In publication continuously since 1971, SubStance is a major interdisciplinary journal with a reputation for excellence. It is an international nexus for discourses converging upon literature from a variety of fields, including philosophy, the social science, science, and the arts. Readers have come to expect the unexpected from SubStance, and to experience a sense of participating in the formulation of emerging theories.
Vol. 36, no 3 (2007 – 114)
Kolkman, Michael
Foreword
In this special issue of SubStance we celebrate the centennial of Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution. Published in 1907, it has lost none of its relevance�in fact, as the content of this issue hopes to convey, it might well be that we are only now able to appreciate its far-reaching insights. After having set much of the agenda for twentieth-century philosophy (William James and American pragmatism, Ricoeur and history, Sartre and nothingness, Deleuze and differentiation, as well as engagements with Einstein, and of course the study of evolution), Bergson seemed to have exited the philosophical awareness around the late 1930s. If the great conferences on Bergson at his one hundredth birthday in 1959 were more akin to the form of extended obituaries, we can say that another 50 years down the line, Bergson appears to be alive and well. It is this sense of a flourishing of projects that we have attempted to transmit with this issue. More a matter of philosophical honesty than of hedging one's bets, Bergson always stressed that a final and complete knowledge of the world could only come at the expense of a world that is fully completed and without change. Since evolution is a living process and not a completed history, any understanding of it must necessarily be open-ended. If no one can have the...
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Vaughan, Michael
Introduction: Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution
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...
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Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941
Vaughan, Michael, tr.
The Metaphysics of Life: From Leçons de Psychologie et de Métaphysique given at Clermont-Ferrand, 1887-88
Various Conceptions of Life Let's now rise now above matter per se, and let's inquire into what characterizes the living being. There are many theories on the nature, origin and essence of life; we will begin with the most simple, which denies that life is something sui generis, and which claims to reduce vital phenomena to physical and chemical facts like any others. First, there is one point upon which everyone agrees: vital phenomena present characteristics that seem so distinct from those of inert matter that we have invented a new name to distinguish them; thus nobody questions the appearance of phenomena sui generis. What are these phenomena? At first glance, what distinguishes the living body from brute matter is the presence of an apparent capacity to react against physical and chemical forces�a kind of initiative. A mere body [corps brut], left to itself, necessarily suffers the inevitable action of gravity, of heat, or of any other physical force. The phenomenon is entirely and absolutely determined in each identical situation by the conditions to which...
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Gunter, P. A. Y.
Bergson's Creation of the Possible
"The Possible and the Real," Bergson insisted to Isaac Benrubi, is an important part of his philosophy (Benrubi, 306-307). Far from a mere, perhaps interesting adjunct to his thought, this essay (originally given at Oxford in 1920) both demarcates his fundamental ideas and brings out their meaning. It is therefore surprising that this essay has suffered from relative neglect. In The New Aspects of Space and Time, Milic Capek writes, "Space does not permit us to discuss here the precise meaning of the Bergsonian views on possibility which, in appearance were seemingly contradictory" (160). Unfortunately, Capek never responded to this challenge. In the text cited to above he refers the reader to the last chapter of Jankélévitch's Henri Bergson. But here Jankélévitch, besides reviewing Bergson's ideas on the possible, remarks only that besides our ordinary ideas of possibility, there is in Bergson a quite different concept of "organic" possibility � a concept which, however, Jankélévitch never worked out (Jankélévitch, 215-228). If Capek and Jankélévitch did not tackle the problem of the possible and its implications in Bergson, then surprisingly, neither did many others: for example, Jacques Maritain or Maurice Merleau-Ponty or,...
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Miquel, Paul-Antoine
Bergson and Darwin: From an Immanentist to an Emergentist Approach to Evolution
At first glance it seems impossible to connect Bergson and Darwin. The French philosopher distinguishes between "the metaphysics of life" and "the knowledge of the living" (la métaphysique de la vie et la connaissance du vivant) (PM, 28). He defends a metaphorical conception of evolution as an expression of some psychological force, which has nothing to do with physics (CE, 257). This is evolution as "a current passing from germ to germ," "an immense wave, which starting from a centre spreads outwards," as élan vital (CE, 27, 266). He asserts that we live the creativity of life as an internal feeling "by sympathy" and that we cannot think it in terms of "pure understanding" (CE, 164). Indeed, our intelligence (l'intelligence) "rejects all creation" (ibid.). It proceeds by abstraction, separation and elimination. Science is a dimension of intelligence, and the life sciences are characterized by a "natural inability" to understand life (CE, 166). He criticizes the Darwinian interpretation of evolution as mechanistic and artificial, because it is focused on chance and natural selection. The British naturalist is fighting against...
