Creative Evolution

Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous. It established him as the pre-eminent European philosopher for the next 10 years, influencing the course of intellectual development not only in philosophical circles but also in literature and the arts. For many, it became the central theoretical work for the first half of the twentieth-century, and it is arguable that it established the concept of time and its avatars (freedom, difference, creativity, the new), as the highest philosophical values for the next century of French thought. In this monumental work, Bergson takes the special theory of duration developedin the philosophy of mind in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, and generalizes it into a cosmology of life and matter in the field of evolution, of change in biological life. Tackling the concepts of evolution current at the time, Bergson shows how both mechanistic (Neo-Darwinian) and finalist (Neo-Lamarckian) theories of evolution fail to account for the diverse creativity of nature, especially speciation. In response, Bergson argues for a theory of non-teleological, non-gradualist dissociative speciation immanent within all evolutionary change: the famous concept of the elan vital that, far from being an obscure, spiritual substance underlying organic matter, is simply the kind of creative temporality specific to all living entities. This general theory of biological duration is also applied to a theory of knowledge (or evolutionary epistemology), as Bergson shows how even the problems of philosophy (order and disorder, of being and nothingness), have their origins in a theory of creative life. This new, critical edition uses the original, authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell, adding a guide to further reading and a new introduction by Bergson specialist Keith Ansell Pearson. It also has a glossary of biological terms, biographical synopses, and other helpful material.