Henri Bergson by Vladimir Jankélévitch (review)

Vladimir Jankélévitch's Henri Bergson provides an account of Bergson's philosophy that not only outlines his principle ideas but also seeks to remain faithful to Bergson's method. This is no simple task because Bergson's main idea—and Bergson argues that each philosopher only has one truly novel idea—is duration (durée) or the endurance of lived or concrete time. Time that is characterised by ineffability and ipseity, which, by necessity, slips from any conceptual grasp. Moreover, Bergson rejects all forms of philosophical systemisation, and although his work becomes much richer over the course of his career as new ideas germinate from the bed of duration—the élan vital, tendencies, extensity—each work does not build on previous works in the way that we would expect from most philosophers. Indeed, most of Bergson's major works serve as critiques of the spatialization of time in particular fields or disciplines, from psychology and philosophy through to physics, rather than direct disquisitions on ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Certainly, these fields are all addressed, but obliquely by tackling specific problems germane to a particular field: what is evolutionary time, are memories stored in the brain, does time alter depending on its frame of reference, etc.? In most expository works on Bergsonism, the issue is resolved by setting out the key arguments in each work often in the context of a specific discipline or historical period. Others, taking the lead from Gilles Deleuze in his radical Bergsonism and Cinema books, have sought to fashion from Bergsonism an ontology by extracting concepts that soon take a life of their own, such as the ubiquitous "virtual." Jankélévitch's book Henri Bergson does not take either path, as it is written most definitely in Jankélévitch's voice but remains absolutely faithful to the orientation of Bergson's thought. Jankélévitch writes as if he were addressing each problem anew, restaging the arguments by drawing in a range of other philosophers as a supporting cast, rather than gesturing towards Bergson's works as artefacts.

Although the first edition of the book appeared in the "Great Philosophers" series in 1930, it certainly is not an introduction to Bergson or Bergsonism. In order to obtain the most from what is a very rich text, the reader must already be cognisant of Bergson's main ideas and be acquainted with the many metaphors or mobile concepts—i.e. the sugar dissolving, the ripening of the free act, the snowballing of memory, Achilles catching the tortoise, lines of facts—which often appear only fleetingly as asides in Jankélévitch's constantly swelling arguments. Nor are the texts clearly framed within a chronology, for there is only brief reference to Bergson's life and achievements in the introduction of the French edition, which is somewhat addressed by Alexandre Lefebvre's excellent introduction in the translation. The reader might be misled by the opening remarks in which Jankélévitch states that the "only way to read a philosopher who evolves and changes over time" is "to follow the chronological order of his works and begin with the beginning," and expect that each chapter will introduce Bergson's major works and carefully outline the arguments. Certainly, each chapter is inspired by particular works which extend from Time and Free Will in the opening chapters to The Two Sources of Morality and Religion and Creative Mind in the final chapters, however, it is the theme that drives each chapter and not the artificial boundaries of a published text. Although the second chapter ostensibly takes freedom as its object, an issue that was addressed in the second half of Bergson's first published work Time and Free Will, and even informs the reader that they will have to wait for topics that appear in later works—"and we will have to wait until Matter and Memory"—Jankélévitch repeatedly introduces themes and ideas from these...