Creative Evolution: Henri Bergson (week 2)
Details
Creative Evolution (1911) is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A sympathetic though critical reader of Darwin, Bergson argues against a purely mechanistic, reductionist view of evolution. For Bergson, all creativity and biological diversity emerges from a common source: a "vital impulse" (élan vital) which infuses life. This "instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If...we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life." But the human intellect, which "treats everything mechanically," is tragically ill-equipped to comprehend an answer. Creative Evolution attempts to reconcile these opposites through intuition, mediating instinct and intellect and taking us "into the very interior of life."
In keeping with Bergson's philosophical project, his thought moves in perpetual flux between animal and vegetal life, insects and molluscs, paleozoic forms and nervous systems, microbes and solar systems, between philosophical argument and poetic metaphor, exploring perception, memory, and the nature and value of art.
A work of wonder and imaginative richness, Creative Evolution was esteemed among popular audiences and scientific circles alike--being particularly admired by philosopher and psychologist William James--contributing to Bergson winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.
Schedule:
- Week 1: Introduction and Chapter 1
- Week 2: Chapters 2 and 3
Creative Evolution:
Supplemental:
- Bergon's Elan Vital and Vitalism - lecture by Dr. Michael Sugrue
- The Philosophy of Henri Bergson - Will Durant
Extracts:
- "It is not down on any map; true places never are." (Moby-Dick, 12)
- "...the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.... So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him." (Moby-Dick, 55)
- "...through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye." (Moby-Dick, 85)
- "...strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God." (Moby-Dick, 93)
This meetup is part of a series on Muses and Monsters.