Creative Evolution

First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson’s most important and ambitious works to a new generation of readers. A sympathetic though critical reader of Darwin, Bergson argues in Creative Evolution against a mechanistic, reductionist view of evolution. For Bergson, all life emerges from a creative, shared impulse, which he famously terms élan vital and which passes like a current through different organisms and generations over time. Whilst this impulse remains as forms of life diverge and multiply, human life is characterized by a distinctive form of consciousness or intellect. Yet as Bergson brilliantly shows, the intellect’s fragmentary and action- oriented nature, which he likens to the cinematograph, means it alone cannot grasp nature’s creativity and invention over time. A major task of Creative Evolution is to reconcile these two elements. For Bergson, the answer famously lies in intuition, which brings instinct and intellect together and takes us “into the very interior of life.” A work of great rigour and imaginative richness that contributed to Bergson winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, Creative Evolution played an important and controversial role in the trajectory of twentieth-century philosophy and continues to create significant discussion and debate. The philosopher and psychologist William James, who admired Bergson’s work, was writing an introduction to the first English translation of the book before his death in 1910. This new translation includes a foreword by Elizabeth Grosz and a helpful translator’s introduction by Donald Landes. Also translated for the first time are additional notes, articles, reviews and letters on the reception of Creative Evolution in biology, mathematics, and theology. This edition includes fascinating commentaries by philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, and Gilles Deleuze. Cover Half Title Title Page Dedication Copyright Page Table of Contents Abbreviations of Bergson’s Works Cited in This Translation Foreword Translator’s Introduction Publication Acknowledgments Table des Matières Bilingue Bilingual Table of Contents Introduction I On the Evolution of Life. Mechanism and Finality [On Durée in General] [Inorganic Bodies] [Organic Bodies: Aging and Individuality] [On Transformism and the Ways of Interpreting It] [Radical Mechanism: Biology and Physico-Chemistry] [Radical Finalism: Biology and Philosophy] [In Search of a Criterion] [Examination of the Various Transformist Theories Through a Particular Example] [Darwin and Imperceptible Variation] [De Vries and Sudden Variation] [Eimer and Orthogenesis] [Neo-Lamarckians and the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics] [Results of the Above Discussion] [The Élan Vital] II The Diverging Directions of Life’s Evolution: Torpor, Intellect, and Instinct [General Idea of the Evolutionary Process] [Growth] [Diverging and Complementary Tendencies] [The Meaning of Progress and Adaptation] [The Relation of the Animal to the Plant] [The Schema of Animal Life] [The Development of Animality] [The Main Directions in the Evolution of Life: Torpor, Intellect, Instinct] [The Primordial Function of the Intellect] [The Nature of Instinct] [Life and Consciousness. The Apparent Place of Man in Nature] III On the Meaning of Life, the Order of Nature, and the Form of the Intellect [Relation of the Problem of Life to the Problem of Knowledge. Philosophical Method] [Apparent Vicious Circle in the Proposed Method] [Actual Vicious Circle in the Opposite Method] [On The Possibility of a Simultaneous Genesis of Matter and of The Intellect] [The Geometry Inherent in Matter] [The Essential Functions of the Intellect] [Sketch of a Theory of Knowledge Based On the Idea of Disorder] [The Two Opposing Forms of Order: The Problem of Genera and the Problem of Laws] [Disorder and the Two Orders] [The Ideal Genesis of Matter] [Creation and Evolution] [The Material World] [On the Origin and the Destination of Life] [The Meaning of Evolution] [The Essential and the Accidental in Vital Processes and in the Movement of Evolution] [Humanity] [The Life of the Body and the Life of the Mind] IV The Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion./ A Glance at the History of Systems. Real Becoming and False Evolutionism [Sketch of a Critique of Systems Founded On the Analysis of the Ideas of Nothingness and Immutability. Existence and Nothingness] [“The Idea of Nothingness”] [Becoming and Form] [The Philosophy of Forms and Its Understanding of Becoming. Plato and Aristotle. The Natural INCLINATION of the Intellect] [Becoming, According to Modern Science. Two Perspectives On Time] [The Metaphysics of Modern Science. