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Creative Evolution

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Bergson's thesis is that Darwinian and Lamarkian evolution are only half the story and that there is a creative urge inherent in life that defines the direction of evolution. It is distinguished from Creationism in that his system does not posit and eschaton or final perfect form, nor an external agent (God).

It has some similarity with biologist Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic fields. In his theory, there is an energy field (as yet undetected by modern physics) that controls the shape of organic molecules, i.e., one protein is shaped one way and the same collection of atoms gets shaped another way under the same pH and temperature.

Aldous Huxley mentions Bergson's theory of consciousness several times in his writings. Bergson thinks that consciousness pervades everything, and that intellect serves as a filter that presents only what is comprehensible to mental categories. This has several implications. One is the possibility for a monistic metaphysic. The other is that it leaves open the possibility of perceiving an alternate reality (what excited Huxley).

Chapter 3 is about his metaphysics, which are not very clearly expressed. There appear to be avenues unexplored by him. What are the consequences of matter being infused with consciousness? Magic? Why is it that intellect and geometrical thinking is what produces objects in perception? What is the mechanism.

What does have value is his theory that chaos is not the absence of repeatability, but is a stochastic process that can be understood as an aggregate of individual "wills." This is used to support his vital theory of evolution. That each organism "wills" its variation in seemingly random fashion, but at a higher order, it produces the regularity of genera.

Chapter 4 is a critique of various philosophic systems after establishing his "cinematographic" theory of perception. His basic point is that matter is in continual flux, yet we are only able to perceive it as a sequence of discrete states, hence the illusion of permanence.

Henri Bergson's seminal ``Creative Evolution'' starts off with the flowing movement so prevalent in his philosophy of the organism, one idea flows into the next in a smooth undivided motion. Not only does Bergson explain his work with analogies and examples supported by the biology of the time, thereby distancing himself from the purely intellectual pursuit of most philosohpy, trapped in the world of the mind, but he demonstrates his thought in the very way of exposition he uses throughout the book. One feels his thought is produced like a Mozart symphony, all at once with no corrections needed. This aptly demonstrates the idea of duration and time he proposes in this book. His influence is profound in thinkers such as David Bohm and Alfred North Whitehead which so to speak ``run with it'' in the parlance of baseball. This is a book worth reading twice for its rich display of creativity and also to reread sections not followed the first time. One does feel however that at times the flow is interrupted by disturbances in his mode of thinking leading to disjointed reading. Nonetheless, not only does he open a whole new way of thought free of dualism and the old patterns of mechanism, but he also expalins the reason for mechanistic thought itself.

Despite Lord Russell's criticism that "intuition works best in bats, bees, and Bergson," in this work Bergson not only finishes the uprooting of the Western and Platonic disembodied intellect (a deconstruction taken only so far by Kant), he presents us with the spectacle of unbridled life creatively shaping, not only its world, but itself in accord with its own telos: the need for eyesight creating the eye, so to speak. Difficult in places but a treasure, although one could wish he gave more credit to Nietzsche's obviously great impact on him. Jungians would do well to peruse Bergson too.

