Creative Evolution

Henri Bergson

Description

French philosopher Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution was published in 1907 and translated into English in 1911. Very popular at the time, it gives an alternate mechanism for evolution - that it is motivated by an "elan vital" a vital impetus, also graspable as our natural creative urge. It also looks at Bergson's conception of time, a subjective "duration" (rather than the quantifiable time of a clock) that is best understood not through the intellect but through our creative intuition, an idea that influenced Marcel Proust and other modernist thinkers.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781775410843
• Langue: English

Extrait

CREATIVE EVOLUTION
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HENRI BERGSON
Translated by
ARTHUR MITCHELL
 
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Creative Evolution First published in 1911.
ISBN 978-1-775410-84-3
© 2009 THE FLOATING PRESS.
While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.
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Contents
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Translator's Note Introduction Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Endnotes
Translator's Note
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In the writing of this English translation of Professor Bergson's mostimportant work, I was helped by the friendly interest of ProfessorWilliam James, to whom I owe the illumination of much that was dark tome as well as the happy rendering of certain words and phrases for whichan English equivalent was difficult to find. His sympatheticappreciation of Professor Bergson's thought is well known, and he hasexpressed his admiration for it in one of the chapters of A PluralisticUniverse . It was his intention, had he lived to see the completion ofthis translation, himself to introduce it to English readers in aprefatory note.
I wish to thank my friend, Dr. George Clarke Cox, for many valuablesuggestions.
I have endeavored to follow the text as closely as possible, and at thesame time to preserve the living union of diction and thought. ProfessorBergson has himself carefully revised the whole work. We both of us wishto acknowledge the great assistance of Miss Millicent Murby. She haskindly studied the translation phrase by phrase, weighing each word, andher revision has resulted in many improvements.
But above all we must express our acknowledgment to Mr. H. Wildon Carr,the Honorary Secretary of the Aristotelian Society of London, and thewriter of several studies of "Evolution Creatrice." [1] We asked him tobe kind enough to revise the proofs of our work. He has done much morethan revise them: they have come from his hands with his personal markin many places. We cannot express all that the present work owes to him.
ARTHUR MITCHELL
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Introduction
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The history of the evolution of life, incomplete as it yet is, alreadyreveals to us how the intellect has been formed, by an uninterruptedprogress, along a line which ascends through the vertebrate series up toman. It shows us in the faculty of understanding an appendage of thefaculty of acting, a more and more precise, more and more complex andsupple adaptation of the consciousness of living beings to theconditions of existence that are made for them. Hence should result thisconsequence that our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, isintended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment,to represent the relations of external things among themselves—inshort, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of the conclusions ofthe present essay. We shall see that the human intellect feels at homeamong inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our actionfinds its fulcrum and our industry its tools; that our concepts havebeen formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, pre-eminently,the logic of solids; that, consequently, our intellect triumphs ingeometry, wherein is revealed the kinship of logical thought withunorganized matter, and where the intellect has only to follow itsnatural movement, after the lightest possible contact with experience,in order to go from discovery to discovery, sure that experience isfollowing behind it and will justify it invariably.
But from this it must also follow that our thought, in its purelylogical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, thefull meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definitecircumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, ofwhich it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by theevolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied tothe evolutionary movement itself? As well contend that the part is equalto the whole, that the effect can reabsorb its cause, or that the pebbleleft on the beach displays the form of the wave that brought it there.In fact, we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of ourthought—unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, intelligentfinality, etc.—applies exactly to the things of life: who can say whereindividuality begins and ends, whether the living being is one or many,whether it is the cells which associate themselves into the organism orthe organism which dissociates itself into cells? In vain we force theliving into this or that one of our molds. All the molds crack. They aretoo narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them. Ourreasoning, so sure of itself among things inert, feels ill at ease onthis new ground. It would be difficult to cite a biological discoverydue to pure reasoning. And most often, when experience has finally shownus how life goes to work to obtain a certain result, we find its way ofworking is just that of which we should never have thought.
Yet evolutionist philosophy does not hesitate to extend to the things oflife the same methods of explanation which have succeeded in the case ofunorganized matter. It begins by showing us in the intellect a localeffect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up thecoming and going of living beings in the narrow passage open to theiraction; and lo! forgetting what it has just told us, it makes of thislantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world.Boldly it proceeds, with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to theideal reconstruction of all things, even of life. True, it hurtles inits course against such formidable difficulties, it sees its logic endin such strange contradictions, that it very speedily renounces itsfirst ambition. "It is no longer reality itself," it says, "that it willreconstruct, but only an imitation of the real, or rather a symbolicalimage; the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; wemove among relations; the absolute is not in our province; we arebrought to a stand before the Unknowable."—But for the human intellect,after too much pride, this is really an excess of humility. If theintellectual form of the living being has been gradually modeled on thereciprocal actions and reactions of certain bodies and their materialenvironment, how should it not reveal to us something of the veryessence of which these bodies are made? Action cannot move in theunreal. A mind born to speculate or to dream, I admit, might remainoutside reality, might deform or transform the real, perhaps even createit—as we create the figures of men and animals that our imaginationcuts out of the passing cloud. But an intellect bent upon the act to beperformed and the reaction to follow, feeling its object so as to getits mobile impression at every instant, is an intellect that touchessomething of the absolute. Would the idea ever have occurred to us todoubt this absolute value of our knowledge if philosophy had not shownus what contradictions our speculation meets, what dead-locks it endsin? But these difficulties and contradictions all arise from trying toapply the usual forms of our thought to objects with which our industryhas nothing to do, and for which, therefore, our molds are not made.Intellectual knowledge, in so far as it relates to a certain aspect ofinert matter, ought, on the contrary, to give us a faithful imprint ofit, having been stereotyped on this particular object. It becomesrelative only if it claims, such as it is, to present to us life—thatis to say, the maker of the stereotype-plate.
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Must we then give up fathoming the depths of life? Must we keep to thatmechanistic idea of it which the understanding will always give us—anidea necessarily artificial and symbolical, since it makes the totalactivity of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which isonly a partial and local manifestation of life, a result or by-productof the vital process? We should have to do so, indeed, if life hademployed all the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pureunderstandings—that is to say, in making geometricians. But the line ofevolution that ends in man is not the only one. On other paths,divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have been developed,which have not been able to free themselves from external constraints orto regain control over themselves, as the human intellect has done, butwhich, none the less, also express something that is immanent andessential in the evolutionary movement. Suppose these other forms ofconsciousness brought together and amalgamated with intellect: would notthe result be a consciousness as wide as life? And such a consciousness,turning around suddenly against the push of life which it feels behind,would have a vision of life complete—would it not?—even though thevision were fleeting.
It will be said that, even so, we do not transcend our intellect, for itis still with our intellect, and through our intellect, that we see theother forms of consciousness. And this would be right if we were pureintellects, if there did not remain, around our conceptual and logicalthought, a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which hasbeen formed the luminous nucleus that we call the intellect. Thereinreside certain powers that are complementary to the understanding,powers of which we have only an indistinct feeling when we remain shutup in ourselves, but which will become clear and distinct when theyperceive themselves at work, so to speak, in the evolution of nature.They will thus learn what sort of effort they must make to beintensified an