Creative Evolution (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Creative Evolution appeared in Paris in 1907 to a receptive audience. In some respects a culmination of nineteenth-century thought, Henri Bergson’s path-breaking work was nonetheless seen as one of the new century’s radical breaks with the past, enjoying this status in the public mind with the work of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and with the shock of post-impressionist art. Bergson’s critiques of abstract ideas and Darwinian concepts of evolution, his celebrations of intuition and creativity, closely paralleled the spirit of the times. Creative Evolution, destined to have a significant effect on fields as diverse as genetic psychology, literary criticism, and thermodynamics, was to become the most unlikely of philosophical events—an international best seller.

Born in Paris of a Polish father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Henri Bergson (1858-1941) made a distinguished record as a student, winning an award in classics and two national competitions in mathematics. His dissertation, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, translated into English as Time and Free Will, was completed in 1889. His progress through the French educational establishment, beginning in Parisian lycées, culminated in a chair at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure. It is more than a little ironic that Bergson, a very private individual and careful, even meticulous, scholar, was to be awarded so many honors, from the French Legion of Honor (1919) to the Nobel Prize for Literature (1928).

Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France were to provide yet another example of the conflict between Bergson as a private individual and as a public figure. His lectures at the Collège de France were to be so popular that a larger lecture hall had to be found. This in turn filled up and overflowed. Embarrassed by public adulation, Bergson put the problem to rest by retiring from public lectures. The status that his writings had gained him as a leading philosopher and de facto spokesman for the values of French and of European civilization, however, continued to follow him. During the First World War he was sent by the French and British governments on a secret mission to American President Woodrow Wilson, promising that if Wilson would intervene on the side of the Allies, they would support the founding of the League of Nations. This offer—and Bergson’s determined arguments for it—were two factors that led Wilson to declare war.

Bergson’s participation in the League of Nations (as chairman of the Committee for International Intellectual Cooperation, forerunner of today’s UNESCO) was cut short in 1923-1924 by an abrupt decline in his health. His final work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), was the result of a quarter century of reading and reflection as well as a triumph over a crippling illness. This last study expands the arguments of Creative Evolutionso as to deal with human moral and religious experience.

A philosopher worthy of the name, Bergson insists, says only one thing. Bergson’s fundamental insight concerns the nature of temporality. In preparing for his dissertation, Bergson entered into a careful analysis of the concept of time employed by a well-known contemporary philosopher, Herbert Spencer. The result was surprising. Spencer, following an ancient tradition, really did not take time seriously. He began by studying space and then, without reflection, transferred its fundamental characteristics to time. But if time is depicted as composed of static points and homogeneous lengths, Bergson protests, it loses its dynamic experienced character: it ceases to flow.

There are practical reasons for breaking the flow of things into static points (instants) and identical time-lengths (minutes, days, etc.). This procedure is the basis of our clocks and our predictions. But clock time must be distinguished from actual process. The former represents a dimension of space; the latter is “real duration”: a direct experience that is qualitative, dynamic, and continuous.

Bergson’s concept of duration—close cousin to William James’ “stream of consciousness”—is deepened and broadened throughout Bergson’s career. Duration, by the time of the writing of Creative Evolution, had been expanded to include nature, both living and non-living. All things endure; each has its own duration. This would not be true if nature were made up of exclusively hard, unchanging atoms in motion, relative to each other. Such motions are strictly reversible; aggregates made up of such timeless particles are strictly reducible to the particles themselves. And all is predictable in principle. In such a world, “time” is reduced to an appearance or an illusion and evolution becomes the result of factors predetermined from all eternity. Bergson found this mechanical model unbelievable. It needed to be rethought in terms of real duration.

The fundamental task of Creative Evolution, therefore, is to introduce a real, dynamic temporality into the study of life. To do so is to become involved in both scientific and philosophical conundrums. From the side of science, it requires a critical analysis of reigning scientific paradigms in biology. From the side of philosophy, it elicits a new look at fundamental issues in both the theory of knowledge and metaphysics.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two theories divided evolutionary biology, Lamarckianism and Darwinism. Lamarckians held—to simplify things—that the neck of the giraffe has been lengthened through the efforts of giraffes in each generation to reach ever higher branches. Darwinians held that evolution is the result of chance mutations which, when they produce a fitter animal, are preserved by natural selection.

Bergson critiques Lamarckianism on the grounds that the experiments taken to prove the theory turn out to be unconvincing. If there is an “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” it is rare and relatively insignificant. His critique of Darwinism, on the other hand, is complex. One criticism concerns the problem of whether mutations are small and limited (“point mutations”) or whether they are large and transform the organism (“macromutations”). If they are small, how can they be preserved, in the right order and in the right combinations, to create a new organ or species? If they are large and dramatic, there is an almost magical appearance of new biological form. But magic is not science. This problem is continued today in the debates between gradualism and punctuated equilibrium theories of evolution.

