took over sartre camus they
were the new cool kids on the block and bergson
was seen as irrationalist or vitalist, which
became dirty words in philosophy. Bertrand Russell
mocked him relentlessly. He called Bergson's
work emotive speculation. The analytic philosophers
took over the universities in the English spooking
world, and they wanted logic and language, not
intuition and poetry. So why are we talking about
him now? Why is he popping up in 2026? What sparked
the revival? A few key reasons. First, and most
importantly in the world of philosophy, was Yule
Deleuze. In the 1960s, he wrote a book called
Bergsonism that basically rescued Bergson from
the trash heap of intellectual history. What
did Deleuze do? He showed that Bergson wasn't
just a fuzzy mystic. He was a rigorous thinker
of difference and becoming. He made Briggs and
cool again for a whole new generation of thinkers.
And science kind of caught up again, didn't it?
It did in a big way. We already mentioned quantum
mechanics, but later came complexity theory and
chaos theory. Scientists studying complex systems
like the weather or the stock market or biology
started realizing that the old mechanical linear
view of cause and effect. just doesn't work right
bead a hitting bb isn't enough to explain a hurricane
exactly and ilya prigogine who won the nobel
prize in chemistry explicitly cited bergson's
influence really yes prigogine said that physics
had to rediscover the arrow of time the idea
that time only moves one way and creates irreversible
changes and novelty that is pure bergson and
i have to imagine artificial intelligence is
a big part of this revival today It's huge. We
are building these incredible machines, large
language models, neural networks. They are the
absolute triumph of the Brygzonian intellect.
They are the ultimate net. thrown over reality.
They analyze billions of static data points from
the past. But they don't have intuition. They
don't have duration. They don't swim. They don't
experience that snowball of consciousness. They
predict the next word in a sentence based on
the statistical probability of all the previous
words they've seen. But they don't have the lived
felt snowball of consciousness. They simulate
but they don't live. Bergson predicts exactly
why AI for all its brilliance feels hollow. It's
the difference between a perfect map of Paris
and actually walking in Paris. AI is the best
map ever made. But it's still just a map. Exactly.
And as we merge more and more with our technology,
we need Bergson to remind us of what parts of
us cannot be digitized or calculated. There's
also a connection to Eastern philosophy that
I found really interesting in the notes. Yes.
Many scholars, especially in recent years, have
noted the deep parallels with traditions like
Vedanta or Buddhism. The idea that the self is
a flow, not a static thing. Sri Aurobindo, the
Indian philosopher and mystic, had a very similar
view of a creative, integrative evolution. You
could say Bergson was trying to heal. the split
between the spiritual and the material in the
West, a project which Eastern traditions had
been engaged in for millennia. So as we wrap
up this deep dive, and this is a truly deep one,
what is the big takeaway? If I'm driving to work
right now or washing the dishes, what should
I take from Henri Bergson into my day? I think
it's an invitation. An invitation to change how
you view your own life. Bergson asks us to stop
freezing the world. Stop looking at your life
as a series of checkpoints on a timeline, school,
job, marriage, retirement, death. That's spatial
time. That's just the beads on a string. Instead,
jump in the water. Jump in the water. Feel the
duration. Trust your intuition. Understand that
you are a part of a creative evolution that is
still happening right now. Through you. You aren't
a machine following a program. You are an artist
creating a moment that has never existed before
in the history of the universe. I love that.
And here is a final provocative thought for you
to chew on as we finish. We live in the age of
algorithms, predictive modeling, big data. The
entire goal of big tech is to predict what you
will buy, what you will watch, and who you will
vote for. Which is the ultimate triumph of mechanism
and finalism, isn't it? The algorithm looks at
your past to predict your future. It assumes
you are a closed loop, a predictable machine.
Exactly. But Bergson argued that time unravels
unforeseen possibilities, that true novelty is
always possible. So, is the algorithm right?
