Creative Evolution

Bergson (page 44) writes of foresight: "We must therefore have managed to extract resemblance from nature, which enable us to anticipate the future. Thus we must, consciously or unconsciously, have made use of the law of causality. Moreover, the more sharply the idea of efficient causality is defined in our mind, the more it takes the form of a mechanical causality. And this scheme, in its turn, is the more mathematical according as it expresses a more rigorous necessity." This necessity could be the workings of a mechanical clock, with its gears and cogs, fully determined from the offering of our deductive thought that awakens.Then Bergson writes about the formation of generalities, that imply the workings of a plan: "... this natural mathematics is only the rigid unconscious skeleton beneath our conscious supple habit of linking the same causes to the same effects; and the usual object of this habit is to guide actions inspired by intentions, or, what comes to the same, to direct movements combined with a view to reproducing a pattern. We are born artisans as we are born geometricians, and indeed we are geometricians only because we are artisans." This is a hindsight that differs from the aforementioned deductive foresight, but returns again to time in the form of a now inductive drum beat that becomes instinctive.Bergson (page 45) writes about the synthesis of these two tendencies: "Whether nature be conceived as an immense machine regulated by mathematical laws, or as the realization of a plan, these two ways of regarding it are only the consummation of two tendencies of mind which are complementary to each other, and which have their origin in the same vital necessities." I may conclude that Bergson`s vitalism recognizes the synthesis of deduction and induction, and as such it is consistent with the Trinitarian philosophy described in my book.Spirit, and the mystery implied by vitalism, is reduced to the deep mystery of time and its two windows. Bergson's vitalism appears to us as a great differentiation and fragmentation, followed by a division of labor. But the support given to our eyes to which appearance is given is a sentience capable of the most subtle awareness coming as hindsight, and this quality may go unnoticed in mere appearance that sees only differentiation.Bergson (page 112) writes about how plants and animals diverged, one giving themselves over to chlorophyl and sun-light interaction, and the other locomotion: "... the vegetable manufactures organic substances directly with mineral substances; as a rule, this aptitude enables it to dispense with movement and so with feeling. Animals, which are obliged to go in search of their food, have evolved in the direction of locomotor activity, and consequently of a consciousness more and more distinct, more and more ample."Bergson (page 116) writes: "The harmony of the two kingdoms, the complementary characters they display, might then be due to the fact that they develop two tendencies which at first were fused in one. ... While the animal evolved, not without accidents along the way, toward a freer and freer expenditure of discontinuous energy, the plant perfected rather its system of accumulation without moving."Bergson (page 140) writes: "instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even of constructing organized instruments [life-like]; intelligence perfect is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments [machine-like]." Bergson tells us that insects perfected instincts, and humans perfected intelligence, representing two divergent pathways. Bergson (page 143) writes: "Here again, then, the greatest success was achieved on the side of the greatest risk [the path to intelligence]. Instinct and intelligence therefore represent two divergent solutions, equally fitting, of one and the same problem."Bergson (page 149) writes: "Intelligence, in so far as it is innate, is knowledge of a form; instinct implies the knowledge of a matter." Bergson (page 150) writes: "The two tendencies, at first implied in each other, had to separate in order to grow. They both went to seek their fortune in the world, and turned out to be instinct and intelligence. Such, then, are two divergent modes of knowledge by which intelligence and instinct must be defined, from the standpoint of knowledge rather than that of action. But knowledge and action are here only two aspects of one and the same faculty." Bergson (page 151) writes: "There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which by itself, it will never find. These things instincts alone could find; but it will never seek them."Bergson (page 167-168) tells us of the unlikelihood of science ever understanding instinct completely: "The reason is that instinct and intelligence are two divergent developments of one and the same principle, which in the one case remains within itself, in the other steps out of itself and becomes absorbed in the utilization of inert matter."However, what came as instinct in animals, comes as intuition in human experience. Thus intuition may give us some of what intelligence misses. Bergson (page 177) writes: "... intuition may bring to the intellect to recognize that life does not quite go into the category of the many nor yet into that of the one; that neither mechanical causality nor finality can give a sufficient interpretation of the vital process." Nevertheless, the doorway points to the middle-term that holds our deductions to our induction, in my view. But can we enter?Bergson (pager 197) writes: "And for having tried to avoid the seeming vicious circle which consists in using the intellect to transcend the intellect, we find ourselves turning in a real circle, that which consists in laboriously rediscovering by metaphysics a unity that we began by positing a priori, a unity that we admitted blindly and unconsciously by the very act of abandoning the whole of experience to science and the whole of reality to the pure understanding."Bergson (page 267) writes: "Consciousness in man, is pre-eminently intellect. It might have been, it ought, so it seems, to have been also intuition. Intuition and intellect represent two opposite directions of the work of consciousness: intuition goes in the very direction of life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus finds itself naturally in accordance with the movement of matter. A complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of conscious activity would attain their full development."Is humanity doomed to its intellect, unable to find the intuition we need? I think there is some room for optimism in the development of an intuitionist logic! We looked an inductive thinking already, and how it opposes deductive thought. Induction is as an instinct that follows the happy-go-lucky habits of life, and it is an already recognized human faculty of reason. It is induction that has a close associations with intuition, particularly when we discover a deduction that contradicts our blind expectations given to us by induction. Wayward induction is found married to its faulty deduction, and what holds the two together is a naked emotionality that may fall for the circular thinking that Bergson`s warns us about.

