What is Modern? Part I

 

 

 

And now for that confession I was referring to in my last Post. What I'd gotten in over my head about was Russian Futurism and Formalism. I had been discussing modernism with a friend who is quite knowledgeable in that broad subject and wanted to call her attention to someone that I thought could turn the discussion in a certain way; that someone, that artist was David Burliuk.* But in bringing up Burliuk I realized he and his group, at one time called the Russian Futurists, were more important than I'd realized in their early influence on modernism, which brought me to the conclusion that I needed to know more about the origins of modernism. For what or for whom you might ask? But we've been over that before. It goes to my new autobiographical theme, 'I have all the Time in the World'; which theme I hope may be more understandable by the end of this post.

There's a buzzword going around; maybe it's even a one-word meme, if that's possible; the word is influencer. It seems there are people around today who have, earned or not, been given that nomenclature. But of course we know; the activity of influencing has always existed. I've heard about it among the artists and the writers I've known back as far as I can remember, ie; so and so was influenced by Cezanne, (or Joseph Conrad). I have no idea how old it is as an expression, though I tend to think it must be Post-Rennaissance.*

But in the Russian Futurism era, roughly the 1900s up to the First World War, there was an 'influencer' ferment abroad that was steeped in something that incorporated spiritualism and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. (For the most part, by the way, the Russians I'll be referring to here were believing Russian Orthodox Christians.)

*David Davidovich Burliuk (Russian: Давид Давидович Бурлюк; 21 July 1882 – 15 January 1967) was a Russian-language poet, artist, publicist and book illustrator associated with the Futurist, Neo-Primitivist and Futurism movements. Burliuk is often described as "the father of Russian Futurism".

While I haven't come across any sign of a Futurist, Formalist, Surrealist, et. al. saying anything in print about being influenced by Henri Bergson, (I haven't scoured the earth, so I haven't yet lost hope about that), his book Creative Evolution was a huge hit throughout Europe when it came out in France in 1907.  French after all was the second mother tongue for aristocrats and the upper-classes in Russia and the rest of Europe, up until the end the First World War. If there was buzz in 1907, it was likely about Bergson. He was a philosophical super-star.  

But getting back to Burliuk and his group, without I hope losing the thread of the 'influence' idea, I learned quite a bit by reading the rather long and very thorough introduction by Christopher Pike, to a collection of translated Russian articles, Russian Formalism and Futurism; also edited by Pike: 

 Born in 1882 in the Ukraine when it was part of the Russian Empire, from a well-off family, Burliuk studied at the Kazan and Odessa art schools, and at the Royal Academy in Munich. Teaming up, in 1907, with his brother Wladimir Burliuk, the artist Mikhail Larionov and several other similarly unknown painters, they put on an exhibition, which was not a success, after which the Burliuk brothers [including at one point another brother, Nikolai] and Larionov, retreated to the Burliuk Estate near Kershon, known as Hylea. There they experimented with avant-garde ideas that they had picked up along the way, and the following Fall they put together a street exhibition which brought them enough money to go to Moscow. Since there were other futurist groups around, they called their literary efforts the Hylea Futurist group. In Moscow they were joined by Vasily Kamensky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Roman Jacobson, Livshits, Matyushin, Natalia Goncharova and, eventually, Aleksey Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky. 

 In a limited way these poet-artists were influenced by the Italian Futurists, which was to an extent a one-man operation in the person of Filippo Marinetti, but he was a Fascist and a zealot, and after he made a poorly received appearance in Moscow they were quick to distinguish themselves from him. 

Roman Jacobson soon left the Futurists to co-found a Formalist group that developed a Russian brand of Linguistics. He later was a founder of The Prague Linguistics Circle, and eventually found his way to the U.S. where he taught at Harvard and MIT.  