Are you just the sum of your data points? Or
is there an Elan Vital in you that can do something
the data never, ever predicted? That is the question,
isn't it? Are you living by the clock or are
you living by the melody? I think I'm going to
go listen to some music and try to forget what
time it is. Thanks for diving deep with us. A
real pleasure. See you in the next Deep Dive.
Welcome to The Debate. I want you to picture
a scene in Paris right around 1910. The street
outside the Collège de France is just gridlocked.
You've got horse -drawn carriages tangled up
with these, you know, very early automobiles.
Inside, society ladies have sent their servants
five hours early just to hold a seat. And they're
not there for a concert. They aren't there for
a political rally. They are there to listen to
a philosopher. A man who, for a very brief window,
was, well, arguably the most famous intellectual
on the planet, Henri Bergson. He was really the
first rock star philosopher. I mean, he won the
Nobel Prize in Literature. He was read by everyone
from Marcel Proust to Theodore Roosevelt. And
then almost as quickly as he rose, he just sort
of vanished from the curriculum. Only to be resurrected
every 30 years or so by people who find science
a bit too cold for their liking. He returns because
the question he asked is the one we still haven't
really answered. It's the ghost in the machine
of our modern world. And the question is this.
Is reality a mechanism? Is the universe just
a giant clock, you know, ticking away based on
fixed laws? Or is it a continuous, creative,
unpredictable flow that our science is simply
too rigid to capture? Right. To put it in modern
terms, are we biological robots running a complex
script, or is there actually something extra
going on? I'm here to argue the former. I'm taking
the side of the rationalists. Berkson's philosophy
is beautiful. I will absolutely grant you that.
It's poetic. But he asks us to abandon the precision
of the intellect for this vague feeling he calls
intuition. And historically, Whenever we trade
rigorous analysis for gut feelings, we end up
in trouble. And I'm here to argue that Bergson
was right and that his warning is actually more
relevant now than it was in 1910. We have let
the machine model of the universe blind us to
the actual experience of being alive. We're obsessed
with measuring, quantifying, and predicting.
Bergson argues that while that's great for building
bridges, it's, well, it's terrible for understanding
life. We treat life like a math problem, but
it's actually a melody. A melody doesn't keep
the lights on. Math does. But all right, let's
get into the weeds. Where do we even start with
this? We have to start with his most famous concept,
time. But not time as you see it on your watch.
Bergson called it duration, or in French, durée.
Right. And this is the core disagreement. Bergson
argues that we have all committed a fundamental
error in how we think. We have spatialized time.
I mean, think about how you visualize history
or even just your day. You probably imagine a
line. You put dots on it. 9 a .m., 10 a .m.,
11 a .m. You're treating time as if it were space,
a container that you can slice up into little
static units. Because that is how reality functions.
I mean, if I don't cut time into hours and minutes,
I don't show up for this recording. Physics,
logistics, engineering, they all rely on treating
time as a variable, little t. It's a coordinate.
It has to be measurable or it's useless. Useless
for calculation, maybe, but is it true? Bergson
says no. He says that by cutting time into static
slices, you kill it. You stop the flow. Real
time, the time you are experiencing right now
as you listen to this, is a continuous melt.
It's like a snowball rolling down a snowy hill.
The snow of the past isn't left behind. It's
gathered up into the ball. The past is constantly,
as he says, gnawing into the future. It's an
accumulation, not a sequence of distinct dots.
I've read the snowball metaphor. It's evocative.
But if we strip away the poetry for a second,
what is he actually claiming? If I measure a
second and then I measure another second, I have
two seconds. The feeling that they are all connected
doesn't change the physics of the clock. It sounds
like he's just complaining that math feels cold.
No, no, he's saying math is blind to the essence
of movement. He uses the metaphor of the city
to explain this distinction between intellect
and intuition. The photos versus the walk, yeah.
Exactly. Imagine you want to understand Paris.
You can take 10 ,000 photographs of the city
from every possible angle. You can categorize
the architecture, map the sewers, measure the
height of the Eiffel Tower to the millimeter.
