I’ve long been interested in Henri Bergson because he was such a huge figure in the intellectual life of the early 20th century, but I’ve kept a respectful distance because I had a hard time making sense of what he wrote and what people said about him. Now his fourth book, L’Evolution créatrice (1907), appears in a new translation by Donald A. Landes as Creative Evolution, and Emily Herring’s TLS review (archived) makes it sound like it might help me understand what’s going on:
In Creative Evolution Bergson transported the theory of time, or durée, that he had been developing since the late 1880s from the realm of psychology into biology. Rather than comparing organisms to machines, as the physiologists of the nineteenth century had tended to do, he argued that organisms needed to be considered in their temporality: they could not be reduced to repetitive physical mechanisms because, in the living realm, “to exist is to change, to change is to mature, and to mature is to go on endlessly creating oneself” (in Donald A. Landes’s translation). He used an “image”, the élan vital, to represent life as a self-creating movement striving to liberate itself from the constraints of matter, which represented the opposite movement of self-destruction. […]
Indeed, his use of the élan vital has served as grounds to dismiss him as the defender of an obscure mystical life force. Recently, however, a handful of scholars have taken it upon themselves to rectify these misconceptions and bring the twenty-first century up to speed with what is truly original and relevant about Bergson’s philosophical theory of evolution. Landes’s new English translation offers a valuable and timely contribution to this Bergsonian revival.
An updated translation of Bergson’s most significant and most misunderstood book was long overdue. Although the first English version of Creative Evolution, completed in 1911 by a Harvard postgraduate student called Arthur Mitchell, was carefully supervised, and approved by Bergson himself, most Bergson scholars and enthusiasts have since agreed it falls short on several fronts. […]
There is no doubt that this new translation will become an absolute reference, not least because Landes has included illuminating passages from the critical apparatus of the most recent French edition of L’Evolution créatrice. But Landes’s most remarkable improvement is in his recreation of the effortless flow of Bergson’s philosophical prose. Often described as “poetic” by both his admirers and critics (or as “miraculous” by William James), Bergson’s writing earned him a Nobel Prize in literature in 1927. But beyond mere aesthetic sensibility, his written style played a role in his philosophical method. A world away from the formal investigations to which today’s anglophone descendants of Russell’s “analytic” tradition are accustomed, Bergson preferred fluid, imaged language over rigid concepts. He believed that beneath the static symbols of logic, science and even everyday language, philosophical intuition could reveal the true nature of reality and the continuous change at work in the universe. Any translator of Bergson must therefore take on the uncomfortable and paradoxical task of employing language to bend it beyond its own limitations.
Another of Landes’s improvements on the 1911 translation is his decision to leave a handful of Bergson’s key notions in the original French, in particular his most controversial one: the élan vital. This was one of several images that Bergson used to represent the evolution of life, which he also compared to a “current” or to “a shell that immediately exploded into fragments. And each of these fragments, being itself a kind of shell, in turn exploded into fragments destined to explode again, and so on for a very long time”. But of all these images the élan vital was, according to Bergson, the one that best represented his philosophical picture of life. In French the expression “prendre son élan” might be used to describe an athlete gathering momentum before a long jump. In a more figurative sense a new élan can be breathed into a dwindling project to inject hope, energy and a sense of direction into it. The word élan also ties into the language of our most intimate emotional impulses. An élan of love is an uncontrollable surge of warm or romantic feelings; an élan of generosity is a spontaneous overflowing of often collective solidarity; an élan of rage might explain sudden, uncharacteristic acts of violence. All of these meanings are implicitly contained in Bergson’s deceptively simple image and converge, pointing the reader towards a picture of evolution as an open-ended surge of creativity thrusting itself towards more and more complex solutions to the obstacles its environment presents. The élan vital is the original impulse of life traversing all the branching diversity of evolution, following no preconceived plan, but always drawn towards more freedom. As Landes notes in his introduction, Bergson’s “argument relies upon all of these various connotations remaining active” in the reader’s mind. In Mitchell’s 110-year-old translation, however, the élan vital, as a “vital impetus”, remains tethered to its physical connotation, losing most of its evocative power.
