Creative Evolution
In 1907, a French philosopher dared to rewrite Darwin. Bergson argued that evolution isn't the blind mechanical process Darwin described, but a creative surge driven by what he called the élan vital, the vital impulse that courses through all living things. Evolution, for Bergson, is not mere adaptation but continuous becoming, each moment overflowing into the next with genuine novelty. He challenges our understanding of time itself: duration, he insists, is not the tick of a clock but the subjective flow of consciousness, the irreducible texture of lived experience. Intuition, Bergson contends, reaches deeper than intellect, the analytical mind can only fragment and repeat, while intuition grasps the vital flux directly. This radical vision influenced Proust's memory and Mann's consciousness, reshaping how modernism understood time and being. A century later, Bergson's argument that life cannot be reduced to mechanism retains its power to disturb and inspire.
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“Pour un être conscient, exister consiste à changer, changer à se mûrir, se mûrir à se créer indéfiniment soi-même.””
— Henri Bergson
“all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.””
— Henri Bergson
“All the pieces have been arranged with a view to the best possible funk””
— Henri Bergson
“Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that “we must have like to produce like.” In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that “all is given.” Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need.””
— Henri Bergson
“psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation.””
— Henri Bergson
“The truth is we change without ceasing...there is no essential difference between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same state. If the state which "remains the same" is more varied than we think, [then] on the other hand the passing of one state to another resembles”
— Henri Bergson
“Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared”
— Henri Bergson
“Mūsų laisvė pačiais ją įtvirtinančiais veiksmais sukuria tolydžio stiprėjančius įpročius, kurie ją pasmaugia, jeigu jos neatnaujina nuolatinės pastangos: jos tyko automatizmas. Pati gyviausia mintis sustabarėja ją išreiškiančioje formuluotėje. Žodis atsigręžia prieš idėją. Raidė nužudo dvasią. Ir netgi liepsningiausias mūsų entuziazmas, pasireiškiantis išoriniu veiksmu, kartais taip natūraliai pavirsta šaltu savanaudišku išskaičiavimu arba išpuikimu, vienas taip lengvai įgija kito formą, jog mes galėtume juos supainioti vieną su kitu, galėtume abejoti savo pačių nuoširdumu, neigti gerumą ir meilę, jei nežinotume, kad miręs dar kurį laiką išsaugo gyvojo bruožus.””
— Henri Bergson
“for a conscious being””
— Henri Bergson
