Concept
Creative Evolution (book)
Overview
Creative Evolution (French: L'Évolution créatrice) is a 1907 book by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Its English translation appeared in 1911. The book proposed a version of orthogenesis in place of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, suggesting that evolution is motivated by the élan vital, a "vital impetus" that can also be understood as humanity's natural creative impulse. The book was very popular in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The book also developed concepts of time (offered in Bergson's earlier work) which significantly influenced modernist writers and thinkers such as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. For example, Bergson's term "duration" refers to a more individual, subjective experience of time, as opposed to mathematical, objectively measurable "clock time." In Creative Evolution, Bergson suggests that the experience of time as "duration" can best be understood through intuition.
According to the translator's note, Harvard philosopher William James intended to write the introduction to the book's English translation, but died in 1910 prior to the completion of the English edition in 1911.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Other metaphors, expressed by other words, might have arisen; an image is called up by an image, a word by a word. All these words run now one after another, seeking in vain, by themselves, to give back the simplicity of the generative idea. Our ear only hears the words: it therefore perceives only accidents.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
States what Creative Evolution is; the book is titled for Creative Evolution.
The plain truth is that the 'philosophy' of evolution (as distinguished from our special information about particular cases of change) is a metaphysical creed, and nothing else. It is a mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude, rather than a system of thought,--a mood which is old as the world, and which no refutation of any one incarnation of it (such as the spencerian philosophy) will…
William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
The author is tied to Creative Evolution in the knowledge graph.
But, on the other hand, the oscillations of the pendulum, which are distinct only because one has disappeared when the other appears on the scene, profit, as it were, from the influence which they have thus exercised over our conscious life. Owing to the fact that our consciousness has organized them as a whole in memory, they are first preserved and afterwards disposed in a series: in a word, we create for them a…
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
The author is tied to Creative Evolution in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Creative Evolution (book)
Related ideas
- Henri Bergson
- Modernism
- Natural selection
- Élan vital
- Thomas Mann
- France
- Charles Darwin
- William James
- Evolution
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of French philosophy.
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