Creative Evolution

July 6, 2023

I recently read Henri Bergson’s book Creative Evolution, a book which is clearly the result of a philosopher spending far too much time wondering why a bunch of different animals ended up having eyes. Bergson is not a biologist, and the book came out in 1907, so we can’t expect much genetic insight here; rather, what Bergson wants to talk about, as always, is time. Bergson is mad — perpetually mad — about the way people conceptualize time; that is, as a line, or a series of instants. Such a conceptualization turns time into a static object, which kind of defeats the whole point of talking about time in the first place. Modern physics conceives of time by looking at a series of sequential instants — what happens one instant causes what will happen in the next. Of course, none of these instants actually contain motion, but instead only imply it collectively. There is no real concept here of duration except as a mass of arbitrarily delineated instants, each of which effectively take up no time at all.

Bergson spends at least half of each of his books making this argument over and over, because it is essential to everything and yet so easily ignored or forgotten. As far back as Plato and Aristotle, he argues, time has been fundamentally misunderstood within practical science. To the Greeks, time degraded objects; an object constantly in flux was lesser than its essence that exists outside of time. An essence is a snapshot of an object at a particular time that is taken to be characteristic. This snapshot is generally, somewhat arbitrarily, placed at the point when the development of the object is considered complete. In the case of an animal, this is when it reaches maturity; in the case of an idea, this is when it reaches “perfection.” In either case, the essence is atemporal, existing in a realm independent of time, because of course time brings change, and change is anathema to essence.

Nowadays, rather than searching for essences, we amass large collections of snapshots — collections that grow larger and larger as technology allows greater and greater specificity — which we call data, and then organize this data into some sort of picture. With calculus, movement can take the form of a graph, which, of course, is a static image capable of being viewed all at once. In this way, duration is made instantaneous. This is like taking all the notes of a symphony, playing them all at once, and saying, “There you go, that’s the symphony.” Of course that’s not a symphony; that’s a car alarm.

Bergson compares evolution at one point to the development of a painting. The process of painting is not a movement toward a clearly pictured goal, nor is it a piecing together of distinct lines or brush strokes. The first would imply that the painting is conceptually completed before it is painted, which eradicates the entire process of painting; the second makes painting into a sort of jigsaw puzzle, a modular object made by fitting together pre-existing pieces. In reality, painting is not like either of these. The painting is incomplete in the painter’s mind, and comes about through the process of putting the paint on the canvas, with each line existing not as an independent entity, but as part of a family with all that comes before or after it. A key aspect of painting is that it takes time, that it develops as it it is created, even during the times when the painter is not actively painting it. The finished painting contains within it all of this time; if it was simply cast onto the easel exactly as the painter imagined it, it would be a fundamentally different creation.

This applies, of course, to all creative pursuits. A musical piece is not a series of moments but a flowing sort of thing, with successive notes blending together to create altogether new sounds and experiences. A novel, likewise, develops like a living thing, whether that development is contained within the construction of the outline, or spread out throughout the entire writing process. Some take more time to develop, others less, but no novel appears instantaneously.

In a roundabout way, then, we are led back to living beings. A static snapshot of an organism can tell us little about it. Ishmael in Moby Dick reiterates this point numerous times in justifying his authority as a scholar, since he lived with the whales in action, while others merely investigated their corpses. Life is motion; it is, as some might say, a constant becoming. Innumerable rites have been developed over the centuries to determine when a child becomes an adult; the variety of ages at which these rites take place, as well as the activities involved, reveals that there really is no one moment when this occurs.. We can say the process is complete at a certain point, but of course its never complete; one’s body will continue to change, as well as one’s personality and character.

There is no such thing as a fully-developed person that we can study; it’s true that at a certain point physical changes slow down, but they never cease. The child that was me became the adult that is me; as snapshots, we are utterly distinct, but as an actual being existing within actual time, we are the same guy. But I don’t exist in time; I live time. Life is time.

Now, as is the case with all philosophers, Henri Bergson can be instantly deflated by a sneering “So what?” Sure, our spatial models can not accurately depict time, but why should they? We shouldn’t have to watch a creature’s entire lifetime to figure out what it is, and we clearly don’t have to, because we identify creatures all the time. In the same way, calculus allows us to understand where an object will end up without having to sit there and watch it go every time. We can predict the outcome of physical phenomena pretty well using our models, which is exactly the whole point.

Like Kant before him, what Bergson fundamentally wants to do is cling to the idea of free will. Science is based on a mechanistic worldview, which implies the possibility of a rational model capable of predicting the outcome of all events. This means that a vast enough intelligence could, if given the location of every atom in the universe at any given moment, use sophisticated mathematical models to construct the entire universe at all moments in its history and its future. This is absolutely fundamental to all mechanistic cosmologies, from Descartes onward. And it’s freaky. It’s truly freaky and goes against everything we feel and do as people. Descartes himself didn’t like it, and he, along with most all philosophers since, have devoted their various systems to proving that this can not actually be the case. For the most part, this involves theorizing some entity, realm, God, force, or what-have-you that exists somehow outside of space and time, and therefore independent of all our mechanistic physical laws. The extent to which one is able to trick the reader into believing that such an entity or realm can possibly co-exist with a physical realm that is fundamentally antagonistic and paradoxical to it, is the measure of a philosopher’s success.

