- Length
- 400 pagesMitchell's 1911 English translation, widely reprinted
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Free onlineA usable out-of-copyright text is freely available
Creative Evolution
The book that made a philosopher a celebrity. Bergson argued that our intelligence is a tool for handling matter and is therefore constitutionally unable to grasp life, and for two decades much of the educated world found this thrilling before it stopped reading him altogether.
- Date
- 1907
- Author
- Henri Bergson
- Region
- Paris
- Language
- French
- 1911 English, Arthur Mitchell Made with Bergson's cooperation; public domain Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 77 years
The most famous philosopher in the world before 1914 and almost entirely unread by 1950; his lectures in New York in 1913 are said to have caused the first traffic jam in Broadway's history.
What the book says
An argument that life is not a mechanism and not the execution of a plan, and that our difficulty in seeing this is a fact about how intelligence works. Bergson begins from duration - lived time, which is continuous, cumulative and unrepeatable, as against the time of physics, which is a line divided into interchangeable instants. The intellect, he argues, evolved to handle solid bodies for the purpose of acting on them, so it works by cutting continuities into parts, treating change as a series of states, and reassembling motion out of stillness. This serves us well with matter and misleads us completely about life. Applied to evolution it produces two equally inadequate accounts: mechanism, which explains the eye as an accumulation of accidents preserved by usefulness, and finalism, which explains it as the realisation of a plan - both of which treat the outcome as given in advance and differ only about the direction. Bergson's alternative is a vital impulse pushing through matter, dividing as it goes into divergent lines, each solving the problem of living differently. Intelligence is one solution; instinct is another; intuition would be instinct become self-aware.
What it argues
That reality is duration and that treating it as a succession of states is a practical convenience mistaken for a description. The intellect proceeds by fixing, dividing and repeating, which is what acting on the world requires and what living things do not consist in; so the accounts of life it produces will always be assemblages of states with the movement left out - like reconstituting a gesture from photographs. Evolution is neither the working out of a plan nor the accumulation of accidents but a single impulse encountering the resistance of matter and dividing under it, so that the divergent lines of life are alternative solutions rather than steps toward anything. Intuition, which Bergson insists is a difficult and disciplined effort rather than a feeling, is the attempt to think in duration rather than about it.
What it answered
Mechanistic biology, Spencer's evolutionism, and the general nineteenth-century confidence that the physical sciences were the model for all knowledge. Bergson had begun as a follower of Spencer and describes the moment he realised that the account of time in it was empty. He is also answering, without naming it, the philosophical tradition's treatment of time as a dimension analogous to space, which he took to be the original error.
How it argues
By image and by accumulation, in prose of remarkable clarity for a book making these claims. Bergson's method is to show that a familiar way of thinking generates a puzzle, and then that the puzzle disappears when the way of thinking is set aside - and his images do the persuading: the cinematograph reassembling motion from stills, the hand plunged into iron filings, the sugar that will not dissolve any faster because one is impatient. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and it is not hard to see why.
The moment
Paris in the decade before the war, where Bergson's lectures at the Collège de France were public and so crowded that tickets were sold by touts and society ladies sent servants to hold seats. He was the most celebrated intellectual in Europe. During the war he undertook diplomatic missions, including a mission to Washington that historians credit with helping bring the United States in; afterwards he worked for the League of Nations. Crippled by arthritis in his last years and drawn to Catholicism, he declined to convert publicly because he did not wish to leave the persecuted Jews.
How it travelled
To enormous heights and then straight down. Bergson's influence on literature and the arts was vast - Proust was a relative by marriage, and the whole vocabulary of lived time in modernist writing owes something here. Then came a public debate with Einstein in 1922 in which Bergson was judged, by physicists at least, to have misunderstood relativity, and his reputation among scientists never recovered; the rise of phenomenology, existentialism and structuralism finished the job in philosophy. Deleuze's book of 1966 began the recovery, and Bergson has been read seriously again since the 1990s.
The strongest objection
That the vital impulse explains nothing. Bergson rejects mechanism and finalism and offers a force that pushes life in divergent directions - but the force is characterised entirely by what it produces, so citing it adds no information beyond the observation that evolution happened and was not predictable. Biologists said so at the time and the modern synthesis, which arrived after this book, gave a mechanistic account of variation and inheritance far more powerful than anything Bergson was arguing against. His defenders answer that the target was a philosophical picture rather than a scientific theory, and that his real point about the intellect's spatialising habit is untouched. That reply is fair and concedes that the biology has not aged well.
Why read it
For the first chapter on duration and the fourth on the cinematographic habit of the intellect, which are as good as anything written on time in the twentieth century and require no background at all. It is also, simply, a pleasure to read, which is rare in this group.
- First printed
- 1907
- First in English
- 1911
- Digitised
- Yes
Bergson forbade the republication of his thesis on Aristotle and left instructions against a posthumous edition of his papers, which has kept his archive thinner than his contemporaries'.
Arthur Mitchell's 1911 English, made with Bergson's cooperation, is public domain and is what most English readers use.
Where it stands
Revived. Bergson is now discussed in philosophy of time, in process philosophy, in work on memory and on the philosophy of biology, and the Deleuzean reception has given him a substantial second readership.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain and Mitchell's English is too, but the terms on which the argument turns are rendered in ways later scholarship regards as misleading. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How badly Bergson misunderstood relativity in the 1922 exchange with Einstein is disputed, and recent work has been considerably more sympathetic to him than the immediate verdict was. Whether the vital impulse is meant as a scientific hypothesis or a philosophical characterisation is argued and the text supports both readings. And whether the eclipse of his reputation was a philosophical judgement or a generational reaction is a question the recovery has reopened.