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Henri Bergson is perhaps the most famous of the philosophers who fall under the label of vitalism, whose most basic tenet is that the procedures of science, dealing with material objects, is inappropriate to living organisms and especially that aspect of life called consciousness. Since most of the academics in the Western tradition think otherwise, it is fitting, I think, that much of Creative Evolution should be taken up with why they do so. I cannot sum up Bergson's premise better than this pivotal paragraph from CE:

'Originally, we think only in order to act. Our intellect has been cast in the mold of action. Speculation is a luxury, while action is necessary. Now, in order to act, we begin by proposing an end; we make a plan, then we go on to the detail of the mechanism which will bring it to pass. This latter operation is possible only if we know what we can reckon on. We must therefore have managed to extract resemblances from nature, which enable us to anticipate the future. Thus we must, consciously or unconsciously, have made of the use of the law of causality. Moreover, the more sharply the idea of efficient causality is defined in our minds, the more it takes the form of mechanical causality. And this scheme, in its turn, is the more mathematical according as it expresses a more rigorous necessity. That it why we have only to follow the bent of our mind to become mathematicians.' (p. 36)

In other words, we just think that way. Humans need to be efficient in obtaining the deer and avoiding the lion, and those same patterns lead to the mechanistic, scientific viewpoint.

However, Bergson points out that this method, that of the intellect and science, is not the only method of coping with the overabundance of stimuli that is our world. Within the evolution of life, instinct is the other path, one that as far as efficiency is concerned matches the intellectual faculty. Bergson contradicts the somewhat easy to accept notion that intellect builds on instinct, the more advanced building upon the more primitive. Instead Bergson sees these two paths as parallel but diverging extremely early in the history of animal life. One, instinct, pushes toward total assimilation with the object of their focus, its members specialized for the activity they are performing. The other, intellect, is removed from the object, aligned with it only conceptually. It is a far less perfect connection, and partly for that reason, open to changing direction when the context changes. The essential function of instinct is interpenetration, of intellect problem solving. Obviously the angle of its trajectory is toward flexibility and that is what the intellect can supply. However while Bergson is the champion of the 'vital' element in evolution, he is also deeply aware of the energy involved in solving the problems instinct has settled. Too often, that most cogitating animal, mankind, falls back into modes of thought that are conventional and near automatic. Intellect, by itself, can never break out of the already known except by an exceptional act of will.

The divergence of the intellect and instinct bifurcated a momentum that is the simple, effusive flow of life. By definition life is the opposite of stasis, of quiescence, and life on the move is explosive for Bergson. Movement has to entail choice, being here rather than there, such that the humblest organism with the ability and necessity of movement, demonstrates a spark of consciousness. Consciousness is nearly coterminal with life, and for the moving organism, it is. Bergson most basically believes that while the scientific worldview is obviously not dealing with the real but only the efficient, it is no serious error when concerned with the material world. But beyond the unbridgeable gap that separates life and matter, there is another huge gap for Bergson at the threshold where life moves or it doesn't: plants seem mired in the soil that contains them. Being photosynthesizers, they provide the energy that allows other life to break away into mobility.

So now that we know why most of us think the way we do most of the time and why (most) scientists want to think mechanistically all the time, what do we have left? Most obviously, all that 'stuff' the intellect charted through in the first place. The world is very complex, especially when an organism starts moving around in it, and that is why coping mechanisms like instinct and intellect were called for. And one reason why life is so complex is that has a history, as Bergson says, it endures. Duration is very different from the time of the intellect. Scientists attempts to make time static by using frozen moments which she can contemplate and arrange with elements already known. They operate with the principle that 'all is given'. So while we can't think any other way than with time as segmented ( 'intellect solidifies everything it touches' p. 38), we live time as a flow and sense the possibility of real change. If time truly flows, and we leave behind the frozen moments of the intellect, then events don't cause an effect, they interpenetrate, like a glass of water given drops of dye. Scientists like to present one artificially segmented section of time as being totally determined by the segment just before. This can't be true if time is fluid. For one thing, an event touches that which comes as well as what came before. Think of a fisherman walking upstream- he influences the water not only behind him but ahead of him as well. And then consider what lies behind: if time flows, the ripple effect from life's movement is incalculably vast. Think of a newborn who begins life already with the drag of his genetic history. With the passage of time, each experience both influences and is influenced by everything around it. The effect is almost exponential when one considers each ripple interpenetrating with the field around it, producing new ripple fields as courses meet. And while the medium of our lived experience may be best described as fluid, it is not weak. This long history that every human has, while not always there in awareness, can pounce back with a vengeance in the form of intense memories, or we can bring a past episode of our life front and center, to reconsider it, rejoice over it, or mourn it. No wonder Proust and Bergson are so often discussed together.

