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WorkHenri Bergson

Creative Evolution

One impulse pushing from behind rather than an end drawing from ahead, inventing as it goes — and an intelligence built for solids that cannot follow it.

by Henri Bergson473 passages held

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Original title
L'Évolution créatrice
First published
(aged 48)
Original language
French

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Overview

Natural selection was in more trouble among biologists in 1907 than it had been in Darwin's lifetime. Neo-Lamarckians, orthogenesists — who read evolution as running toward an end — and mutationists were each offering a replacement, and the decades around the turn of the century are remembered as the eclipse of Darwinism. Into that quarrel Bergson brought an objection aimed at the two standing explanations at once. Mechanism explains a living form by the parts and causes behind it, finalism by the end it is moving towards; each, he argued, assumes the whole thing is already given, and so neither can allow that anything genuinely new has ever happened. What he offered instead was élan vital, a vital surge — one impulse running through everything alive and dividing as it goes into the torpor of plants, the instinct of animals, the intelligence of human beings. Intelligence comes off worst. It is the tool-maker's faculty, cut for handling solids and laying out space, and it takes life the way a strip of film takes a movement: as a run of still frames that never adds back up to the thing it copies. His publisher Alcan reissued the book roughly twice a year for a decade. The lecture rooms at the Collège de France filled with people who were not students. On 1 June 1914 a decree placed the book on the Index of Forbidden Books, along with two earlier ones. Biologists were the harder audience. They came back to the same objection: the vital surge was too vague to work with. As the modern synthesis hardened around genetics, the book stopped being read as science at all. Arthur Mitchell's English translation of 1911 was to have opened with an introduction by William James, who had encouraged it and died before it was done.

Key concepts

What is the cinematographic figure a figure for?

For the way thought handles movement. It takes snapshots of something flowing, lines them up, and runs an abstract uniform time behind the strip to restore the motion it removed. Bergson's point is that the frames never add back up: the movement was continuous, so any method built out of states is reconstructing exactly what it destroyed.

Why is intelligence described as cut for solids?

Because it was shaped for making tools, not for knowing. Intelligence works by dividing the world into stable pieces laid out in space, which is what handling matter demands and what the fluid, the living and the ongoing cannot survive. Its failures with life are not carelessness; they are the price at which its usefulness was bought.

What is intuition here, and why is instinct the clue to it?

Intuition is knowing something from inside, by entering its movement rather than surveying it from outside. Instinct already does something like this, acting on life from within, but blindly and with no interest in knowing anything. Intuition is that same inward contact made disinterested and self-aware, able to turn back on its object and give an account.

Why does Bergson attack the idea of nothing?

Because the question why there is something rather than nothing rests on an idea that does not survive inspection. The notion of nothing contains more than the notion of being, not less: it is a thing thought and then dismissed, the work of a mind that negates. Remove that illusion and the puzzle it generated has nothing left to stand on.

What do mechanism and finalism have in common?

Both assume the result was given in advance. Mechanism reads a living form off the causes behind it, finalism off the end ahead of it, and neither leaves room for anything genuinely new to occur. The only difference between them is the direction the answer arrives from. That shared assumption, not either doctrine separately, is the book's target.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

An evolution that invents as it goes

If the history of life is already contained in its causes or in its goal, then nothing has genuinely happened. Bergson asks what biology would have to admit for novelty to be real.

Mechanism reads a living form off the parts behind it, finalism off the end ahead of it, and one objection catches both: each assumes the result was given in advance, so neither leaves room for invention. In their place Bergson puts élan vital, a vital surge, one impulse running through everything alive and dividing as it goes into the torpor of plants, the instinct of animals, the intelligence of human beings. Biologists never accepted it, answering that the surge was too vague to work with.

  • evolution
  • vitalism
  • mechanism
  • teleology
  • philosophy of biology
  • biology
  • organism
  • adaptation
  • heredity
  • life
  • freedom

Enter a dialogue

An intelligence built for solids

Why should the faculty that made tools be trusted to understand life? Here the theory of knowledge becomes a question about what the mind was shaped by and therefore what it cannot follow.

Intelligence is the tool-maker's faculty: it cuts the world into solids, lays them out in space, and is superbly fitted to action while remaining hopeless at what flows. Its picture of movement is the strip of film, a run of still frames that never adds back up to the motion it copies. Intuition is the proposed corrective, a sympathy that enters duration instead of surveying it, and instinct is the clue to it, knowledge of life from inside rather than about it.

  • intellect
  • intelligence
  • instinct
  • intuition
  • epistemology
  • knowledge
  • action
  • space
  • matter
  • perception
  • language

Enter a dialogue

Time that does something

Either duration is a working force in nature or it is only a way of describing changes settled elsewhere, and the whole argument of the book rests on the first.

Duration is carried here beyond the inner life where the 1889 thesis found it, out into the universe at large: if time is real then it manufactures, and the future is not deducible from the present however much of the present is known. Bergson presses the point through an analysis of the idea of nothing, arguing that the old puzzles about why anything exists are artefacts of a mind that negates. Continuity, not a succession of states, is what a philosophy of life owes an account of.

  • duration
  • time
  • becoming
  • continuity
  • metaphysics
  • negation
  • consciousness
  • philosophy of science

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
473
distinct concepts
506
by passages held, corpus-wide
#158

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “evolution” and “vitalism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
evolutionvitalism25
mechanismteleology24
evolutionphilosophy of biology20
evolutionteleology20
mechanismphilosophy of biology17
philosophy of biologyteleology16
consciousnessduration15
evolutionmechanism13
durationmechanism11
durationevolution10
durationintellect9
philosophy of biologyvitalism9
consciousnessevolution6
evolutionintellect6
mechanismvitalism6
teleologyvitalism6
consciousnessintellect5
intellectteleology5
consciousnessvitalism3
intellectmechanism3
intellectphilosophy of biology3
intellectvitalism3
consciousnessmechanism2
consciousnessteleology2
durationteleology2
durationphilosophy of biology1
durationvitalism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1889 Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience)

    Duration makes its first appearance here, in a doctoral thesis. Memory, comedy, dreaming and evolution are all later applications of what this book works out.

     EN
  2. 1900 Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique)

    The outlier on Bergson's shelf: the only one of these books that turns to the stage and the street. What it carries across is the test — the living against the mechanical, now applied to what makes an audience laugh.

     EN
  3. 1901 Dreams (Le Rêve)

    In French it survives as a chapter of L'Énergie spirituelle, the 1919 collection of his occasional pieces; in English it has gone on being sold as a book of its own, which is why a single lecture stands here beside three much larger works.

     EN
  4. 1907 Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice) you are here EN
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