By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — On a cold December day in occupied Paris in 1940, a large group lined up at the Nazi commandant’s office. Jews stood waiting to be registered, anxious for their lives. In the crowd was a thin, tall old man with a bulging, high forehead, a shallow chin and a small mustache. After waiting for hours in the cold, he caught a bad cold, caught pneumonia, and died on January 3, 1941. He died in the very town in which he had been born 80 years earlier. Registered by the Nazis, the old Jew was one of France’s most famous men, Professor Henri Bergson of the Collège de France, member of the French Academy of Sciences, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the Pantheon there is an inscription on one of the columns: “To Henri Bergson, a philosopher whose life and work have done honor to France and to human thought.”
Although Bergson’s books were on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Catholic Church, he himself was inclined to convert to Catholicism. Although Bergson was by the end of his life a convinced Catholic, the Nazi registry lists him as a Jew. Although Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was not a literary man. Although Bergson was one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, he made no contribution to philosophy: his conception of time proved flawed. Although Bergson was a philosopher, his main contribution to civilization was through literature.
Henri-Louis Bergson (1859 – 1941), the greatest exponent of 20th-century irrationalist philosophy, became a professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1898, and in 1900 was appointed chair of Greek philosophy at the Collège de France. In 1914 he was elected a member of the French Academy and president of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. Central to Bergson’s philosophy is the concept of time. He distinguished between scientific time, which is measured by hours, and pure time as a dynamic and active flow of events – the flow of life itself. He called this time “duration.” Bergson distinguished between physical time and duration, the time of consciousness. This idea is similar to American philosopher and psychologist William James’s idea of the “stream of consciousness.”
Even before the outbreak of World War I, Henri Bergson gained international fame with his works, lectures and speeches. In his lectures he poked fun at the limitations of rational methods of knowledge. Criticism of the intellect, praise of intuition, and subjective time as truth attracted writers to Bergson’s philosophy and repelled natural scientists. Bergson denied the conclusion of the theory of relativity that time slows down on the clock of a fast-moving observer. In Duration and Simultaneity (1924) he wrote that the clock of a moving twin “does not show a lag when he finds the real clock on his return (from space travel. – A.G.)”. In his opinion, there are real, that is, absolute clocks. This statement discredits Bergson in the eyes of physicists, despite the fact that he later tried to soften the negative effect of his statement. On April 6, 1922, at a meeting of the French Philosophical Society in Paris, Bergson defended the idea of the coexistence of multiple “living” times. Einstein, who was present at the meeting, categorically rejected the “time of philosophers.” He said: “The philosopher’s time […] is both psychological and physical time.”
A new clash between Bergson and Einstein occurred a few months later on different ground. Einstein was invited to join the Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, of which Bergson was chairman. Immediately after joining the committee, Einstein began to think about resigning because of the prevalence of chauvinistic anti-German sentiments and demands to expel German colleagues from his ranks (this boycott did not apply to Einstein himself as a Swiss citizen). During the war, Bergson wrote harsh anti-German articles. In the Committee, Einstein was regarded with suspicion for his internationalism and for his collaboration with the Zionists. While Einstein remained an internationalist, not forgetting his Jewishness, Bergson’s position was dominated by French nationalism. In February 1925 he declined Einstein’s invitation to come to Jerusalem for the opening of the Hebrew University, saying he was busy. In a letter to a friend, Maurice Solovin (1923), Einstein described his decision to resign from the Committee: “I resigned from the Committee of the League of Nations, for I no longer believe in that institution. This has caused a lot of anger, but I am nevertheless pleased that I went for it. False undertakings must be abandoned, even if they have a pretty name. Bergson made serious mistakes in his book on the theory of relativity. God will forgive him.”
Bergson was not a writer, but he wrote brilliantly. William James characterized his style as follows: “Clarity of presentation is the first thing that strikes the reader. Bergson grips you so much that you immediately want to be his disciple. It’s just a miracle, he’s a real magician.” There was a kind of musicality in his way of writing and speaking, noted by his pupil and biographer Jacques Chevalier: “His speech was calm, rhythmic and noble. Extraordinary confidence and striking accuracy, mesmerizing musical intonations.” Bergson inherited his musicality from his father, a famous pianist and organist, author of a pedagogical treatise on piano playing, composer of several operas, professor and director of the Geneva Academy of Music, Michel Bergson, a Polish Jew who took piano lessons from Chopin.