 

Along with the Pike translation, while scrolling through Amazon's used books I found and read a small book, The World Backwards, Russian Futurist Books 1912-1916, by Susan P. Compton, about a group of picture and poetry books, some little more than booklets, that the futurists put out. The Compton book, though, didn't go into the quality of the materials used in these books, something that has become more important to me recently having read Janet Wolff's The Social Production of Art, New York University Press, 1993. Very interesting book, that one, which seems to hug closely to the shores of Marxist critical theory while also managing to differ in some degree from each of its highly noted scholars. With Wolff in mind, and to put the Futurist books into more focus, I found the following online; 

From the Getty Center Website:

"For a few short years in the second decade of the twentieth century, a group of artists in Russia created a new art form: books meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Artists had long made books as art, but these were different—handmade, hand-sized, serial, interactive. Combining sound poetry with lithography and rubber stamping, the books were collaborative in their making and in their relationship with the reader. 

Russian Futurist books are small, some no larger than postcards. Their paper and design are deliberately coarse; each page of the book differs slightly in size and is bound with ordinary staples. The books incorporate found papers, such as wallpaper and imitation gold leaf, and feature collages and childlike stamping. Titles exist in small editions of 50 to over 200, and often involve subtle variations from book to book.
 Art historian Nancy Perloff, curator of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute, has spent the last 15 years studying the Russian avant-garde, and her recent book Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art is the first work of scholarship to offer a close reading of these books as “verbivocovisual” objects, whose meaning derives from the interplay of image, text, and sound. She bases her study on the remarkable collection of Russian modernist books held in the library of the Getty Research Institute. An online companion to her publication features full-screen reproductions of pages from the Getty’s Futurist books and invites you to listen to the poems and watch how they come alive on the page."

 

Being for the most part members of the monied class of Pre-revolutionary Russia, the Futurist group could afford to work full time on art and travel as needed, and they became more interested in what was going on in Europe; particularly Paris and Munich. In order to distinguish themselves from a burgeoning number of other futurist groups they renamed themselves the Cubo-Futurists. 

Among the group, and possibly inspired by the ambiance of Hylea was a feeling that the group shared, about transplanting the roots of what they wanted to be their new feeling about art, their avant-garde, from Western Art and Cultural history to a certain specific Eastern terra firma, that which the poet Velimir Khlebnikov* was deeply involved with.  Concerning Klebnikov:  

The following is an abstract of a book from a Journal article in JSTOR. It's in that nutsy academic-speak but I suppose it gives a hallway pass to those young minds interested in Ms. Banerjee's book, which I hope to read soon. (Supposed to be available online but I haven't found it yet.) 

Liberation Theosophy: Discovering India and Orienting Russia between Velimir Khlebnikov and Helena Blavatsky  by Anindita Banerjee. (Journal and Publishing information below)

Abstract       

Between the Volga and the Ganges lies a vast yet little-examined zone of linguistic, religious, ethno-racial, and political contact shaped over many centuries by mobile communities of trader's, saints, soldiers, and rebels. This is the space from which Velimir Khlebnikov, modernist poet and philosopher of  history, articulates a vision of revolutionary internationalism. Khlebnikov's quasi-fictional journey from Russia's Islamic borderlands to the Indian sub-continent "in search of an idea that will free all oppressed people" transforms Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical interpretation of ancient Indian religious philosophy into a cornerstone of political resistance against global imperialism in the twentieth century. The intersectional history of violence through which Khlebnikov imagines a community of minorities, misfits, and mystics wandering between the peripheries of the Russian and British Empires challenges monolithic constructs of the Orient as well as dominant discourses of Russian and Indian national identity.

The Banerjee book would appear to throw some light on the art-cultural direction that the Hylea group hoped to infuse their work with, (although how intersectional violence triumphs over monolithic violence will have to be explained to me.) I wonder if the idea for which the fictional Klebnikov goes searching isn't more theosophical than political?     