That is analysis. That is the intellect at work.
You are circling the object, taking snapshots.
And if I do that, I have a very accurate, very
functional understanding of Paris. I can navigate
it. I can renovate it. It has a duration. The
feeling of the city, the flow of it, can only
be grasped by entering it, by using intuition.
You, the rationalist, are standing outside looking
at photos. Bergson is walking the street. I see
the appeal of that, truly. It's the difference
between reading the menu and eating the steak.
But here's the problem, and it's one that the
philosopher George Santayana pointed out ruthlessly.
If I am an urban planner or a structural engineer,
I don't need the feeling of the walk. I need
the map. I need the static, frozen measurements.
If we rely on Bergson's intuition, we might have
a lovely spiritual experience, but the bridge
falls down. But Bergson isn't telling you to
burn the map. He never said, don't use analysis
for solids. He said, don't confuse the map with
the territory. He argued that when we apply this
snapshot thinking to motion, we create paradoxes
that logic literally cannot solve. I mean, look
at Zeno's paradox. The ancient Greek puzzle,
the arrow that never hits the target. Right.
And let's just break that down for people, because
it proves Bergson's point about how our brains
malfunction. Zeno argued that if you shoot an
arrow at a target, it can never get there. Why?
Because before it goes the whole way, it has
to go halfway. Correct. And before it goes the
rest of the way, it has to go half of that distance.
And half of that. And half of that. There are
an infinite number of halves in any amount of
space. So logically, if time and space are made
of points, the arrow has to cross an infinity
of points. But we solved Zeno. We invented calculus.
We learned how to sum an infinite series. We
used the very intellect Bergeson criticizes to
solve the problem. The math works. Bergeson would
say calculus is just a sharper pair of scissors.
You're still treating the movement as a line
made of points. You're just making the points
really, really small. In Creative Evolution,
he says you can't learn to swim by sitting on
the shore calculating fluid dynamics. You have
to jump in. The intellect is a tool for solids,
for static things. It fails when it tries to
grasp life. The arrow moves because movement
is indivisible. It's one single gesture. The
halves only exist in your mind, not in the arrow.
That is a dangerous statement. It suggests that
analysis is a fiction. But let's pivot to where
this thinking applies to something more tangible.
Evolution. Because this is where Bergson really
stepped into the ring with the scientific establishment.
And where I think he got a bloody nose. The Ellen
Vital. The vital impulse. This is the concept
that got him accused of mysticism. It's the concept
that saves biology from being a machine. What's
the concept that inserts a ghost into the machine?
I mean, Bergson looked at evolution. He accepted
Darwin, mostly, but he decided that natural selection
just wasn't enough. He claimed there must be
some internal spiritual push driving life toward
complexity. He wasn't rejecting Darwin. He was
rejecting the gloom of mechanism. Look at the
prevailing view of his time, which was largely
driven by Herbert Spencer. They viewed the universe
as a billiard table. Atoms hit atoms, causes
lead to effects, and everything is determined
by what happened before. If that's true, and
I want listeners to really think about this,
if that is true, then the entire history of life,
every species, every palm, this very conversation
we are having, was already pre -calculated in
the Big Bang. That's determinism. And it's a
hard pill to swallow, but physics supports it.
If you know the position and speed of every particle
and the laws of interaction, the future is just
the result of the past. Bergson says, look at
the reality of life. Look at the invention. Life
isn't just a reshuffling of old parts. It creates
absolute novelty. He uses the example of the
eye. The eye is the classic creationist argument,
though. It's too complex to be random. But Bergson
isn't a creationist in the religious sense. He's
not saying a designer built it like a watchmaker.
He asks, how does a specific species of scallop
and a human being both develop a complex eye
with a retina and lens along completely different
evolutionary lines? If evolution is just accidental
mutations being filtered by the environment,
that is a staggering coincidence. It's not a
coincidence. It's convergent evolution. Light
exists. Organisms that can detect light survive
better. The environment shapes the tool. We don't
need a mystical vital force to explain why eyes
are useful. We need genes, mutation, and time.