Closely connected with the contrast between Lamarckian and Darwinian views of evolution is another contrast: the view of evolution as purposeful and the view of evolution as lacking all-purpose. Lamarckianism presents itself as a purposive (in other words, teleological) theory of evolution, making evolutionary change the result of the strivings of organisms to attain higher form. Another view, vitalism (championed by the embryologist Hans Driesch) is also purposeful, since it postulates a vital force in each organism which operates as a sort of engineer-in-residence, directing the components of the organism to fit together in the right combinations at the right time.

The tendency of both Lamarckianism and vitalism is toward “finalism”: a teleology for which the goals that evolution strives toward are predetermined. In these theories, evolution is like a plan or blueprint, given ahead of time, which evolution fills in one stage at a time. Bergson points out, however, that things do not seem to act this way. If evolution were a plan-in-progress, it would exhibit more order and harmony as it progressed. In fact, as evolution branches out, the conflicts between its diversity of organisms continue to increase. There does not appear to be one evolutionary blueprint—or any blueprint at all.

In radical contrast to Lamarckianism and vitalism, Darwinism presents itself as a theory radically opposed to purposiveness of any kind. Bergson’s second objection to Darwinism, beyond the dilemma comprised of point mutations and megamutations stated above, is usually discussed today as the “problem of perfection.” Bergson approaches it in terms of the human eye, asking if anything as finely tuned or exquisitely adapted as the human eye can be the result of hit-or-miss mutations and the killing off of the unfit. He adds to this question a second, reinforcing example: the eye of the pectin. The pectin is a shellfish whose eyes have lenses with a cellular structure like our own, with corneas, and with inverted retinas. We thus have, on two different branches of the evolutionary tree, in two very different sorts of organisms, the same kind of eye. At the very least, this fact is enigmatic. At the most, it seems to require an explanation that Darwinism will have difficulty providing.

But if evolution is neither a purpose working toward some “omega point” or a purposeless random walk, what is it? Bergson’s answer is that evolution is, literally, creative: making itself almost experimentally on diverging branches, purposive insofar as it has a direction (toward greater flexibility, spontaneity, awareness), purposeless in that its goals are not pre-established and have to be achieved in transit. Evolution is thus a middle way between mechanism (and Darwinism), on the one hand, and teleology (and Lamarckianism), on the other.

This view of evolution as experimental, creative, and divergent had interesting implications for understanding how human beings think. Most accounts of the human capacity to know have virtually ignored man’s place in the evolutionary tree. Starting from theological, or mathematical, or physical assumptions, philosophers have proceeded to explain our thinking without asking what our brains, perceptual apparatuses, social organization, and language have to do with cognition. But surely the kind of organisms we are has something to do with the kinds of concepts we use.

In understanding human thinking, it can help to contrast our ways of thought with creatures significantly different than ourselves. Bergson does this in Creative Evolution by comparing humans and insects. Evolution has taken three difference durations, he argues: the plants, the arthropods, and the vertebrates. Arthropods (including the insects), with their external skeletons, use tools which are parts of their bodies (the ant’s pincers, the bee’s pollen sacs), tools which, therefore, they do not have to construct. The highest development of the arthropods is found in the intricate but highly stereotyped insect societies, in which one finds a mode of knowing different from our own: instinct. Bergson gives as an example of instinct the sphex, a wasp which stings its caterpillar prey on its nerve centers so as to paralyze without killing it. The sphex, Bergson speculates, has an immediate awareness of the character of its prey, an awareness that Bergson terms instinct. The sphex is neither an automaton nor a scholarly entomologist. Its awareness of its prey as prey and as vulnerable is immediate, a primitive awareness which is sufficient to start an appropriate (for the wasp) behavioral response.

If vertebrates, unlike insects, are compelled to make their own tools, Bergson argues, this involves a radically different kind of knowing. The principle of tool-using (and, later, machine-making) is simple: break things into parts, reassemble the parts, and use as needed. This principle is in itself quasi-mechanical. Many vertebrates other than man use tools. In the case of humans, it is very clear from the chipped flint to the digital computer that human history is in great degree a function of the development and use of new technologies. The result of this history, if it involves continuing achievements, also involves some limitations. Man the tool-user (whom Bergson terms homo faber) thinks in an eminently practical way, conceptualizing the world in terms of stable parts refitted for tool or machine use. If such a procedure leaves no room for sympathy and tends to reduce the world to blueprints, it nonetheless allows human beings to break out of the fixed, stereotyped forms of insect societies. Human life has been a scene of constant change, experiment, development.

One thus arrives at the crux of Creative Evolution viewed as a reflection on the theory of knowledge. There are two different ways of knowing: one a form of sympathy which gets into things but in a limited way, the other a way of fabricating things which is productive, but which arrives at abstract and static concepts. Understanding how Bergson interrelates these two modes of thought is crucial. What can be written in this introduction, however, can be only a sketch.

The practical mode of thought by which we cope with the world around us Bergson terms “intelligence.” He has great respect for intelligence and for what it can do for us. But when the concepts used by intelligence are raised to the level of a theory of reality and a set of fixed static concepts, they become “intellect.” Intellect is different. It provides an abstract picture of the world. At the limit change, temporality, vitality will be considered illusions.