 

Then, in the course of my researching, I came across the following book, Russian Futurism, A History: by Vladimir Markov; which I've been skimming through, and with great joy came upon the following gem of a paragraph;  

Chemyanka was a place in the area of the former Tavrida (Taurida) Government not far from the city of Kherson and the Black Sea coast, and from there the Burliuks' father managed the huge estate belonging to Count Mordvinov. The senior David Burliuk lived there in patriarchal simplicity and abundance, surrounded by a big family (three sons and three daughters) and enormous expanses of the steppes on which uncountable herds of sheep and pigs were grazing. For Livshits, there was something Homeric in this way of life. Prehistory looked at him not only from the meandering ornamental patterns on the houses and from the Scythian arrows found in numerous mounds, but also from the simplicity of their eating, hunting, and courtship habits. In short, it was the Hylaea ("Gileya" in Russian), the name used by the ancient Greeks for this area, mentioned four times by Herodotus, and familiar to all these future futurists from their school lessons in classical history as the setting of some of the deeds of Hercules. "Hylaea, the ancient Hylaea, trod upon by our feet, took the meaning of a symbol and had to become a banner." [Which quote I think is from Herodotus but not sure.]   

 

If 'explodidity' aptly fits the Futurist agenda, it also reminds me of the big best-seller art book, The Shock of The New, by Robert Hughes, from way back in 1980, published first by Random House, which success I suppose reminded people of the necessity for artists to make their work stand out from what is and was already available. "Over here! Look at My work!" Which is undoubtedly part of what Kandinsky was saying to the powers that were, das Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen; (Munich New Association of Artists in Munich; of which he had been the founder in 1909), when in 1911, (two whole years later), he created der Blaue Reiter group. The Blue Reiter is widely considered the first modernist secession and a pathfinder for 20th-century German art.  

Many Russians and European artists at that time still considered themselves Symbolists,  the dominant ouevre since mid 19th Century particularly in poetry and painting and, in terms of influence, a reaction against realism. The Symbolists were particularly interested in the spiritual, as were the Futurists and the Blue Reider group. ...In poetry Symbolism began with Baudelaire, (who had been influenced by Edgar Allen Poe); was further defined by Mallarme and Verlaine, and without going into it any deeper, a caste of dozens over the second half of the 19th century.     

Along with Kandinsky, Burliuk and his brother Wladimir, and several other Russians including Jawlensky, Natalia Goncharova, Marianne Von Werfkin....and the Germans Franz Marc, Paul Klee, August Macke, and Gabriele Munter exhibited paintings in the first Blaue Reider show. The show gave them and all the participants a wide audience and encouragement in their careers, at least up till the First World War. ...There exists a painting by Kandinsky named der Blaue Reider but it is not certain whether that is the origin of the name of the movement. Twenty years after the exhibition Kandinsky declared that the groups name was derived partly from Marc's enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky's love of riders, combined with their shared love of the color blue.

*Wladimir Burliuk, August Macke and Franz Marc died in the War. 

Gary Lachman was once the bass player for the group Blondie. He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; and he has other musical accomplishments to his credit; but I first became aware of him when I came across one of his books on Amazon and got caught up in it enough to order a second one. The two books of his that I’ve read are The Secret Teachers of the Western World, and The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus. I suppose I discovered him, now that I think about it, after reading two of Colin Wilson’s books, The Outsider, and The Decline and Fall of Leftism. The former made Wilson a star, and the latter did much the reverse. Lachman wrote a biography of Colin Wilson, which I have yet to read. He’s written quite a few books and I’m becoming a fan, but will have more on that later. 

The inspiration for this post comes mostly from an article by Lachman that first appeared in Quest Magazine but which I found online on the American Theosophical Society’s website.   

In the article, titled ‘Kandinsky’s Thought Forms and the Occult Roots of Modern Art’, Lachman proposes a recent renaissance in occult and mystical ideas on culture and the arts. (He doesn’t put a date on it.) He plugs a book he’s written, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse; in which, he says, “I sketch an overview of how a collection of occult ideas and insights fed the European and American post-Enlightenment literary imagination.” He’s also written an article about how the same muse has influenced music, ‘Concerto for Magic and Mysticism: Esotericism and Western Music’, also written for Quest. 