Bergson published Creative Evolution during the period that Julian Huxley later called “the eclipse of Darwinism”, when most scientists believed in the fact of evolution, but none seemed to be able to agree on how it worked. In the first chapter of the book Bergson presents the image of the élan vital in opposition to the main theories of evolution of his day, including Darwin’s. In criticizing these theories he was not defending, as Russell and other critics have claimed, an anti-rationalist, anti-science ideology; nor did he aspire for his élan vital to rival biological theories as a mystical, murky pseudoscientific vital principle. Rather, Bergson wished to hold up a mirror to the limitations of scientific models. As he states (in Landes’s translation of the introduction):
We clearly sense that none of the categories of our thought … can be unequivocally applied to the things of life – who can say where individuality begins or ends, whether the living being is one or many, or whether the cells come together to form the organism or the organism divides up into cells? It is in vain that we force the living being into one or another of our frameworks. All of the frameworks crack. They are too narrow and, above all, too rigid for what we would like to fit into them.
As James had correctly predicted, it has taken a long time for Henri Bergson’s ideas to be properly digested and assimilated. Now, with the efforts of scholars such as Landes, it will become even more apparent that we still have a lot to learn from the author of Creative Evolution.
It’s easy to make fun of this sort of thing, since we’re all steeped in the materialism that conquered most of the Western intellectual world in the last century, but I’ve grown impatient with the excesses of materialism and scientism, and I’d like to see what Bergson had to say that so impressed some of my favorite writers.
(If you’re curious about élan, it’s a deverbal from élancer ‘to dash forward,’ a prefixed form of lancer ‘to throw.’)
Not really my cup of tea (thé vital?), but to be fair I have long had “try to gain a better understanding of Whitehead’s ‘process philosophy’ and why lots of people at the time thought it was a big deal and a sensible/plausible thing” on my list of “Intellectual Projects I Sort of Know I’ll Probably Never Get To.”* And there’s the asymmetry that there’s unlikely to be a new translation of Whitehead into English to serve as a hook/prompt to finally get around to it … [ETA Whitehead supposedly expressly acknowledged Bergson as an influence although I don’t know what if any opinion Bergson himself expressed on the direction in which Whitehead had headed.]
*With subproject being whether there are connections with some of the wackier language theorists of the interbellum years like Whorf** or Korzybski.
**As a result of checking that Whorf’s birth/death years on the internet I have now become aware of the wacky fact that his younger brother Richard Whorf “directed a number of television programs in the 1950s and 1960s, including early episodes of Gunsmoke, the entire second season of My Three Sons and 67 episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies.”
That is truly one of the wackier facts I’ve seen lately.
.@ .. the élan vital. This was one of several images that Bergson used to represent the evolution of life, …“a shell that immediately exploded into fragments. And each of these fragments, being itself a kind of shell, in turn exploded into fragments destined to explode again, and so on for a very long time”.
I believe this is related to D’Arcy Thompson’s ink drop
http://watercalendar.com/2013/march/
where by the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov%E2%80%93Arnold%E2%80%93Moser_theorem
toroidal vortices break up naturally into smaller toroidal vortices; it’s a very beautiful phenomenon which is very difficult to photograph. [If Google finds anyone some reasonable images please let me know!]
In this analogy the momentum of the falling drop is the elan, which gradually dissipates because these hydrodynamical tori have no metabolism, but biochemical systems [cf Turing] provide similar toroidal patterns (leopard spots for ex).
That is truly one of the wackier facts I’ve seen lately
It may account for the
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StatusQuoIsGod
aspect of radio and televison series.
The characters have a cyclical rather than linear notion of time.
I used to work for a professor of Ophthalmology who was a great fan of Whitehead. It never rubbed off on me.
He used to ride a tricycle everywhere (professor, not Whitehead. I suppose Whitehead may have ridden a tricycle too, though. His WP article is, however, silent on this point.)
