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All Is Unfinished: Henri Bergson's philosophy for our times
Why did one of the early 20th century’s most famous philosophers go out of fashion?
Enormous crowds attended his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris—there are photographs of people thronging the street outside the college, scaling ladders and even standing on windowsills to try to catch a scrap of la leçon du maître. But thanks to Emily Herring’s fascinating and lively biography, Herald of a Restless World —the first in English, according to the publisher’s blurb—we are reminded just how much Bergson’s philosophy, although as hard to pin down as the poetry of Mallarmé and as shimmeringly elusive as an impressionist painting, has to say to us in our afflicted age. Herring takes the title of her splendid book, and its epigraph, from another once widely famous and now largely forgotten figure, the journalist Walter Lippmann, who wisely wrote that “Bergson is not so much a prophet as a herald in whom the unrest of modern times has found a voice.” It is a voice to which we would do well to lend again our collective ear.
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