This book must be read slowly and deliberately -- do so and it will give you an insight into the brilliance of one of the most revolutionary and extraordinarily perceptive philosopher scientists of the 20th Century, IMO.
Bergson changed the way scientists see the world by introducing his conception of an "original impetus", which began simply (if "intelligently") and evolved matter into living, increasingly complex lifeforms and concurrently evolved an increasingly complex consciousness within it -- as an "imperceptable thread" (my wording) ultimately called the elan vital.
In my case, after reading carefully and filling the book's margins with notes, Professor Bergson seems to be proving (showing) that all science up until his time (circa 1930's) was concerned with objects as they were at a particular moments, whereas in fact these objects were and are in a state of continual "being" (duration), making their actuality or essence unknowable.
He chronologically takes us through the writings of Plato and Aristotle (the natural trend of the intellect)-- Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz (becoming in modern science) -- and even through the Criticism of Kant and the evolutionism of Spencer. Bergson thoroughly critques each philosophy and shows us why they are not dealing the world as it really is.
Through this he weaves his own philosophical system based on Creation and Evolution by (quote):
". . . showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living beings in the narrow passage open to their action: an lo! . . . (making) of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world.
"Boldly (Kantian and Spencerian science) proceeds with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of things, even of life. . . . But the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; WE MOVE AMONG RELATIONS; THE ABSOLUTE IS NOT IN OUR PROVINCE; WE ARE BROUGHT TO STAND BEFORE THE UNKNOWABLE.
" . . . BUT AN INTELLECT BENT UPON THE ACT TO BE PERFOMED AND THE REACTION TO FOLLOW . . . WOULD DIG TO THE VERY ROOT OF NATURE AND MIND."
In simpler words, the observation of any object changes reality for that object. It is only real as a moving "being", animated by an original impetus and kept real by an "elan vital" which cannot be known because "being" cannot be defined. What we call "real things" are illusions which beomce "real" to us only when we stop their duration. Heidegger spends thousands of pages unsuccessfully trying to define "being", which ultimately he can only label as "dasein". What we observe as the real world is matter and consciousness evolving concurrently from simple to complex as they move through space and time.
This means that the original impetus, the spark, the first flame, began neither in space nor time. Later quantum physics would support Bergson's insight, considering that an electron (as one example) cannot be seen without turning it into something else, or ever stranger, disappearing into what can only be other universes parallel to our own.
IMO, this means a creative force must exist that animates matter and consciousness; and that could only have originated in that Singularity outside time and space which I in my particular need call the thought of "God". You can call "it" what you will: the Tao, Bhudda, Nature, et al.
In my possession is a 1932 edition of "Creative Evolution" which had lingered on a library shelf over eighty years but had been checked out only three times after 1970. Sometimes I wonder where are my fellow philosophers and why I seem in my pained isolation to be the last of the 20th Century philosophers of mind. But that is because I am a crazed crackpot in the collective mind of those who measure men by their wealth. My contemporaries are in the universities, religious orders and lecture tours, where they belong. Yet even I am animated by the elan vital. Even I am part of the "God" finally perceived by Henri Bergson.
"Creative Evolution" was a sensation when it first appeared in 1932, the work of an already distinguished Professor Bergson of the College de France. It gave the world at last a new and scientific conception of the God long intuited by prophets, priests, poets, writers and grizzled, scarred, aging gray bearded philosophers like myself, dumb beasts of intellectual burdens, who desperately need a new physics to help us embrace an unknowable God created out of a Singularity and connecting our minds and bodies to what the Apostle Paul called Love.

Richard Lee Fulgham, Bel Air, 2009

I wanted to reread Henri Bergson's "Creative Evolution" after reading William James. Although best known for his development of pragmatism, James had a highly speculative side late in his career, and he praised Bergson highly in his book, "A Pluralistic Universe." Although they have serious differences, both Bergson and James share an emphasis on a stream of consciousness view of the mind, and on the importance of freedom, chance, and indeterminacy.

Bergson wrote "Creative Evolution" in 1907. At James' urging it was translated into English in 1911 in the still standard translation of Arthur Mitchell. James died before he could write the introduction he contemplated to the book. The book is one of the relatively rare works of philosophy that received a large and enthusiastic popular reception. Bergson became internationally famous and highly sought out as a lecturer for some years following its publication. In 1927, Bergson received the Nobel Prize for literature, a rarity for a writer whose only publications were in philosophy. By the 1940's, however, the book had become little noticed by professional philosophers and lay readers alike. Of late, there have been scholarly efforts to look again at Bergson.

In one sense the early popularity of "Creative Evolution" is puzzling as sections of the book are notoriously difficult and obscure. The book left me cold when I first read it some years ago, but a second reading, after reading James, helped me understand where the book was going. Besides the lengthy technical discussions of matters ranging from biology to mathematics to the history of philosophy, Bergson was a master of allusion and analogy and of beautifully clear writing which pressed home his conclusions where his argumentation was dense and foggy. The writing is brilliant and poetic but makes use of loose metaphors and obscure thinking which lessens its value.

Part of the difficulty I and many modern readers have with the book lies in its approach to the nature of philosophy and its relationship to science. As the title indicates, "Creative Evolution" is in part about Darwinism and evolutionary theory. Bergson wants to show that there is more to human life and to human evolution that can be accounted for by what he terms mechanism. In the process of developing his position, Bergson spends a great deal of space with Darwinian theory and, in places, with his objections to it. Most of his objections, especially with further developments in biology, appear not well taken and outside the scope of how philosophy should be developing its questions and making its arguments. If philosophy is concerned with meaning and with reflections on science rather than with the substance of science, Bergson in many places steps over the line. Much of the book appears to be based on a willy-nilly combination of philosophical reflection with scientific issues which lessens its appeal and which contributed to the eclipse of the book after its early popular reception.