I’m concerned about riding not a tricycle but my hobbyhorse, but think it’s important for multicultural literacy to understand that \’elan vital – which an excellent metaphor going back to Aristotle on metamorphosis – can be construed mathematically as a cromulent metaphor about symplectic mechanics. I think we should be told…
I’d like to ride a tricycle, but when I wasn’t riding it, I’d have to carry it around, especially up and down stairs, which would be an annoyance.
…uh.
Relevant? To what, other than obviously the history of science?
What am I missing? How isn’t a philosophical theory of evolution a category mistake?
They aren’t even frameworks, they’re words. It is not only in vain, but unnecessary to try to apply them unequivocally to “the things of life”.
And so is life itself. That is the discovery Bergson was missing.
@dm
It appears to me that you may be addressing something that Bergson is not arguing. I do not think he is competing with scientific (approaches to a) theory of evolution or even seriously attempting to criticise these theories (Ok, maybe he thought he was doing that, but that would be the normal sort of hubris one finds among thinkers when they try to extend their thought to something they have no training in). I think he is saying something like “life as we know it has evolved from other life, Science does not seem to be able to provide a theoretical or empirical basis for life emerging or evolving from non-life, so I am free to speculate that life is some kind of inherent and non-emergent property.” I think you could still do science if you thought like that, you would just be considered a little weird. It is true that you might be more prone to believing in and wasting your brainpower on telepathic parrots, but once you know this is possible, you would be extra-careful.
David M:
What am I missing? How isn’t a philosophical theory of evolution a category mistake?
You are once again missing the point that philosophy and science are regions in a seamless whole. Only by an artifice of definition (or over-strict demarcation) can “philosophical theory of evolution” be considered aberrant.
Now, from Herring’s review as excerpted by Hat:
I am impressed, after skimming through the Translator’s Introduction. I must give it a close reading. But I am not convinced about “vital impetus”. It’s not the worst choice, if élan vital must be translated. Landes [at xlvi] canvasses various options:
To his credit Landes proceeds to answer those questions, as well as can be managed without pointing us to the entire text.
If I were cornered and compelled to translate élan vital I would probably go for “life force”; but I think Arthur Mitchell’s choice of “impetus” for élan is sound. “Impulse” retains even more of the physical flavour that Landes is at pains to avoid, especially for philosophers who will recall its classic early use in Locke, used as OED’s second citation at Impulse (see also the third, from Hume):
* In later editions Locke added a very politic note to the effect that God could, of course, override by fiat that seeming impossibility and allow action at a distance – as opposed to real-world “action by contact” through impulse.
“Impetus” does not share with “impulse” the sense of a transfer from one object to a second object that is a mere passive recipient. “Surge” is also good in this way, but “vital surge” or “life surge” lacks elegance. Nothing wrong with “life force”, as I say; but in the end I think Landes is justified in keeping the original French.
More strength to Landes, for tempering Bergson’s legacy against elanguescence.
Noetica: I am relieved this gets your tentative seal of approval; you know much more about these things than I. (I knew from the start that DM would be uninterested…)
life force
Ah. Kusaal siig.
(It’s what witches steal from you.)
My project of translating Bergson into Kusaal has rather been on the back burner of late. Perhaps it is time to take up the task once again.
You never replied to my reply in that thread.
Yes, of course. That was the idea. At the time, it was easily defensible because no other “theoretical or empirical basis for life emerging or evolving from non-life”, nor any such basis for the other things the élan vital was supposed to explain, had been found.
Such bases were found a few decades later, rendering the élan vital too unparsimonious to consider any further. As I said, history of science – not relevant to science today.
An important, and widely underappreciated, property of science is that you can do perfectly good science without having the first clue about its history.
Bergson is not doing science, even if he’s using science as a base for his philosophy. You are in the same position as someone who thinks they can refute religion by proving that miracles do not exist.
