Creative Evolution
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 10 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~180,000 words · 844 passages
Cite this work
- APAHenri Bergson. (n.d.). Creative Evolution. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/creative-evolution
- MLAHenri Bergson. "Creative Evolution." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/creative-evolution.
- ChicagoHenri Bergson. Creative Evolution. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/creative-evolution.
What it is about
Bergson's proposal that evolution is explained neither by chance nor by a plan laid down in advance, but by an impulse — the élan vital — that tries paths and divides into diverging directions.
Context and history
Published in 1907, it had enormous success outside philosophy and made him a celebrity; in 1927 he was given the Nobel Prize in literature. The part that has worn best is not the élan vital, which biology never accepted, but the critique of the way the intellect manufactures time: Bergson argues that thought, made for action, turns duration into a succession of motionless instants, and for that reason cannot think what changes.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The history of the evolution of life, incomplete as it yet is, already reveals to us how the intellect has been formed, by an uninterrupted progress, along a line which ascends through the vertebrate series up to man. It shows us in the faculty of understanding an appendage of the faculty of acting, a more and more precise, more and more complex and supple adaptation of the consciousness of living beings to the conditions of existence that are made for them. Hence should result this consequence that our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves--in short, to think matter. Such will indeed be one of the conclusions of the present essay. We shall see that the human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools; that our concepts have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, pre-eminently, the logic of solids; that, consequently, our intellect triumphs in geometry, wherein is revealed the kinship of logical thought with unorganized matter, and where the intellect has only to follow its natural movement, after the lightest possible contact with experience, in order to go from discovery to discovery, sure that experience is following behind it and will justify it invariably. But from this it must also follow that our thought, in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect? Deposited by the evolutionary movement in the course of its way, how can it be applied to the evolutionary movement itself? As well contend that the part is equal to the whole, that the effect can reabsorb its cause, or that t