Lachman recommends a book, “a massive catalogue from an exhaustive exhibition..” which he had seen years ago in Los Angeles, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1895 by Maurice Tuchman. A short review on Amazon Books says the following about Tuchman’s book: “The seventeen essays in this provocative book provide a radical rethinking of abstraction, from the Symbolism that prefigured abstract art through the current manifestations of spiritual content in American and European painting.”

I’m a sucker for anything that moves the needle in the art world. I'd love to have a copy of the 'massive catalogue', but have yet to obtain one. Among the seventeen articles, according to Lachman, are many mentions of the most illustrious figures in the last few hundred years of European occult (or spiritual if you prefer) history, including Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Paracelsus, and Eliphas Levi. Among the artists more recently influenced he sites Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Frantisek Kupka, and Joseph Beuys. The most recent 'influencers' though, Lachman says, are the Theosophists; and the most openly enthusiastic follower of Theosophy among the painters appears to have been Wassily Kandinsky, who Lachman gives the honor of being the first non-representational painter.

Well, someone had to go first! And it sounds right to me. It appears that Kandinsky, along with many of his artist associates circa 1910, felt that the world was going to hell in a hand-basket. It was materialism that was the problem and spirituality was the answer. Kandinsky shared this view along with artists outside of the painter’s world, including Rilke, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann. He had an extensive occult library, but was particularly interested in Leadbeater, Annie Besant, and Rudolf Steiner.  

Did he, though, actually paint ‘thought forms’? I can imagine what the artist would say to that;  “…Let the forms speak for themselves.”  (Not for nothing would he be called a precursor to abstraction.)   

Kandinsky wrote several books, including an autobiography, but his most well- known, the one Lachman calls his manifesto, is Concerning the Spiritual in Art; Uber das Geistig in der Kunst, written in 1912. Books which “fueled his speculation”, according to Lachman, included Man, Visible and Invisible, 1902, by C.W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms, 1905, by Annie Besant and Leadbeater, and Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy, 1904. He came to believe that thoughts are things; that shapes and colors had vibratory individuality, moods and feeling. He felt with the material world having been burnt out, the future for man’s expression was inward. [Editorial note]; I’m in the middle of Concerning the Spiritual, right now, so I can’t say I have a complete grasp of the manifesto. 

....I should probably alert my readers to the fact that Gary Lachman appears to be very much on the side of the occult and spiritual as opposed to the side of the skeptics. Now, there are those of us who are on the fence, some more on one side, some on the other, and some in almost perfect balance. I should admit that I'm coming down more and more on the Lachman side, but not without aligning myself with (dropping some names of) some big intellectual guns.   

 .....I thought I’d see if my cohorts on Goodreads had anything to say about Lachman; I was in for a big surprise.  

Goodreads I should say is an on-line library where you can list all the books you've read and review them or review other people's reviews, that sort of thing. And, it's of a higher quality than the other similar site, 'Library Thing', that I once joined and then quit, due to the low quality of it's readership; snobbery I suppose, but that subject I will leave for another time. 

I looked up Lachman and saw that he has written a biography of Madame Blavatsky. Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality; 2012 Tarcher: Perigee. Important note; I haven't read it. So, ordinarily I might stop there. However; among the more than forty reviews of the book, many with five stars, a few two-star, and from an across-the-board selection of intelligence, (it's an open-for-amatures reviewing site), I noticed a review by Carl Rollyson.* Well, I had to see what ole Carl has to say; (not that we're BFs. Never met the guy.) Rollyson is a major biography writer, critic, play-write, and college professor; Baruch College. Although I've only read three of his books, all of which are about Rebecca West, I can say that he seems to be as much on Rebecca's side as I am. So he is my brother Rebecca West Fan, and I'm inclined to like him. He is a former president and founder of the Rebecca West Society. The West bios (which I've read) are Rebecca West; a Modern Sibyl, 1996, Rebecca West: A Life, 1996, and The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, 2007. 