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Ansell-Pearson, Keith
Beyond the Human Condition: An Introduction to Deleuze's Lecture Course
Introduction Deleuze's 1960 lecture course at l'Ecole Supérieure de Saint-Cloud on chapter three of Bergson's Creative Evolution is of interest to us today for a number of reasons. The course can be read in the light of Deleuze's attempt from 1956 to 1966 to demonstrate Bergson's importance for philosophy (what we might call "the Bergsonian Revolution"). But it also provides a set of revealing insights into the development of Deleuze's own philosophical project. Not only does it display Deleuze's tremendous gifts as a pedagogue, it also contains in embryonic and germinal form some of the essential modes of thought that characterize his contribution in the development of philosophy in post-war France. My intention in this introduction is not to provide a commentary on the lecture course. Instead I want to illuminate two topics that occupy an important place in the Bergsonian revolution and which inform and shape Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson, both in the lecture course and in his published writings on Bergson: Bergson's relation to Kant, and the endeavour to think beyond the human condition. Before examining these topics, however, let me note some...
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Deleuze, Gilles
Loban, Bryn, tr.
Lecture Course on Chapter Three of Bergson's Creative Evolution
In the first part of this work, Bergson aims to present philosophy, and to show the necessity of conceiving of it as genetic philosophy. He thus comes to grips with something essential in philosophy. In effect: a) philosophy has, prior to him, laid claim to be genetic; b) cosmology�in ancient metaphysics�is portrayed as genesis; c) Kantian inspired philosophy�representing modern metaphysics �is also portrayed as a genesis. The third chapter of Creative Evolution is written counter to all these claims. In passing, it should be noted that for Bergson, to a certain extent, Kantianism acts as a "reference point." To differing degrees, Kantianism claims to be a philosophy of genesis. To be precise, there is no genesis of the phenomenon, but in fact there is a genesis of the intelligibility of phenomena. After Kant, with Maïmon and Fichte, the claim becomes explicit. In effect, they both say that it is necessary to pass from a transcendental philosophy to a genetic one. But Bergson says that this genesis is badly enacted: � either because it is a genesis of intelligence derived from matter; � or because it is a...
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Montebello, Pierre
Lapidus, Roxanne, tr.
Matter and Light in Bergson's Creative Evolution
Bergsonism is characterized by its quest for a "living unity" that would link life, consciousness and the material universe. Clearly, for a philosopher who takes as his starting point the experience of conscious life, and whose line of inquiry concerns what our experience registers, the most difficult aspect is to connect this psycho-vital experience to matter. This difficulty is not unique to Bergsonism; most of the philosophies of nature at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century that consider the question of cosmological unity (especially those of Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Tarde) find that matter poses a problem. The concept of matter seems heavily saturated with intellectual representations that prevent its being included in the "living unity" of the cosmos. Therefore it is not surprising that Bergson considered one of the most important stakes of Creative Evolution to be the comprehension of the material universe as being of the same nature as the self. Thus he told the Société Française de la Philosophie in 1908 that "One of the objects of Creative Evolution is to show that All is [...] of the same nature as...
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François, Arnaud
Lapidus, Roxanne, tr.
Life and Will in Nietzsche and Bergson
The bringing together of Nietzsche and Bergson, which may appear strange, seems justified by the fact that the two philosophers were the first to understand life in terms of will. Admittedly, we find a similar doctrine already in Schopenhauer. But when Schopenhauer speaks of will-to-life, he considers will as a thing in itself, and life as a phenomenon. It is true that will, inasmuch as it is unceasing thirst, is the only thing that can explain life's tendency to self-perpetuation. However, when Schopenhauer describes the struggle between forces�or rather, between ideas�and the ensuing victory of a superior idea, this victory that lets him explain the deployment of life in the heart of phenomena is always expressed in terms of objectification (Objektivation). Both Nietzsche and Bergson, in their own ways, refuse the distinction between phenomena and the thing-in-itself. Of course Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy reprises Schopenhauer's terminology of the principal of individualization, but transforms its meaning. Beginning with Human, All Too Human, however, we find a strong critique of Kant's and Schopenhauer's distinction. Later, however, Nietzsche would...
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Fujita, Hisashi
Lapidus, Roxanne, tr. Bergson's Hand: Toward a History of (Non)-Organic Vitalism
"Today vitalism is sterile, but it will not always be so." �Henri Bergson Introduction Let me say at the outset that my question is not whether or not Bergson was a vitalist. If vitalism is defined as a theory that proposes a "vital force" underlying phenomena which transforms matter into living, organized matter while stressing its irreducibility to physico-chemical phenomena, and if one takes into account the bergsonian notion of life that is "more than anything else, a tendency to act upon inert matter" (CE, 96), as well as his notion of the "élan vital" ("the explosive force�due to an unstable balance of tendencies" [CE, 98]), then incontestably there is a kind of vitalism in Bergson. My concern here is to understand what kind of vitalism is at work in Bergson's philosophy. This being so, where in his work should we focus on the intertwined relationships between life and matter, mind and body, the organic and the inorganic, the body and the machine, and so on? I propose to approach this question via the notion of the "organ," a notion that seems to give a key to Bergson's vitalism. For the term "organ" is an...
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