Introduction: Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution

Abstract

Henri Bergson was the philosopher who, in an intellectual career stretching from the 1880s to the 1930s, provided a rigorous account of the real efficacy of time (which he called duration). This allowed him to conceive of creativity as the source of both psychological freedom and of life as an open system. Bergson identifies in the history of Western thought the demotion of time to the status of a measurement, a demotion that renders the effects of its real activity in consciousness and in life inexplicable (even non-existent). According to Bergson it is impossible, without an adequate conception of time, to properly pose questions of free will or evolution, and in books such as Time and free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907) he reinterprets a vast range of empirical research in such a way as to take into account the role of time in psychological and biological processes. In the late nineteenth century, the sciences of consciousness and of life were dominated by a commitment to materialism and mechanism that meant they struggled to conceptualize growth, change and creativity, or even held such phenomena to be unreal. Bergson's commitment to the reality of time as a source of creative change enabled him to clarify many problems in psychology and biology that appeared contradictory from existing scientific and philosophical perspectives, and to provide a rigorous account of a Creative Evolution, The Creative Mind, and the nature of their relation. Hence, those sciences that attempted to explain consciousness in purely physiological terms and those that attempted to explain life in purely physical and chemical terms are subject to extensive critiques in Bergson's works.