As long as this antinomy between determinism and free will exists, there is no end to philosophy. There will be no end to theories of time, of extension, of souls, of Ideas, etc, etc. We are in constant need of new ways of thinking that free us from this paradox.

Philosophy itself is a becoming; it can not be complete because, in the end, there is no complete knowledge. Any knowledge said to be complete would have to contain within it these paradoxical modes of thought, and not only contain them both but fit them together, explain how they can both co-exist, and equally importantly, actually influence each other. Descartes’ followers washed up on the problem of how an atemporal and non-spatial God can possibly have any influence on a mechanistic world without Himself existing in space and time. Kant argued that nothing exists in space and time; that these are mere categories we impose on the world to make it intelligible. This, as he points out, means that we can not possibly have any true knowledge of the world, but only relative knowledge. Those who followed him pointed out that, in this conception, you can’t even have relative knowledge, since you can only suppose a relation when you have knowledge of the two things being related, which Kant just said is impossible.

And so on, and so on.

Whether we are capable of absolute knowledge or of no knowledge at all is a question that necessarily takes us far away from any practical experience. In life, we recognize that we have knowledge at least of something, and whether that something is indicative of the nature of all reality, or whether it is merely a figment of our imaginations makes no material difference.

In a mechanistic worldview, whether you believe you have free will or not is determined by the movements of the atoms that make up your brain, themselves determined by the entire history of every object in the universe. It sort of eats everything up like that. Once you’re caught in determinism, there’s no escape. As soon as the idea enters your mind, it’s all over. We can run, we can create fantastical realms of things-in-themselves, of becomings, of Pure Will, but we can not escape.

The only possible way out is pure, blind faith. But we must ask: is mechanism itself not a form of faith? We believe our physical laws to apply to the entire universe, but of course there’s no way to actually prove this is the case without that infinite intelligence we theorized earlier. As we said earlier, the entire worldview rests on this idea that we are working toward complete knowledge of the entire universe, and thus that complete knowledge of the universe is possible. But what proof is there that this is the case? There is no proof, only dogma.

Mechanism is not inescapable because it is necessarily true, but because it is the very foundation of our current scientific models. But our models are not reality; they merely approximate it. They don’t reveal the truth, in the same way that a graph doesn’t reveal motion. By making it legible, we lose something.

This is maybe the greatest irony: that by organizing all this sensory data into knowledge models, we somehow come to know less about reality. We understand our models incredibly well, but everything that falls outside of their purview, everything that we can’t fit in, diminishes in importance and eventually becomes impossible to see. We make fun of outdated scientific models for their glaring oversights, such as failing to note the importance of sanitation in medical procedures, but when your model does not incorporate the existence of microscopic germs, how are you supposed to know about them?

The mechanistic model of the physical world has no place for free will, and no place for the soul. It conceives of our imagination as electrical charges passing between neurons. It conceives of our moods through neurotransmitters such as “dopamine” and “serotonin.” What Bergson wants to open up the possibility for is the idea that these physical phenomena are not the end-all be-all of our mind. That this mechanistic model is a result of losing sight of something, something that hasn’t been incorporated into our model.

In his view, this is time. We have broken up the world into instants, and thus we fail to see what lies between. When we move our arm, as he loves to say, we don’t conceptualize each movement of each muscle at every moment in the process; instead, we move our arm. The whole movement is one thing, just like how a human life is all one thing. Somehow — and I won’t profess to know how, even though I’ve read several of his books — what lies between each instant, this duration, is just that chink in the armour that will allow us to move past mechanism, to cease thinking of ourselves as physical machinery, and instead rediscover some idea of free will.

It’s a fleeting hope. It’s a shot in the dark, really. But what Bergson recognizes, and what many people recognize, is that something feels wrong about the mechanistic model. Something just does not sit right about the idea that all is determined by physical laws, and that we are nothing more than the result of matter interacting in ways predictable by a sophisticated enough computer.

Perhaps this is just a coping mechanism. Perhaps it’s just a fantasy of superiority, a belief that we are somehow above all this and have some elevated place in the cosmos. Perhaps it’s a holdover from some misunderstanding so ancient that we’ll never be able to trace our way back to it.

What seems clear to me is that we need something like this. We need to believe that we have some sort of agency, that we have some sort of freedom, if only because the alternative is so disheartening, so discouraging, and so totally inhuman that it can not be survived. We need a model that allows us to feel powerful, powerful enough to help ourselves and to help each other. If we think we’re beasts, we’ll act like beasts. If we think we’re machines, we’ll act like machines, at least as far as such a thing is possible. And if we think we are at the whim of millennia-old interactions between atoms a million miles away, we won’t do a god damn thing. And that clearly won’t get us anywhere.