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz] [Kant’s Critical Philosophy] [Spencer’s Evolutionism] Correspondence, Reception, and Commentaries Introduction I Correspondence James–Bergson Correspondence (1907) Letter to H. Wildon Carr (1908) Letter to Florian Znaniecki (1911) II Critical Reception in Biology Bergson and Le Dantec in Dialogue “Bergson’s Biology” (1907) “Letter to the Editor of Revue Du Mois” (1907) Ruyer as Reader of Bergson “Bergson and the Ammophila Sphex” (1959) III Critical Reception in Mathematics Bergson and Borel in Dialogue “The Evolution of Geometrical Intellect” (1907) “In Response to ‘The Evolution of Geometrical Intellect’.” (1908) “Letter to the Editor of Revue De Métaphysique Et De Morale” (1908) IV Critical Reception in Theology Bergson and Tonquédec in Dialogue Preface (1912) “How Should We Interpret the Order of the World?” (1908) Letter From Bergson to Joseph De Tonquédec (May 12, 1908) “Is Bergson a Monist?” (1912) Letter From Bergson to Joseph De Tonquédec (February 20, 1912) V Notable Commentaries Canguilhem as Reader of L’évolution Créatrice Commentary On Chapter III of L’évolution Créatrice (1943) Introduction The Genesis of Matter I Personality II Materiality Merleau-Ponty as Reader of L’évolution Créatrice “The Ideas of Bergson,” From Merleau-Ponty’s Course On Nature at the Collège De France (1956–1957) Schelling and Bergson Nature as the Aseity of the Thing Nature as Life The Ontological Infrastructure of the Concept of Nature in Bergson: The Ideas of Being and Nothingness The Idea of Disorder The Idea of Nothingness The Idea of Being The Idea of the Possible Note On Bergson and Sartre Deleuze as Reader of L’évolution Créatrice Lecture Course On Chapter III of Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1960) Ecole Normale Supérieure De Saint-Cloud I. 14 March 1960 II. 21 March 1960 The Third Chapter 1 Psychology 2 Materialist Cosmology 3 Metaphysics Critical Apparatus Editorial Endnotes to Creative Evolution Bibliographies Index "First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson's L'évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson's most important and ambitious works to a new generation of readers. A sympathetic though critical reader of Darwin, Bergson argues in Creative Evolution against a mechanistic, reductionist view of evolution. For Bergson, all life emerges from a creative, shared impulse, which he famously terms élan vital and which passes like a current through different organisms and generations over time. Whilst this impulse remains as forms of life diverge and multiply, human life is characterised by distinctive form of consciousness or intellect that is modelled upon how objects or parts of objects are juxtaposed in space. Yet as Bergson brilliantly shows, the intellect's fragmentary and action-oriented nature, which he likens to the cinematograph, means it alone cannot grasp nature's creativity and invention over time. A major task of Creative Evolution is how to reconcile these two elements. For Bergson, the answer famously lies in intuition, which brings instinct and intellect together and takes us "into the very interior of life." A work of great rigour and imaginative richness that contributed to Bergson winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, Creative Evolution played an important and controversial role in the trajectory of twentieth-century philosophy and continues to create significant discussion and debate. The philosopher and psychologist William James, who admired Bergson's work, was writing an introduction to the first English translation of the book before his death in 1910. This new translation includes a foreword by Elizabeth Grosz and a helpful Translator's introduction by Donald Landes. Also translated for the first time are additional notes, articles, reviews and letters on the reception of Creative Evolution in biology, mathematics and theology. This edition includes fascinating commentaries by philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, and Gilles Deleuze"-- Provided by publisher French philosopher Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution was published in 1907 and translated into English in 1911. Very popular at the time, it gives an alternate mechanism for evolution - that it is motivated by an "elan vital" a vital impetus, also graspable as our natural creative urge. It also looks at Bergson's conception of time, a subjective "duration" (rather than the quantifiable time of a clock) that is best understood not through the intellect but through our creative intuition, an idea that influenced Marcel Proust and other modernist thinkers.