Creative Evolution
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Creative Evolution
Narrated by:
Michael Lunts
Buy Now for ₹667.71
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Narrated by:
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Michael Lunts
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Written by:
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Henri Bergson
In this work, Bergson seeks an alternative explanation as to how new forms of life emerge compared to those prevailing at the time. This included both the ‘mechanistic’ or deterministic explanations of biological science on the one hand, and on the other the ‘finalist’ or strictly teleological explanation of those who believed in the hand of a ‘Creator’ or God, coordinating life in a divine plan.
Creative Evolution proposes a third explanation in what Bergson calls élan vital’ or ‘vital impetus’, a force that infuses all matter and drives it forward into an ever-changing and infinite variety of living forms. This appears as a vital impetus that can also be related to humanity’s own creative life force. Bergson’s book builds on his ‘Theory of Time’ as set forth in works such as ‘Matter and Memory’ and ‘Time and Free Will’. In these works, and in the present volume, Bergson sees continuous ‘duration’ as real time, as opposed to the way in which time is divided up into measured units by the ‘organising’ mind of science.
Life, as we really experience it, is subject to constant change and our tendency to explain evolutionary change by looking only at ‘ends’ achieved rather than the processes by which they emerge, divorces us from the life force itself.
Instead, Bergson feels we need to reengage with our instincts as well as with our intelligence in order to understand the evolutionary process, as both co-exist to some extent within us, all forms of life having a common origin in that instinctual, innate knowledge of simpler life forms. Though these may be unconscious or semi-conscious, they are, in Bergson’s view, much more in touch with the ever-changing nature of real time than the analytical and rational knowledge of our species
As he writes: “Our thought, in its purely logical form, is incapable of presenting the true nature of life, the full meaning of the evolutionary movement. Created by life, in definite circumstances, to act on definite things, how can it embrace life, of which it is only an emanation or an aspect?”
It is to attempt an answer to this question that ‘Creative Evolution’ directs its attention.©1907 Public Domain - Translation by Arthur Mitchell (P)2023 W. F. Howes Ltd
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