The Left and Henri Bergson
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The Left and Henri Bergson Kevin Duong1
© Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract This article studies the polarizing role Henri Bergson played in twentieth-century political theory in France and beyond. A controversial and charismatic philosopher, Bergson’s thought traveled a notoriously convoluted itinerary. Though his critiques of scientific positivism before the First World War endeared him to Catholic intellectuals, sectors of the French left were his most committed interpreters, a fact that mystified and enraged his contemporaries. Tracing the assorted ways the left took up Bergson—from syndicalism to négritude—brings into focus the left’s historically bipolar relationship to scientific progress and its promise of emancipation. It also underscores something fundamental about the history of the twentieth-century left: It maintained an ideologically unpredictable yet indispensable concern for “lived experience.” Keywords Henri Bergson · The left · Lived experience · French political thought
1. From the moment Henri Bergson published his doctoral thesis in 1889, he became a figure of intense interest for the French right. Temperamentally moderate, the son of assimilated Polish Jews, Bergson spent his normalien days steering clear of political polemics. Unwilling to take sides publicly during the heights of the Dreyfus Affair, he complained quietly that the scandal was too divisive (Grogin 1988, 109). The young philosopher devoted his energies instead to his lectures and research. Studies like his 1889 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience were not remotely political. They were works of metaphysics, criticisms against conventional understandings of time and determinism. Above all, they were efforts to defend “intuition” as a means of understanding the reality of time, memory, and the past. They were uniformly tender in tone and poetic in presentation. * Kevin Duong [email protected] 1
Department of Politics, University of Virginia, Gibson Hall S453, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA Vol.:(0123456789)
K. Duong
Yet in the early twentieth century, numerous thinkers on the right found in Bergson a weapon and a cause. A significant group of royalists at the Action française, men like Gilbert Maire and Henri Clouard, were avowed Bergsonists (Weber 1962, 80–82). In the “crise du français” which pitted the Sorbonne’s esprit de géométrie against the culture générale of the Collège de France, Bergson’s name became a rallying cry for those denouncing the tyranny of the Third Republic’s cult of science, state, and systematization (Massis and de Tarde 1911; see generally Grogin 1988, 107–138; Prochasson and Rasmussen 1996; Bianco 2015, 81–93). Many artists, especially those who would later sympathize with fascism, drew from Bergson’s philosophy (Antliff 2007). In one indication of his recurring importance for Catholics in particular, Jacques Maritain explained at the Institut Catholique in April and May 1913 that Bergsonism seemed to “restore the great theses that traditional philosophy had guessed
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