Rollyson gives Lachman's Blavatsky three stars, and pretty much takes the gloves off. He says that while Thomas Edison and Mohandas Gandhi found her "persuasive" many others' regarded her as a "world class fraud, a trickster and plagiarist whose ruses were exposed and whose accounts of her own life were largely fiction." Then, top of next paragraph, without declaring his analysis, he adds; "Pity the poor biographer who has to deal with such an elusive and prevaricating figure." Then, he backs off a little saying that Lachman isn't exactly an apologist for Blavatsky, but he does appear to cede her more ground than other biographers. Well, (I thought), ceding ground isn't exactly the same as calling her a fraud.    

Since I haven't read the Blavatsky book I'll leave it at that, except that for someone of Rollyson's level of credibility, three Stars is a bit more than chopped liver.    

*A blurb from Amazon books;

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of a dozen biographies, including American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated, the latter three published by University Press of Mississippi. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Criterion, and other major periodicals.

 

 

I remember one summer day in my 19th year sitting in a car in a parking lot at the local ocean beach drinking beer with a tall freckle-faced Irish woman who was a graduate student at a New York City college majoring in Theology. She was giving me what I felt at the time was an enthralling lecture, an introduction to Teihard de Chardin. I remember having a sense of excitement that lingered for days, maybe even longer. I remember nothing else about the day; not the girl's name; not the effect of the beer; not anything. A dozen years later or so, I was down and out, feeling mighty blue; searching for some sort of help; I thought of God. Then I thought of the Irish girl; then I thought of Teihard de Chardin. Some how, I'm sure it wasn't easy especially in my depressed state, I got hold of Teihard's book, The Phenomenon of Man, and read it cover to cover. I was inspired; I felt better from the beginning of reading it. But in the process of becoming a non-aligned Chardinian, non-aligned because I still didn't buy the Nicean Creed or the R.C. Church in all its orthodoxy, I looked for further salvation in Bergson. How I came up with Bergson's Creative Evolution I'm not sure; I think the title sounded Chardinian. Those two books became a foundation for my coming to believe in, well, something as opposed to nothing. Today, I believe in a power greater than, you guessed it, me.       

 

And now it's fifty years later and I'm again standing at the foot of Bergson Mountain. I'm re-reading Creative Evolution, and have installed two other of his books on my Kindle, with intention of becoming, to the best of my aged ability, conversant in Bergsonian thinking. Toward that effort I've also been researching Henri Bergson to find out why he has been an 'influencer' to so many of the great minds of the 20th century. And when I say 'minds' I am including painters, poets, writers and in particular any person or persons thought by themselves or others to be 'Moderns'. So. Just to be clear. I am not a Bergson scholar. I'm a beginner at learning Bergson's philosophy. Going forward, I hope to learn more. 

 

Henri Bergson was born in Paris on 18 October, 1859, of Jewish ancestry. His father was an accomplished musician from a wealthy Polish-Jewish family; his mother, Katherine Levison was of English-Jewish and Irish-Jewish heritage, born in Northern England, the daughter of a Yorkshire doctor. (A sister, Mina Bergson, married Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers a British writer of occult themes and one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.)     

The young Henri spoke English and French as a child; the family lived in England for a few years during the boy's childhood. He attended the Ecole Normale Superieure from 1878 to 1881, became a professor of philosophy, was appointed to a post at the Lycee Clermont-Ferrand in 1883, in 1888 back in Paris he taught at the Lycee Henri 14 for three years. In 1900 he was named professor of philosophy at College de France. He remained in that position until he retired because of ill health in  1921. 

