Introduction: Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution

Introduction:

Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution

Henri Bergson was the philosopher who, in an intellectual career stretching from the 1880s to the 1930s, provided a rigorous account of the real efficacy of time (which he called duration). This allowed him to conceive of creativity as the source of both psychological freedom and of life as an open system. Bergson identifies in the history of Western thought the demotion of time to the status of a measurement, a demotion that renders the effects of its real activity in consciousness and in life inexplicable (even non-existent). According to Bergson it is impossible, without an adequate conception of time, to properly pose questions of free will or evolution, and in books such as Time and free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907) he reinterprets a vast range of empirical research in such a way as to take into account the role of time in psychological and biological processes. In the late nineteenth century, the sciences of consciousness and of life were dominated by a commitment to materialism and mechanism that meant they struggled to conceptualize growth, change and creativity, or even held such phenomena to be unreal. Bergson's commitment to the reality of time as a source of creative change enabled him to clarify many problems in psychology and biology that appeared contradictory from existing scientific and philosophical perspectives, and to provide a rigorous account of a Creative Evolution, The Creative Mind, and the nature of their relation. Hence, those sciences that attempted to explain consciousness in purely physiological terms and those that attempted to explain life in purely physical and chemical terms are subject to extensive critiques in Bergson's works.

In 1907, Bergson was a forty-seven year old professor at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in Modern Philosophy. He had a background in mathematics, for which he had won prizes as a student, and in his first two books, Time and free Will and Matter and Memory, he had based his arguments on a close analysis of the latest research in psychology and neurology. Creative Evolution was his third book, and was the result of several years of painstaking research, reading books and research papers on comparative homology, cytology, embryology and palaeontology, in English, German and French. However, a survey of both Bergson's published essays and the posthumously collected documents in Mélanges (1959) from the eleven years following Matter and Memory reveals little to suggest that a major encounter with the biological sciences was underway. Even the essay "L'idée de néant" [The Idea of Nothing], published in the November 1906 issue of Revue Philosophique and reproduced at the beginning of the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution, did not represent the real focus of the book; it challenged the metaphysical sense of a supposed "nothing" that is said to precede existence, rather than dealing with any directly biological issue.¹

However, it would be wrong to suggest that Creative Evolution appeared out of nowhere. First, Bergson included a number of sessions on different conceptions of life in the lecture course on metaphysics that he held at the college of Clermont-Ferrand in 1887-1888. Summaries of these lectures were published in France in 1992, and a selection of those sections dealing with the life sciences appear in this issue of SubStance, in their first English translation. These lectures indicate that before the publication of Time and free Will, Bergson was at least aware of the issues that would become central in Creative Evolution: the difference between organic and inorganic matter, the coordination of parts in organisms, the nature of life and the relation between life and consciousness. More significantly though, there is the unity and continuity that Bergson's philosophical approach establishes between his previous works in psychology and his new work in biology. In this introduction, we will examine how Bergson's philosophy, particularly in its response to the...