Indeed, the presence of art is one of the proofs that mankind is still capable of at least glimpsing that stream of life which is forbidden to the intellect. It is hard to deny that there is a different kind of knowledge which the great poets provide, that they supply suggestions of that whole through which the intellect can only map a course. The artist reconnects with life through a sympathy with his model that is not unlike the connection of an organism driven instinctively toward its object. In fact, the sympathy the artist exhibits is a latent spark of an instinctual relationship with the world that the human species polished with the tools of disinterestedness and reflection, tools of the intellect. Bergson calls this kind of knowledge intuition. I'm not sure that this origin story for intuition is totally necessary to appreciate the thrust of Bergson's intent, but it is a word for that which stimulates change, for what is insightful and creative. Bergson is sure we all feel such explosive moments at times, and wants to pull this recognition out of us. Intuition is in place whenever someone suggests a new course to an established system or makes real changes to a theory, whenever the already known needs change, however hard that may be.

For me, Bergson is a very fecund writer who provides templates for viewing many other thinkers. Pete Gunter, who wrote the introduction to my edition of Creative Evolution, rightly points out that much of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions can be pulled from the pages of the former. Normal science as a convention that directs research, everyone happily confirming the niceties of the current theory-this is the work of the intellect attempting to expend as little energy as possible. But with some interruptions, the sleep of the already known is awaken with a bang and a revolution takes place, usually brought about by the intuitive insights of a newcomer to the field. So even science demonstrates the creative changes which its procedures tend to deny.

Colin McGuinn is one of the more prominent, current philosophers defending consciousness as more than just brain function. In 2018, I reviewed his 'The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World' with this summary: the human brain has evolved to solve problems in space, with linguistic logic an added twist, and and that kind of brain does not have the ability to think in such a way that it can conceive of a piece of meat providing consciousness. Old hat for anyone who has read Creative Evolution.

I often thought of Heidegger while reading Bergson: their distrust of science as a path to the real is very similar, as well as their obvious contempt for humankind's inclination to fall back into habit and convention. (Bergson is much more light-hearted about it, though, a light-hearted buoyancy something I can't help attributing to him. Heidegger would define the opposite end of that scale. He calls mankind 'inauthentic' when falling into the conventional, Bergson more mourns the entropy which is necessarily there.) Bergson's working out of the attributes of the intellect, as that which allows humankind to maneuver the world through distant observation and conceptual manipulation, provides a framework for viewing so many critics of the Western tradition that came later. I think of Foucault who so emphasized the sedimentation of appraisal, the remote overview of prisoners and citizens, as the hallmark of the nineteenth century. Bergson maintains that this attempt to bring everything under the purview of the intellect is endemic to mankind and the only hope we can entertain is barricading it at the entrance to life and consciousness. As Foucault, for one, and Horkheimer and Adorno for another, show, that has not been too successful for some time.

I believe one of the most important of Bergson's legacies is his elaboration of the astonishingly complex history we are embedded in with his sense of duration. The influences that reach us have so many histories of their own that the field of our experience becomes so complex that 'not even a superhuman intelligence' (p. 5) would be able to predict a future outcome. Walter Benjamin demonstrates a similar sense of history while examining the architecture of the nineteenth century in "The Arcades Project". His translators ( Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin) write:

"The transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism-grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogeneous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect the "cracking open of natural teleology." And all this would unfold through the medium of hints or "blinks'--a discontinuous presentation deliberately opposed to traditional modes of argumentation." (p. vi)

The subject in the midst of Bergson's duration is very like the reader that Terry Eagleton describes while summarizing Reception Theory:

"Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others. As we read on we shed assumptions, revise beliefs, make more and more complex inferences and anticipations; each sentence opens up a horizon which is confirmed, challenged or undermined by the next. We read backwards and forwards simultaneously, predicting and recollecting...". Literary Theory, p.77