The Revolt Against Materialism

by Joel Pitney, EnlightenNext Magazine [source]

If you’ve never read anything by the French philosopher and scientist Henri Bergson (1859-1941), you are definitely missing out! Most famous for coining the term élan vital–or vital force–in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, Bergson was trying to reclaim the theory of evolution from the mechanistic and deterministic worldview that was starting to take hold in many cultural and philosophical circles by the end of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He argued that there is a creative, living force driving the evolutionary process. And his bold claim that free will and human choice were not only real, but products of the evolution of life, won this philosopher surprising fame in the public eye. His inspired talks filled lecture halls, he won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, and his writings were very popular during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Here’s an excerpt from Creative Evolution:

Bergson was redefining God within the context of evolution and in the process rescuing evolution from mere determinism. Take this passage for example, also from Creative Evolution:

Consciousness seems proportionate to the living being’s power of choice. It lights up the zone of potentialities that surrounds the act. It fills the interval between what is done and what might be done. In reality, a living being is a center of action; it represents a sum of contingency entering into the world; that is to say, a certain quantity of possible action.

Here’s what Will Durant had to say about Bergson’s role in the history of philosophy in his epic 1926 book, The Story of Philosophy:

God, thus defined, has nothing of the ready-made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely.

And finally, to get a sense of the profound deep-time evolutionary perspective through which Bergson viewed reality, check out this famous quote:

Of all contemporary contributions to philosophy, Bergson’s is the most precious. We needed his emphasis on the elusive contingency of things, and the remoulding activity of mind. We were near to thinking of the world as a finished and pre-determined show, in which our initiative was a self-delusion, and our efforts a devilish humor of the gods; after Bergson we come to see the world as the stage and the material of our own originative powers. Before him we were cogs and wheels in a vast and dead machine; now, if we wish it, we can help to write our own parts in the drama of creation.

As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion . . . All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

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