With the real success of his “Descartes and France, the story of a national passion,” François Azouvi has struck upon a good formula: to venture into the genre of biography but completely reshape its approach. It’s no longer a matter of narrating the life of a thinker in lavish detail but rather of placing his work at the heart of the major intellectual and political developments of his century.
His latest study on Henri Bergson is inspired by the same vein and adopts the same perspectives. Bergson’s personal life takes a back seat to an “Essay” on his “philosophical magisterium.” This choice is all the more interesting because the man who came to be known as the “philosopher of intuition” is astronomically—and for good reason—removed from Cartesian thought. Unlike Descartes, Bergson achieved glory during his lifetime. Yet both were sidelined by the Sorbonne, a place which, as the author ironically notes, “one doesn’t need to mention to write the modern history of philosophy, except to designate the place where the most notorious philosophers have not taught!” As a result, Bergson delivered his lectures at the Collège de France, a place already created, as the research director at CNRS tells us, by Francis I to bypass a “university already paralyzed by old ways.” This situation of being “rejected” did not at all hinder, but rather contributed to his intellectual fortune: at the height of his fame, footmen reserved seats hours in advance for the “ladies of society” who came to listen to the master.
The author of “Creative Evolution” became the man of an era, of an entire century since his initial reflections born as early as 1889 seemed to ride, as one might say today, a substantial wave of fatigue or even “bankruptcy,” to use a contemporary’s exaggerated term, that was affecting the foundations of positivist thought: the absolute truth of scientific knowledge and the primacy of experimental reasoning. Was it the turn of the century, which always arouses a people’s enthusiasm for spiritualist philosophy—as evidenced by the many speculations around the year 2000—that contributed to the philosopher’s success? Whatever the reason, the commentaries on his “Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,” published in 1889, and later on “Matter and Memory” in 1896, positioned Bergson as an opponent of intellectualism and Kantian rationalism. Furthermore, they portrayed him as an advocate of a metaphysics where “psychology becomes the science of realities par excellence.” With this background set, the methodology previously used by the author in his “Descartes” takes hold: by summoning, through his extraordinary erudition, the works of artists, the reflections of intellectuals and thinkers, the reactions of politicians from all sides, and the diatribes of the clergy’s leaders of the time regarding Bergson, François Azouvi allows us subtly and progressively to appropriate the entirety of Bergson’s complex philosophical work. For example, “symbolist” and then “futurist” painters claimed his influence, and literary critics have wished to discern in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” the respective ability of art and language to access interiority. In both cases, Bergson distinguishes himself and refutes. Proust confirmed in an interview that his novel owes nothing to the philosopher. It did nothing to curtail the influence: “Weird extension of glory that is legend,” explains Albert Thibaudet in a vivid phrase accompanying the success of Bergson’s major 1907 work, “Creative Evolution.” Despite clear support from nationalist and conservative right-wing circles, the “shock” of this publication—the idea of a “vital impetus” allowing a return on oneself to rediscover the divine essence—led to its placement on the Index by a Rome Church more Thomist than Augustinian in June 1914. This occurred four months after his election to the French Academy and fourteen years before receiving the Nobel Prize in 1928. Meanwhile, the man who had always “kept away from political commitments” nonetheless brilliantly fulfilled the mission assigned by Aristide Briand’s Government to visit President Wilson to convince him to go to war alongside the Allies.
A star fades when it joins the vastness of the firmament. Having become “classic,” and therefore less fashionable, Bergsonism, according to François Azouvi’s conclusion, nevertheless produced “something truly new in France”: as a popular event, “the philosophical instance has become everyone’s affair.”
François Azouvi, “The Glory of Bergson, Essay on the Philosophical Magisterium,” NRF Essay Collection, Gallimard Editions, 2007, 390 pages, 22.50 Euros.