The philosopher’s mother, a religious Irish Jew, was a broadly educated woman who awakened her son’s interest in English philosophy. Bergson read the original works of English philosophers from John Locke to Herbert Spencer. Living to the age of 98, she had read all of Henri’s major works, was proud of his accomplishments and tolerated his fascination with Catholicism.
The concept of “stream of consciousness” did not take hold as a philosophical category, but became popular in literature to describe spiritual life. Bergson’s concept of time, meaningless in terms of physics, had a huge impact on the style of writers, Nobel Prize winners, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Bergson compared his time to a tangle which, as it increases, does not lose the accumulated time, and he compared mechanical time to a pearl necklace, in which each moment is its own. In the concept of duration Bergson saw the exercise of free will taken away by determinism. He influenced the manner of writing of the author of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust. His “time” played a major role in recreating artistic time, in capturing the bizarre mechanism of memory, a kind of memory image. When sending the philosopher another volume of the In Search of Lost Time, the 1922 novel Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust wrote: “To Mr. Henri Bergson, the first great metaphysicist since Leibniz (and even greater), whose creative system, even evolving, will forever retain the Bergson name. – A passionate admirer of you, embarrassed that the words “Bergsonian novels” are applied to his works without any occasion […] But any modern coin carries the clear imprint of the monarch’s profile.” Bergson’s “monarch” time was an unscientific fiction, a literary device, a way of conveying the writer’s fantasy.
Henri Bergson was the same age as Dreyfus. Many major figures of culture and science in France supported Dreyfus during the famous affair, which lasted from 1894 to 1906. The future Prime Minister of France, the Jew Leon Blum became involved in politics because of the Dreyfus affair. At one time Blum was apparently a candidate for a second Dreyfus. During the Dreyfus case, Bergson heard from all sides in Paris about the case, but he signed no protests, published nothing on the subject, nor spoke out in defense of the wrongfully accused officer. He did not respond to the trial of the century, which reflected the power of the Jewish question on French society. His detachment from the Jewish question was allowed to him by the main category of his philosophy, the concept of time, his subjective interpretation of the concept of time: Jewry was outside the stream of his consciousness.
In 1926, another trial brought Bergson out of his fantasy time and back to a Jewish problem whose existence he had ignored. On May 25, 1926, on Rue Racine in Paris, Sholom Schwarzbard murdered Simon Petlyura, the former prime minister of the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. A thread ran from the Dreyfus case to the Schwarzbard trial. The grandfather of Schwarzbard’s defender, French Jew Henri Torres, was a founder of the League for Human and Civil Rights during the Dreyfus case. Bergson spoke publicly in defense of the murderer of Petliura, punishing this murderer of Jews. The humanist Henri Bergson sided with the murderer: a murder committed in retaliation for a mass murder was, in his opinion, a measure of self-defense. The mass murder of Jews horrified Bergson. He supported Schwarzbard’s “unconventional” protest against genocide. Silence during the Dreyfus affair gave way to Bergson’s eloquent condemnation of the Petliurian crimes against the Jewish people. Ten years after the murder of Petliura, Bergson was already convinced that anti-Semitism would lead to even more massacres. He, a fighter against reason, feared the loss of reason by humanity. The “search of lost time” began, but Bergson had very little physical time left.
Henri Bergson lived to see the anti-Jewish “Decree on the Jews” issued by the Vichy administration on October 3, 1940. He returned his orders and decorations to the pro-Nazi authorities, the heirs of the anti-Dreyfusarians, and refused the Nazis’ offer not to register as a Jew. He did not make it to the ghetto. He did not live to see the expulsion of French Jews to extermination camps. Shortly before his death, he solidarized with the people from whom he had been estranged all his life. In his will he explained his intention to register as a Jew: “Reflection has led me to Catholicism, in which I see the full completion of Judaism. I would have accepted it if I had not seen for a number of years the terrible wave of anti-Semitism being prepared […] that would sweep over the world. I wanted to remain among those who will be persecuted tomorrow.” Before his death, Henri Bergson realized the urgency of the Jewish question, the answer to which he had evaded all his life.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 8 books and about 500 articles in paper and online, was published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English and German.