There remains much of interest in "Creative Evolution" to the extent that the book can be read as a reflection on the findings of science and on the possible limitations of science rather than as a critique of scientific findings. Bergson tries to find a way between a scientific philosophy of mechanism on the one hand and a teleological philosophy based upon ends and final causes on the other hand. Bergson develops a philosophy based upon duration and change -- the felt experience of the passage of time, which Bergson argues eloquently, cannot be explained either mechanistically or teleologically. Bergson argues that human endeavor and conduct cannot be fully explained by the methods of the natural sciences or, indeed, by any science as indeterminacy and freedom are at their core. He finds biological development for human beings was in the direction of freedom and intelligence. Intelligence, he argues, is basically pragmatic and related to physical, geometrical objects but does not exhaust human creativity. Bergson finds the source of creativity and change in time through a mysterious intuitive ability that tends to be covered over by practical intelligence. Here again, many modern readers, lay and philosophical, will demur to intuitionism. Bergson sees life as in its essential spiritual part as consisting in constant change and development in a direction that cannot be predicted in advance. In fact, every individual's development is unique.

Here is a lengthy paragraph from near the middle of Bergson's book that captures something of his thought, his writing, and his concept of philosophy as both individual and communal. Other passages could be cited as well. Bergson writes (pp 209-210)

"Human intelligence, as we represent it, is not at all what Plato taught in the allegory of the cave. Its function is not to look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plow and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even to live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the work that is being accomplished and the furrow that is being plowed, such is the function of human intelligence. Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be an attempt to dissolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But the enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke: it is necessarily collective and progressive. It consists in an interchange of impressions which, correcting and adding to each other, will end by expanding the humanity in us and making us even transcend it."

In its approach, "Creative Evolution" is outside the mainstream of philosophy in the United States and in Europe and is something of a throw-back to German romanticism. The philosophical issues it raises, however, remain much alive. This is a frustrating, difficult book to read with valuable thought and insight intertwined with some unfathomable writing. It was a quirk that "Creative Evolution" became for a brief time a popular book. Readers who want to struggle with a difficult and in part outmoded work, may still find the effort worthwhile.

Robin Friedman

Bergson (page 44) writes of foresight: "We must therefore have managed to extract resemblance from nature, which enable us to anticipate the future. Thus we must, consciously or unconsciously, have made use of the law of causality. Moreover, the more sharply the idea of efficient causality is defined in our mind, the more it takes the form of a mechanical causality. And this scheme, in its turn, is the more mathematical according as it expresses a more rigorous necessity." This necessity could be the workings of a mechanical clock, with its gears and cogs, fully determined from the offering of our deductive thought that awakens.

Then Bergson writes about the formation of generalities, that imply the workings of a plan: "... this natural mathematics is only the rigid unconscious skeleton beneath our conscious supple habit of linking the same causes to the same effects; and the usual object of this habit is to guide actions inspired by intentions, or, what comes to the same, to direct movements combined with a view to reproducing a pattern. We are born artisans as we are born geometricians, and indeed we are geometricians only because we are artisans." This is a hindsight that differs from the aforementioned deductive foresight, but returns again to time in the form of a now inductive drum beat that becomes instinctive.

Bergson (page 45) writes about the synthesis of these two tendencies: "Whether nature be conceived as an immense machine regulated by mathematical laws, or as the realization of a plan, these two ways of regarding it are only the consummation of two tendencies of mind which are complementary to each other, and which have their origin in the same vital necessities." I may conclude that Bergson`s vitalism recognizes the synthesis of deduction and induction, and as such it is consistent with the Trinitarian philosophy described in my book.

Spirit, and the mystery implied by vitalism, is reduced to the deep mystery of time and its two windows. Bergson's vitalism appears to us as a great differentiation and fragmentation, followed by a division of labor. But the support given to our eyes to which appearance is given is a sentience capable of the most subtle awareness coming as hindsight, and this quality may go unnoticed in mere appearance that sees only differentiation.

Bergson (page 112) writes about how plants and animals diverged, one giving themselves over to chlorophyl and sun-light interaction, and the other locomotion: "... the vegetable manufactures organic substances directly with mineral substances; as a rule, this aptitude enables it to dispense with movement and so with feeling. Animals, which are obliged to go in search of their food, have evolved in the direction of locomotor activity, and consequently of a consciousness more and more distinct, more and more ample."

Bergson (page 116) writes: "The harmony of the two kingdoms, the complementary characters they display, might then be due to the fact that they develop two tendencies which at first were fused in one. ... While the animal evolved, not without accidents along the way, toward a freer and freer expenditure of discontinuous energy, the plant perfected rather its system of accumulation without moving."

Bergson (page 140) writes: "instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even of constructing organized instruments [life-like]; intelligence perfect is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments [machine-like]." Bergson tells us that insects perfected instincts, and humans perfected intelligence, representing two divergent pathways. Bergson (page 143) writes: "Here again, then, the greatest success was achieved on the side of the greatest risk [the path to intelligence]. Instinct and intelligence therefore represent two divergent solutions, equally fitting, of one and the same problem."