Bergson is clearly a critic of “intellect.” Because of this, because he wishes to introduce “intuition” as a counterpoise to intellect, and because (as we will shortly see) he relates intuition to instinct, Bergson has been stigmatized as both anti-intellectual and obscurantist. Given his rhetorical flourishes and image-laden prose, this response is understandable: understandable but mistaken. If intelligence and intellect are not identical, neither are instinct and intuition. Once the differences between instinct and intuition are understood, the place of intuition in his thought and in human conceptual creativity becomes clear.

Instinct, as Bergson describes it, sympathizes with various aspects of life. It enters into its object. Intuition, as Bergson describes it, also enters into its object. It is a kind of participation. But where instinct participates only in certain limited aspects of life (like the sphex, which only “knows” a species of caterpillar and only in a limited way), intuition is “instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting on its object and enlarging it indefinitely.” That is, intuition is reflection: it is highly conscious and contains a dynamic conceptual content. It is thus able to suggest new, more flexible, less static conceptual schemes. Bertrand Russell once quipped that “Intuition is at its best in bats, bees, and Bergson.” Russell, however, missed the point. Intuition is for Bergson only possible in a creature than can think about its thinking. Nothing of the kind exists in bats and bees.

In our ordinary lives, man the tool-maker lives by received modes of thought lumped under the heading of common sense. But, Bergson argues, it is the uncommon insight, the creative intuition which expresses itself in new conceptual tools: new technology, new science, new art. As Thomas Kuhn argues in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, there is normal science, representing the status quo. But there is also revolutionary science, which overturns received assumptions and opens new paths for research and understanding. Bergson’s views are much like Kuhn’s, anticipating them by over half a century. But for Bergson it is intuition which makes possible new directions, literally, the creation of new possibilities.

Thus it should not be surprising if Bergson’s inquiries were to provide a ready resource for stream-of-consciousness novelists and for post-impressionist movements from fauvism to surrealism. Nor should it seem strange that his approach led scientists like Alexis Carrell and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy to do laboratory studies in biological time or Jean Piaget to see the possibility of a genetic epistemology. It is understandable also that Bergson should have “inspired” Ilya Prigogine to reconsider the foundations of thermodynamics.

From this understanding of human creativity and its roots in intuition, it is helpful to return to a discussion of biological evolution. This return will make it possible to attain two related insights: a fuller understanding of Bergson’s view of evolution and a final argument that he will make against Darwinism. Both insights are closely connected with the concept of entropy and with the science of thermodynamics.

Clearly, in human history creativity has not always triumphed. Societies have reverted to a quasi-instinctive torpor, rather than attempt to renew themselves. Geniuses have let their gifts wither. But the same is true of evolution, which has not always prevailed. Bergson does not see evolution, then, as everywhere an unqualified success. Everywhere there are “arrests,” “setbacks,” “turnings aside.” If there is any ultimate reason for these failures, he believes, it is the omnipresence of entropy: a measure of the loss of potential energy wherever actual energy is expended. When this loss is universalized, we have the famous second law of thermodynamics, whose sobering conclusion is that order in the universe is constantly decreasing as atoms, molecules, and supermolecules continually break down.

The contrast between the perpetual breaking down of matter and the continual building up of life is striking. On the surface of it, there appear to be two different kinds of processes, radically different from each other yet paradoxically interrelated. Bergson is led by this contrast to postulate a life force (élan vital) which pushes evolution to higher levels of dynamic form, prevailing over entropy’s constant undertow. One might not be led by the contrast entropy/evolution to postulate a life force—the existence of which certainly goes beyond the confines of Darwinism. The contrast to which Bergson refers certainly remains puzzling, however. Are there other unexpected factors which explain the extraordinary upwelling of “negentropy” which defines evolution?

The present edition of Creative Evolution comes at an opportune time. The influence and acclaim which accompanied Bergson’s philosophy in the first two decades of the twentieth century were gradually to decline. The factors which accounted for this decline were many, from the rise of phenomenology and the progress of scientific biology to the pessimism of a century embroiled in ceaseless destructive conflict. Today interest in Bergson’s thought begins a gradual but persistent return, fueled not only by the currency of philosophies similar to and in part influenced by his own (like those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze) but by the reemergence of questions which he had discussed with great originality and which now turn out, in spite of assurances to the contrary, not to have been resolved at all. A few of these (the relations between thermodynamics and biology, the “punctuated” character of evolution, the significance of evolutionary convergence) have been mentioned in this introduction. A careful reading of Creative Evolution will reveal others, both philosophical and scientific. Bringing this new edition to the hands of a broad readership may not be to answer fundamental questions once and for all. It does, however, allow this work, almost a century after its publication, to continue to challenge our received ideas and to point in new directions.

Pete A. Y. Gunter, author of many books and articles on Bergson, is Regents University Professor of philosophy at the University of North Texas. Among his books are Bergson and the Evolution of Physics (1968) and Henri Bergson: A Bibliography (1974, 2^nd edition 1986).