Abstract
In Creative Evolution (1911 [1907]) Henri Bergson discusses the distinction between the living, biotic, and the non-living, abiotic world. The study touched directly upon several of the key developments of his age in biology. Notably evolution theory played a crucial role in his philosophy. In the historical context of the turn of the century, the debate between religious readings of the origin of life and evolution theory had far from quieted down. Evolution theory continued to be seen as controversial due to its negation of the story of the origin of species as it was laid down in Genesis. Biological vitalism appeared to safeguarded the notion of the sanctity of life. Bergson’s vitalism is however of a different nature, preluding views that emerged only decades later, in complex systems theory. This chapter discusses the relevance of Bergson's ideas for the life sciences.
Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division. We must get beyond both points of view, both mechanism and finalism being, at bottom, only standpoints to which the human mind has been led by considering the work of man.
- Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911 [1907])
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Notes
- 1.
In discussions with an expert on thermodynamics, he defined a solution to this: the processes expressed in living beings were triggered by and are kept in motion through the energy of the sun. In this regard, the earth is not a closed system. As such, life on earth is merely a side-phenomenon of the heat generated by the sun. The total net calculus of entropy still carries along an increase in the entropy in the universe.
- 2.
The physicist Richard Feynman wrote down the dictum with chalk on blackboard just before his death. Although he meant it to refer to the (re)creation of the argumentative steps towards a theoretical result, it has often been used to refer to the literal recreation of something in nature, to be able to understand it.
- 3.
- 4.
Personal communication with Prof. Vitor Martins Martins dos Santos (2017). Wageningen University and Research.
- 5.
In early 1943, by invitation of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at Trinity College, Schrödinger gave a view on biology in a series of lectures he later published under the title “What Is Life?: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell”. These were bundled in a small book with an enormous impact. It indirectly inspired the definition of the double helix (Schrödinger 1944).
- 6.
Bergson already criticised evolution theorists of his time for taking this position since to his mind they did not fundamentally rethink time in evolution theory, and thus still subsumed evolution under a Newtonian mechanistic principle (Bergson, Creative Evolution).
- 7.
The aim here is not to dispense with symbols, but rather to explain how the (symbolic) conventions within given fields of knowledge may lead to overstretched conclusions, and thus create openings for further theory and research.
- 8.
Creationism departs from the view that all species were, at one point in time, at the beginning of the history of the cosmos, created, and remained unchanged in the ensuing centuries.
- 9.
At the time also with ‘specimens’ that remain a horrific witness to humanity’s talent for cruelty in the name of science and truth.
- 10.
He objected to Immanuel Kant’s epistemological conception of time (Critic of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/1787)) since Kant, as mentioned previously, seemed to interpret time as a spatial dimension. There is reason to draw this assertion into question, since for Kant, time is very much constituted by our ability to recognize a thing as the same thing over time. This is amongst others captured in Kant’s ‘modality of recognition’: our ability to recognize something as something relates time to experiential memory rather than to space: Kant thus reconstructs time as an aspect of memory, not of space, a strategy quite similar to Bergson’s in ‘Matter and Memory’.
- 11.
Something that is illustrated by the average, and often parodied, picture of the evolution of homo sapiens, from left to right, as a sequenced linear development from crawling dark-haired apes to increasingly tall, evermore upright (and, whilst disliking certain forms of overenthusiastic political correctness: indeed often also more blonde haired and lighter skinned) bipedal specimens.
- 12.
For an example, please see the use of the concept of a safe ‘chassis’, a standardised GM organism that has multiple safeguards built into its DNA.
- 13.
And admittedly, by adhering to a position that, although articulated by a contemporary of Bergson, was not picked up by him in spite of its crucial importance to his position.
- 14.
Since much of Bergson’s personal archive was destroyed at his own request, we cannot know whether he might have reflected upon the potential of Metchnikoff’s theories more elaborately.
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Landeweerd, L. (2021). Life and Time: Bergson and the Life Sciences. In: Time, Life & Memory. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 38. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56853-5_4
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