 

For many years he gave  weekly lectures that attracted large numbers of people, including the Catholic Thomist Jacques Maritain and the anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel. He became such a popular speaker that he was asked to lecture throughout Europe, England and even the United States. 

His four most important books are Matter and Memory, published in 1896; Time and Free Will, published the same year; Creative Evolution,1907 and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932. Two collections of his writing were published more recently in 1959 and 1972.

 

In 1891 Bergson married a cousin of Marcel Proust, Louise Neuberger. Proust was best man at the wedding, which leads me to believe that perhaps Marcel and Henri had been friends prior. It has been said that Proust thought favorably of Bergson's ideas, had read some of his writing and perhaps attended some of his lectures. I don't know of any written communication between the two, but I am aware of Proust's use of the plasticity of time in his great body of work. (With Albert Einstein though, there were problems. Henri and Albert held a famous debate, at which it was said that Einstein won, but even though time continues to creep forward, it might still be said a century later that philosophy is not permitted on relativity's turf. That can't last forever!)

One of the great American minds of the 19th, or any other century, William James, said the following about one of Bergson's first published essays; 

"I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read for years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure that his philosophy has a great future; it breaks through old frameworks and brings things to a solution from which new crystalisations can be reached."

In his Hibbert Lectures, (A Pluralistic Universe), which he gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London, William James told of the encouragement he had gotten from Bergson's thought, and referred to his confidence in being "able to lean on Bergson's Authority".  

"....to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be." It had induced him, he continued, "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it."

 

The following seems like such a good summary of Bergson's most well known writing that I've surrendered to the impulse to borrow a long quote, from a much longer excerpt in The New Catholic Encyclopedia; GALLAGHER, I. J.

"Bergson's leading ideas are encompassed in four principal works. In Time and Free Will he showed that free will is the most evident of facts and that its denial follows upon the confusion of succession with simultaneity, duration with intensity, and quality with quantity. In Matter and Memory he proved that spirit as well as matter exists. By demonstrating that consciousness is not identical with cerebral activity, he paved the way for a proof of the survival of the soul after death. In Creative Evolution, his most famous work, he showed that the mechanistic interpretation of evolution is not justified by the facts. Viewing the data of evolution in the light of his intuition of duration, he described the evolutionary process as the forward thrust of a great spiritual force, the life impulse (élan vital ), rushing through time, insinuating itself into matter, and producing the various living forms culminating in man. Its movement is not predetermined but creative, ever generating novel and unpredictable forms. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion represents the full flowering of Bergson's thought. Morality and religion are traced back to their double source in the evolutionary process. Bergson distinguished two separate moralities and religions—the open and closed moralities, the static and dynamic religions. Closed morality pertains to social cohesion. It is static and rooted in social pressure, the morality of a group enclosed upon itself. It represents a halt in the evolutionary process. Open morality transcends the group to unite all mankind in a common brotherhood. It is progressive and creative, a forward thrust of the élan vital. Whereas closed morality and static religion originate in the instinct for survival, open morality and dynamic religion are inspired by the moral heroes, saints and mystics, those superior representatives of the human race who, like a new species, foreshadow the future condition of man. They draw man upward to a higher spiritual level by their vision of human destiny and of God, the source of all love. It is in the experience of the mystics that Bergson found the most convincing evidence for the existence of God."   

Let us not forget that the available bandwidth was shorter then. And the means of communication simpler. And reading was not competing with radio, television, electronic media and the world-wide web. So, a philosophical text that becomes a best seller meant something more than it would mean today. Much more. A smart, sophisticated multi-lingual world traveler would have known that Henri Bergson was a celebrity in the greater civilized world, from Rio to Hong Kong, from Sydney Australia to Sydney Nova Scotia. Without having to dig I think we can rest assured that Kandinsky, Burliuk, and company, were aware of Henri Bergson and the boost he had given to the metaphysical in its contentious relationship with the materialistic, mechanistic world with its bonding of Marx and Darwin. Of course there was opposition to Bergson's philosophy but it did not destroy Bergson's foothold in the world of the intellect.  The opposition had it's say, and was able to diminish his seeming importance relative to other powers that be; the Catholic Church, which debated him on doctrine and dogma; Marxists, who denied the whole elan vital business; and the Soviet Government which made anything artistic-cultural other than Soviet Realism illegal.