But you're missing the why. Why does life bother
getting more complex? A single -celled organism
is perfectly adapted. It survives. It reproduces.
It's immortal, in a way. If mechanism were true,
life should have stopped there. Why the explosion
of diversity? Why the risk? Bergson says life
is an effort to graft freedom onto matter. It's
an improvisation. The Alon Vital is that thrust.
It's an explosive force pushing outward, trying
to overcome the drag of matter. Improvisation.
That's the key word you keep using. You're describing
the universe like a jazz musician. Yes, because
jazz is created in the moment. It's not on a
sheet of paper until after it's played. But the
universe acts like a clock. And this is where
Bergson got into trouble with more than just
the scientists. In 1914, the Vatican put all
three of his major books on the Index of Prohibited
Books. That is a rare achievement, to be hated
by the materialist scientists and the Catholic
Church at the same time. Well, it makes perfect
sense. He threatened the dogmas of both. The
church accused him of pantheism. They saw his
creative evolution and realized the implication.
If God is this vital force making things up as
he goes along, then God is an omniscient. God
is just figuring it out. It collapsed the creator
into the creation. But Bergson was trying to
save free will. If God has a plan, that's finalism.
Or if the universe is a machine, that's mechanism.
Then we are just puppets. In both cases, the
future is already written. Bergson insists that
the future is open. It is being written right
now. God, or the force, is creating itself through
us. But look at the cost of that freedom. You
have to strip the human mind of its power to
analyze truth. And this is my biggest issue with
Bergsonism. He claims the intellect, our ability
to use logic, categorize, and define, is not
a window to truth. He calls it a practical faculty.
Because it is. I mean, think about evolution.
Why did we evolve a brain? Was it to solve abstract
metaphysical riddles? No, it was to survive.
It was to hunt, to build shelters, to escape
predators. I agree with that. The brain is a
survival engine. So our intellect is designed
to manipulate solid matter. We cut up the world
so we can eat it or build with it. We are hardwired
to see the world as a collection of dead, static
objects because that helps us control them. But
when we turn that tool, which is designed for
dead matter, onto living things, we misinterpret
them. We treat a person like a machine. We treat
time like a ruler. So we are smart enough to
build the Eiffel Tower, but too dumb to understand
why we built it? We are smart enough to build
the tower, but we look at a bird in flight and
try to understand it as a mechanical glider,
missing the essence of the life within it. Bergson
has a wonderful proof of this in his essay on
laughter. Why is it funny when a man slips on
a banana peel? Slapstick. It's classic comedy.
But why? Bergson says we laugh specifically when
the mechanical is encrusted on the living. We
expect a human to be fluid, alert, adaptive.
When he slips, he becomes a falling object. He
becomes rigid. He becomes a machine. We laugh
because our intuition knows that life shouldn't
be mechanical. The laughter is a corrective.
It's society saying, wake up, be fluid, stop
acting like a robot. That is a brilliant psychological
observation. I'll give him that. It explains
the uncanny valley, too. But does it justify
throwing out logic? You're using a very sophisticated
logical argument right now to tell me that logic
is invalid. It's a performative contradiction.
Well, I'm using the ladder to climb up so I can
kick it away. That's exactly what William James
tried to do. He was Bergson's biggest fan in
America. He said Berkson made him give up logic
squarely and irrevocably. But look where that
leads. James's own students, people like Horace
Callen, eventually realized that if you give
up logic, you have no way to verify anything.
If I say I feel the vital force and you say I
don't, the conversation ends. We're just trading
diary entries. Civilization requires a shared
map, not just individual feelings. But the map
keeps changing. You cling to scientific truth.
But look what happened to the science Bergson
criticized. He fought against the billiard ball
physics of the 19th century. And guess what?
