All Is Unfinished: Henri Bergson's philosophy for our times

Here’s a critical examination of Bergson worth reading: https://ia803207.us.archive.org/31/items/jstor-27900381/2790...

Some of the observations in the article are distilled in a wonderful way by Alan Watts. To paraphrase, most people think of time in terms of cause and effect. So things in the past cause things in the present to happen like a clockwork machine. This is definitely the view of the world you learn in physics 101.

But what if we have it on its head? What if instead we thought of the past like the wake of a ship that we are operating. The past is real in that you can discern where you came from by looking at the wake. But it would be a grave error to think that the wake of the ship caused the boat to move forward.

To me Bergson was a charlatan. The kind of intellectual that would have loved to squash quantum physics, consciousness, and free will together. It's quite positive that he mostly forgotten.