This book must be read slowly and deliberately -- do so and it will give you an insight into the brilliance of one of the most revolutionary and extraordinarily perceptive philosopher scientists of the 20th Century, IMO.Bergson changed the way scientists see the world by introducing his conception of an "original impetus", which began simply (if "intelligently") and evolved matter into living, increasingly complex lifeforms and concurrently evolved an increasingly complex consciousness within it -- as an "imperceptable thread" (my wording) ultimately called the elan vital.In my case, after reading carefully and filling the book's margins with notes, Professor Bergson seems to be proving (showing) that all science up until his time (circa 1930's) was concerned with objects as they were at a particular moments, whereas in fact these objects were and are in a state of continual "being" (duration), making their actuality or essence unknowable.He chronologically takes us through the writings of Plato and Aristotle (the natural trend of the intellect)-- Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz (becoming in modern science) -- and even through the Criticism of Kant and the evolutionism of Spencer. Bergson thoroughly critques each philosophy and shows us why they are not dealing the world as it really is.Through this he weaves his own philosophical system based on Creation and Evolution by (quote):". . . showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living beings in the narrow passage open to their action: an lo! . . . (making) of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun which can illuminate the world."Boldly (Kantian and Spencerian science) proceeds with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of things, even of life. . . . But the essence of things escapes us, and will escape us always; WE MOVE AMONG RELATIONS; THE ABSOLUTE IS NOT IN OUR PROVINCE; WE ARE BROUGHT TO STAND BEFORE THE UNKNOWABLE." . . . BUT AN INTELLECT BENT UPON THE ACT TO BE PERFOMED AND THE REACTION TO FOLLOW . . . WOULD DIG TO THE VERY ROOT OF NATURE AND MIND."In simpler words, the observation of any object changes reality for that object. It is only real as a moving "being", animated by an original impetus and kept real by an "elan vital" which cannot be known because "being" cannot be defined. What we call "real things" are illusions which beomce "real" to us only when we stop their duration. Heidegger spends thousands of pages unsuccessfully trying to define "being", which ultimately he can only label as "dasein". What we observe as the real world is matter and consciousness evolving concurrently from simple to complex as they move through space and time.This means that the original impetus, the spark, the first flame, began neither in space nor time. Later quantum physics would support Bergson's insight, considering that an electron (as one example) cannot be seen without turning it into something else, or ever stranger, disappearing into what can only be other universes parallel to our own.IMO, this means a creative force must exist that animates matter and consciousness; and that could only have originated in that Singularity outside time and space which I in my particular need call the thought of "God". You can call "it" what you will: the Tao, Bhudda, Nature, et al.In my possession is a 1932 edition of "Creative Evolution" which had lingered on a library shelf over eighty years but had been checked out only three times after 1970. Sometimes I wonder where are my fellow philosophers and why I seem in my pained isolation to be the last of the 20th Century philosophers of mind. But that is because I am a crazed crackpot in the collective mind of those who measure men by their wealth. My contemporaries are in the universities, religious orders and lecture tours, where they belong. Yet even I am animated by the elan vital. Even I am part of the "God" finally perceived by Henri Bergson."Creative Evolution" was a sensation when it first appeared in 1932, the work of an already distinguished Professor Bergson of the College de France. It gave the world at last a new and scientific conception of the God long intuited by prophets, priests, poets, writers and grizzled, scarred, aging gray bearded philosophers like myself, dumb beasts of intellectual burdens, who desperately need a new physics to help us embrace an unknowable God created out of a Singularity and connecting our minds and bodies to what the Apostle Paul called Love.Richard Lee Fulgham, Bel Air, 2009

Good

人生の終盤、邦訳を横に置いて、一頁づつ、行きつ戻りつ、読み続けます。

Henri Bergson's seminal "Creative Evolution" starts off with the flowing movement so prevalent in his philosophy of the organism, one idea flows into the next in a smooth undivided motion. Not only does Bergson explain his work with analogies and examples supported by the biology of the time, thereby distancing himself from the purely intellectual pursuit of most philosophy, trapped in the world of the mind, but he demonstrates his thought in the very way of exposition he uses throughout the book. One feels his thought is produced like a Mozart symphony, all at once with no corrections needed. This aptly demonstrates the idea of duration and time he proposes in this book. His influence is profound in thinkers such as David Bohm and Alfred North Whitehead which so to speak "run with it" in the parlance of baseball. This is a book worth reading twice for its rich display of creativity and also to reread sections not followed the first time. One does feel however that at times the flow is interrupted by disturbances in his mode of thinking leading to disjointed reading. Nonetheless, not only does he open a whole new way of thought free of dualism and the old patterns of mechanism, but he also explains the reason for mechanistic thought itself.

Such an interesting book.

Bergson developed an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution without relying on divine design or intervention. Science has moved on and some of the experimental bases of his theory would now be considered doubtful by biologists and other scientists. Nonetheless, there has been a renewal of interest in Bergson's work amongst European philosophers, and this, coupled with Bergson's easily-readable style and this good translation, makes this book an interesting and pleasurable one to read.