From Liberty to Property: The Influence of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and James Mark Baldwin on Bergson’s Views on Life and Technology

Abstract

When we think of Bergson’s relation to American thought, the first name that naturally comes to mind is William James. However, if we look closer and, more specifically, if we analyze the impact of American thinkers on Bergson’s philosophy, we will find two scientists whose preoccupations were distant from those cultivated by the forerunner of pragmatism, the paleontologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) and the evolutionary psychologist James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934). In this article I will investigate how their thesis about the potentialities of the human hand (Shaler) and the social aspects of the “struggle for life” (Baldwin) have shaped Bergson’s views on life and technology. As a consequence, I hope to show two things. First, that without the understanding of the key role played by paleontology in Creative Evolution, we cannot fully grasp the meaning of one of its central ideas, that man is the “term” and the “end” or, in other words, the raison d’être of evolution. Finally, I would like to suggest that after 1907 the emergence of a moral/ethical aspect of technical inventions will balance Bergson’s previous enthusiasm for scientific approaches on the subject. This position will suffer several transformations during the First World War and some years later, with the publication of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where tools and machines are interpreted not only as mediums of liberty — as they were in Creative Evolution —, but also as “property”, which will link them to war and “luxury.”