Bergson (page 149) writes: "Intelligence, in so far as it is innate, is knowledge of a form; instinct implies the knowledge of a matter." Bergson (page 150) writes: "The two tendencies, at first implied in each other, had to separate in order to grow. They both went to seek their fortune in the world, and turned out to be instinct and intelligence. Such, then, are two divergent modes of knowledge by which intelligence and instinct must be defined, from the standpoint of knowledge rather than that of action. But knowledge and action are here only two aspects of one and the same faculty." Bergson (page 151) writes: "There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which by itself, it will never find. These things instincts alone could find; but it will never seek them."

Bergson (page 167-168) tells us of the unlikelihood of science ever understanding instinct completely: "The reason is that instinct and intelligence are two divergent developments of one and the same principle, which in the one case remains within itself, in the other steps out of itself and becomes absorbed in the utilization of inert matter."

However, what came as instinct in animals, comes as intuition in human experience. Thus intuition may give us some of what intelligence misses. Bergson (page 177) writes: "... intuition may bring to the intellect to recognize that life does not quite go into the category of the many nor yet into that of the one; that neither mechanical causality nor finality can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital process." Nevertheless, the doorway points to the middle-term that holds our deductions to our induction, in my view. But can we enter?

Bergson (pager 197) writes: "And for having tried to avoid the seeming vicious circle which consists in using the intellect to transcend the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle, that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity that we began by positing a priori, a unity that we admitted blindly and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience to science and the whole of reality to the pure understanding."

Bergson (page 267) writes: "Consciousness in man, is pre-eminently intellect. It might have been, it ought, so it seems, to have been also intuition. Intuition and intellect represent two opposite directions of the work of consciousness: intuition goes in the very direction of life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus finds itself naturally in accordance with the movement of matter. A complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of conscious activity would attain their full development."

Is humanity doomed to its intellect, unable to find the intuition we need? I think there is some room for optimism in the development of an intuitionist logic! We looked an inductive thinking already, and how it opposes deductive thought. Induction is as an instinct that follows the happy-go-lucky habits of life, and it is an already recognized human faculty of reason. It is induction that has a close associations with intuition, particularly when we discover a deduction that contradicts our blind expectations given to us by induction. Wayward induction is found married to its faulty deduction, and what holds the two together is a naked emotionality that may fall for the circular thinking that Bergson`s warns us about.

Why when Henri Bergson went to lecture to NY in 1913, his presence was celebrated like that of a famous actor? Why such a philosopher created the first traffic jam of the brand-new automotive age? DURATION, the sphere of Life is certainly one of the great contributions of one of the most profound thinkers of mankind. His ideas about time and form were certainly ahead of his time... Time is experienced as a flow; but the concepts through which time is measured are static...we commit a grave error...when we confuse.. spatialized dimension for a dynamic and qualitative flow...but Bersong was conscious of the need of a new, less mechanistic biology...possible founded on a new mathematics...and he was thinking too of a pulsational, quantum like model exhibiting both wave(continuous) and particule(discontinuos) features...Maybe it is time to read Bergson again, and maybe we will find a better way to that domain of the Being, where affirmation is a complete act of the mind, and negation is only an attitude taken by the mind toward an eventual affirmation...

Creative Evolution is not so much a work, but a milestone in print of a new direction of thought. It is a book that is of immense importance to anyone who wants to understand the mystery of humanity.

At the turn of the 20th century, in response to the enthusiasm of biochemists who claimed they had discovered the secret of life because they could synthesize animal waste products; Henry Bergson, who later recieved a nobel prize for his work, said what was needed was a science that focused on vital actions rather than just psychio-chemical elements. He is misquoted as having said physical-chemical forces which has given rise to a false belief he was seeking non-material substance. I am sure Bergson would say that the changing of a single word through vital actions has given rise to a unique ripple of time that will never come again. For how can finite elements give rise to uniqueness of time unless we observe the change, the evolution of matter. A book on biodynamics that even today holds some challenging questions.

I first came across Ibsen's monumental work when reading 'Tropic of Capricorn' by Henry Miller. Despite my complete lack of evolutionary and biological knowledge, I found Ibsen's eschatology mind blowing. Several times I was forced to leave the book for days in order to fully contemplate the philosophical ramifications of his insights. From this great stride forward into the fringes of human understanding Ibsen states: 'A conduct that is truly our own, on the contrary, is that of a will which does not try to counterfeit intellect, and which, remaining itself - that is to say, evolving - ripens gradually into acts which the intellect will be able to resolve indefinitely into intelligible elements without ever reaching its goal. The free act is incommensurable with the idea, and its "rationality" must be defined by this very incommensurability, which admits the discovery of much intelligibility within it as we will. Such is the character of our own evolution; and such also, without doubt, that of the evolution of life." No one, despite their educational backgrounds or lack thereof, should feel intimidated by the possibility of transcending one's very own intellect.