Based on his work on life and evolution, Bergson came out positively on the side of France in the First World War; depicting the Germans as Barbarians. The French government embraced his outlook and sent him on a number of missions, most notably, early in 1917, on a secret mission to the United States to speak to President Wilson, helping to persuade Wilson to enter the war on the side of the French. Later he was an important influence in the decision to create The League of Nations. He was appointed President of its International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation. Members of the International Commission included the following:

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-born physicist, naturalized American. One of the most notable personalities in the history of science, recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, he was active in several other areas, from philosophy to politics. Member of the ICIC from 1929 to 1939.

Marie Curie (1867-1934), born Maria Sklodowska, a Polish-born physician French naturalized. Her research on radioactive substances led her to be the only female winner of two Noble Prizes in 1903 and 1911. Vice President of the ICIC from 1929-1936.

Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), Australian-born British. Philologist, Professor of the language and culture of Ancient Greek at the University of Oxford. He was President of the ICIC from 1928 to 1940.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher. His work had a strong influence in the fields of psychology, biology, art literature and theology which were worth the 1927 Noble Prize in literature. Chairman of the ICIC from 1922 to 1925.

Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928), Dutch physicist known for his research on electromagnetism and electrodynamics which had a deep influence in the study of Physics and won him the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics. Was Chairman of the ICIC from 1925 to 1928.

Alfredo Rocco  (1875-1935), an Italian jurist and politician who promoted the codification of a new Code of Criminal Procedure. President of the IECI from 1929 to 1935, member of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, 1936-1938, and member of the ICIC from 1929 to 1936.

 Kristine Bonnevie (1872-1948), Norwegian biologist in the fields of cytology, genetics, and embryology.  She was Norway's first female professor and deputy representative to the Parliament of Norway. Member of the ICIC from 1929 to 1936.

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), a Bengali intellectual who laid the foundations of experimental science in India. Member of the ICIC from 1926 to 1939.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945), a French writer, poet, and philosopher. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years. He was member of the Committee of Letters and Arts of the ICIC, serving as its president in the 1930s.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), German novelist and writer. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, he is considered one of the most prominent figures of 20th Century European literature. He joined the Committee of Letters and Arts in 1931.

In 1918 Bergson was appointed a member of the Académie Française. In 1927, he received The Nobel Prize for Literature, "...in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented." But wait. Literature, not Philosophy? Well, yes.  It's really quite simple. Physics hadn't caught up with Philosophy; and Physics rules. Physics is how we measure things; from light years to microbes. (The sub-atomic measurement situation hadn't come into focus yet. Even now we don't know what to do with it, though we've made some sort of headway. I won't say 'great strides'.) Bergson might be unique among scientists who were ahead of his time in that he couldn't be proved wrong, so he couldn't be burned at the stake.

[Editor's note: Max Planck was born in 1858, one year before Bergson.]   

 

 

One of the most interesting pieces of writing that I came across in my research was the following, which is an attempt to explain Bergson's thinking by reviewing a book about Bergson's thinking which is a book about another book about Bergson's thinking. To wit; Alex Gomez-Marin's book review of Craig Lundy's book Deleuze's Bergson which is about Gilles Deleuze's book about Bergson titled Bergsonism.  Welcome to the Bergsonian weeds!  

 

DELEUZE ON BERGSON    by Alex Gomez-Marin 

Review of Craig Lundy’s Deleuze’s Bergsonism (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 192 pages.