That physics is dead. Quantum mechanics killed
it. Hold on. You're skipping over the biggest
defeat in Bergson's career. You can't talk about
physics without talking about Einstein. Ah, the
1922 debate. It was the showdown of the century.
Bergson versus Einstein at the French Society
of Philosophy. Bergson tried to argue that relativity,
Einstein's masterpiece, was limited because it
only dealt with measured time, not live time.
He tried to say there was a universal time that
everyone feels. Which is true. We do feel it.
And Einstein just destroyed him. He replied with
one sentence. The time of the philosophers does
not exist. He meant that there is no universal
flow. Time is relative to speed and gravity.
If I move fast enough, My time literally slows
down compared to yours. That is a mathematical
fact. It's not a feeling. The scientific community
rallied around Einstein and Berkson was viewed
as a relic, an old man trying to argue with math
using poetry. It was so embarrassing that later,
Berkson's book on the topic was excluded from
his collected works. It was excluded, yes. But
history is swinging back. The philosopher Maurice
Merleau -Ponty and later Deleuze argued that
Einstein and Bergson were talking past each other.
Einstein was describing how to measure light.
Bergson was describing the phenomenology of existence.
Einstein explains the clock. Bergson explains
why we care what time it is. That sounds like
a participation trophy. You're both right. No.
Look at the science. Louis de Broglie, who won
the Nobel for physics, said Bergson anticipated
quantum mechanics by 40 years. Why? Because quantum
mechanics tells us that at the fundamental level,
matter isn't made of tiny billiard balls. It's
made of waves. It's made of vibrations. It is
indeterminate until it is observed. That is exactly
what Berkson meant by duration and creative evolution.
The universe is not a clock. It's a cloud of
possibilities. You are doing quite a bit of retrofitting
there. Saying vibrations sounds like quantum
theory, sure. But Berkson wasn't doing the math.
He was guessing. He was using intuition. That's
the entire point. He grasped the nature of reality
before the math caught up. Or he got lucky with
a metaphor. Look, even if I grant you that the
clockwork universe is dead, we didn't kill it
with poetry. We killed it with better math. Chaos
theory, complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics.
These are rigorous mathematical fields. They
don't rely on an Ellen Vitale. They rely on equations.
We can model the unpredictability. But they describe
a world that acts like Bergson said it did. A
world where the future is unpredictable. A world
where small variations lead to massive, novel
outcomes. I will concede that the arrogance of
19th century science, the idea that we could
predict every future event like a script, was
wrong. Bergson saw that arrogance and called
it out. It helps us remain human in that obsession
with control, and this is why he matters today.
We are obsessed with algorithms. We want to predict
the stock market, predict our health, predict
what video we want to watch next. We are trying
to turn our lives into machines. We track our
sleep, our steps, our calories. Berkson reminds
us that we are not machines. But we are also
not wizards. I worry that Berksonism is just
a comforting bedtime story. It tells us don't
worry about the hard limits of biology or physics.
You are pure creative energy. It feels good.
It sells books. But does it help us navigate
a world that runs on silicon and electricity?
If I ignore the algorithm of my health, I might
die of a preventable disease. It helps us remain
human in that world. It helps us remember that
the self isn't just a series of data points.
Perhaps. But data points save lives. Let's go
back to the symphony one last time. Bergson says
your life is a composition. The notes of the
past are written. They determine the key, the
rhythm. You can't change them. But the next note,
the very next one. That is not on the page yet.
You have to write it. It is radical responsibility.
And I suppose my role is to remind you that you
still have to follow the rules of harmony. You
can't just smash the keys and call it music.
Fair enough. We need the structure. But we are
the music. A poetic truth. I can accept that.
It has been a pleasure debating the nature of
reality with you. The pleasure was all mine,
even if I'm still checking my watch. And to our
listeners, we leave you with this. Are you living
your life as a machine to be optimized or a melody
to be composed? Thank you for joining the debate.
Until next time.