Foreword

Foreword

In this special issue of SubStance we celebrate the centennial of Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution. Published in 1907, it has lost none of its relevance—in fact, as the content of this issue hopes to convey, it might well be that we are only now able to appreciate its far-reaching insights. After having set much of the agenda for twentieth-century philosophy (William James and American pragmatism, Ricoeur and history, Sartre and nothingness, Deleuze and differentiation, as well as engagements with Einstein, and of course the study of evolution), Bergson seemed to have exited the philosophical awareness around the late 1930s. If the great conferences on Bergson at his one hundredth birthday in 1959 were more akin to the form of extended obituaries, we can say that another 50 years down the line, Bergson appears to be alive and well.¹

It is this sense of a flourishing of projects that we have attempted to transmit with this issue. More a matter of philosophical honesty than of hedging one's bets, Bergson always stressed that a final and complete knowledge of the world could only come at the expense of a world that is fully completed and without change. Since evolution is a living process and not a completed history, any understanding of it must necessarily be open-ended. If no one can have the last word, Bergson writes, the project of understanding evolution "will only be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting and improving one another."

With this appeal in mind, we have sought out authors from various backgrounds to write on Bergson and creative evolution. We present to you work from Bergson scholars seasoned and new, from the United States, Japan, France and Great Britain. Among the texts is the first English translation of a series of recently-discovered lectures that Deleuze gave in 1960 on the third chapter of Creative Evolution. Topics in our issue range from Bergson's encounters with Darwin, Nietzsche, Derrida and Deleuze, and from the analytical to the metaphysical. Preceding the articles are a few particularly relevant excerpts from a course on metaphysics taught by Bergson in 1887-88, in which he discusses different concepts of life, materialism and vitalism.

Michael Vaughan opens this issue with his "Introduction to Creative Evolution." He situates the work both within the context of Bergson's other writings as well as in the context of work done in biology and complexity theory. Creative Evolution is the work of a philosopher focusing on the empirical evidence of evolution. Bergson did not simply find inspiration in the sciences, but through sustained and thorough research into those fields, was able to create a partnership between philosophy and the sciences. It follows that Creative Evolution cannot be adequately understood from within philosophy alone. Situating it within the context of the sciences thus serves to introduce us to some of the main topics in the remainder of this issue.

In "Bergson's Creation of the Possible," Pete Gunter discusses the problem of how to resist our natural investment in the idea that everything in existence is an instance of some pre-existing possibility. It was Bergson's conviction that the belief in the ready-made and in the possible provides one of the main supports for deterministic thought. Gunter discusses Bergson's critique of the idea of the possible, which shows this to be an anthropomorphism: it is to confuse our utility-directed action with the movement of creation in the evolution of life. The notion of possibility assumes the existence of a plan that is somehow executed. But if we do away with the notion of the possible, does this not make all development into a random sequence of events? How then to understand life's continuity? It is to the concept of memory that we must turn. In Creative Evolution Bergson greatly expands this concept, developing a concept of memory that is not only retentive, but...