Alex Gomez-Marin is a theoretical physicist turned neuroscientist. He has a PhD in physics and a Masters in biophysics. For more than a decade he has been working in the field of behavioral neuroscience. He is currently a Ramón y Cajal Fellow and the Principal Investigator of the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, Spain. Combining theory, computational data analyses and biophilosophy, his research aims to establish shared organizational principles of animal behavior across species. Quoting from Gomez-Marin;   

"Bergson’s infamous élan vital is his means of putting life back to life. The élan is the nature of the movement of life. It is duration that differentiates itself. The élan actualizes the virtual along the lines of differentiation, whereby evolution is creative. Importantly, the virtual is already real; it does not need to be realized. The opposite of the real is the possible, not the virtual. The virtual is opposed to the actual. And actualization, contrary to realization, does not take place through resemblance, limitation or elimination, but via differentiation. Since the virtual diverges along different lines, evolution is not a recombination of actualities but a dissociation of the élan. Life is precisely the tendency to diverge. In fact, life acts on matter in order to insert on its necessity the largest possible amount of indetermination. For Bergson, humanity is capable of bootstrapping its own condition." 

 

 

At this point fate came along and supplied me with a way to conveniently back away from European Intellectualism. I was Googling away, and I came across the following; Middlebrow Mystics; Henri Bergson and British Culture 1899 - 1939:  Helen L. Green. It is her Phd. thesis, written in 2015 while at Northumbria University, U.K., and it is, in my admittedly non-professional opinion, after giving it a careful reading, a wonderful piece of work. I think the abstract gives a sufficient summary of the paper which is very much worth reading in total, and is available online.  

Abstract

This thesis explores the influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy on middlebrow literature between 1899 and 1939. In doing so it engages with the work of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood and John Buchan as well as critics John Mullarkey, Suzanne Guerlac, Michael Vaughan and Michael Kolkman who, over the past three decades, have instigated a significant interdisciplinary revival and reassessment of Bergson’s work. Specifically, this study builds on, yet also extends, the work of literary critics like Paul Douglass, Hillary Fink, Mary Ann Gillies and S.E. Gontarski who since the 1990s have produced extensive studies exploring the impact of Bergson’s philosophy on modernism. While each of these studies confirm the considerable impact Bergson wrought on the culture and literature of this period, each limit their focus to canonical ‘highbrow’ modernist writers. Given the pervasive popularity of Bergson at this juncture, and following the spirit of recent calls in modernist studies for more inclusive, ‘flexible and perspicuous’ interpretations of the period’s literature, this project aims to extend the parameters of existing research to encompass early twentieth century ‘middlebrow’ fiction in the belief that Bergson represents a significant cultural and ideological bridge between these too often polarized literary streams.

As such, this study expands on the work of scholars like Nicola Humble, Kate  Macdonald, Erica Brown and Mary Grover who, to borrow Humble’s term, have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ and reassess critical perceptions of the early twentieth century’s ‘middlebrow’ writing. Following a detailed explanation of Bergson’s philosophy, its place in early twentieth century British culture and its pertinence to literary studies today, I will move on to discuss key works by Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and John Buchan in relation to Bergson’s philosophy, placing particular focus on their more mystical aspects and thematic, structural applications. Such an investigation does not aim to negate the unique contribution Bergson made to inspiring, elucidating and supporting the formal innovations of modernism but hopes to emphasize the fact that his ideas resounded far beyond this context, capturing the attention of an unexpectedly broad spectrum of society in often unexpected, unconventional and as yet, under-explored ways.

[ pp.15 Bergson’s work, as embraced and assimilated by this ‘ordinary’ or ‘middlebrow’ audience, did not survive the transition from academia to popular culture in unadulterated form. Rather, just as in the hands of Deleuze, from the beginnings of his remarkable career Bergson (his thought and character) was subject to a fascinating process of distortion.]

* Re; influencing and its origins, after reading Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, I'm inclined to think that influencing is pre-Proto-Indo-European.