Bergson was trying to describe a philosophy that was informed by science. It was unfortunate for him then, that he wrote about the nature of time in the late nineteenth century, before both relativity and quantum mechanics upended out scientific understanding of what time was about. That doesn’t make Bergson’s ideas about time wrong necessarily, but it does mean that he had practically nothing to say about what we now understand to be some of the most interesting questions about the character of time.
Right, but that is (to me) far less interesting than questions about the character of human life and how we live it, which is not dependent on the science of time.
There is a degree of conflict, which is at least as old as what we think of a Western philosophy itself, between viewpoints on what is most important in philosophy. One one side is the view that the ideas themselves are of primary importance in the practice of philosophy; on the other, that the literary expression of ideas, and thus their effect on the audience, is more central. This is by no means a sharp dichotomy. Most philosophers have believed in a more balanced position, although some very influential individuals have been strongly on one side or the other (Socrates versus Derrida, for instance). Bergson was actually a passionate advocate the value of both positions, but subsequent readers and critics, even in the latter part of his own lifetime, have tended to associate him very strongly with the “philosophy as literature” side. (His having won the Nobel Prize was probably both an indication and a driver of this perception.) Part of the reason for this was, I think, that he lived at a time when ideas about the world were changing incredibly rapidly, especially the scientific ideas that he was interested in approaching philosophically. It was probably inevitable that someone who was born the year that On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published and died the year the first plutonium was produced would not be able to keep their philosophical investigations up to date with broader changing understandings of the world.
I’m not trying to argue with Bergson, I’m trying to argue with Herring, specifically with this sentence:
I now see that I may have been quite mistaken in interpreting “relevant” as “relevant to evolutionary biology”.
Still, “philosophical theory of evolution” is a category mistake.
Edit: …two sentences. …Among the sentences that…
A practical example of allant vital:
#
As he continued to struggle for his life in the next three years, he maintained an insatiable appetite, especially for grapes, and lost none of his mental alertness.
#
For my part, I look forward to a terminally alert diet of spaghetti alio-olio con caperi e jalapeños en escabeche.
#
Let me be surrounded by luxury, I can do without the necessities.
#
@ DE
what about \’elan vital as vitality? [There’s the beginnings of a good mathematical theory [IMIgnorantO] of how vigorously an organism explores its environment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_deviations_theory
with roots in Cram\’er entropy, coming from the insurance industry…]
An élan of love is an uncontrollable surge of warm or romantic feelings; an élan of generosity is a spontaneous overflowing of often collective solidarity; an élan of rage might explain sudden, uncharacteristic acts of violence.
this is making me wonder whether a later theoretical generation’s “jouissance” is at heart a rephrasing of “élan”, and from that, whether the rehabilitation of bergson has already happened in different terms.
@ rozele
that sounds right to me.
@jack morava:
Yes, I like “vitality” too. It works for many uses of Kusaal siig too: when witches steal your siig, you don’t actually die unless they take all of it: in the intermediate stages, you just languish. It’s distinct from “life” (as opposed to “death”) though: that’s nyɔvʋr.
(Unfortunate that the Bible translators coopted siig to translate “soul” and “spirit”: it really isn’t the same idea at all. Or at least, it wasn’t.)
I talked to Gaston Bachelard about this, who suggests that `vitality’, though useful, perhaps exaggerates the mechanical aspects of \’elan vitale, and asks about its relation to `joie de vivre’. He reminded me of the distinction between `heat’ and `temperature’ as worked out by Joule, Lord Kelvin, Maxwell and others in the 19th Century…
If you can’t find your character map, try é – test: é
I’m an indigenous LaTeX speaker…
Well, it is kind of annoying in non-LaTeX contexts. If you don’t feel like using HTML markup, maybe copy-and-paste?
@jack: I talked to Gaston Bachelard about this, who suggests that …
“Suggests” ?! How did you manage that ? He died in 1962. Even his daughter, also a philosopher, has passed on.
I myself would love to talk to him. Don’t reveal the name of your séancier here, send me an email.
I post here in hope of dialog between the numerate and the literate, and especially among those with tentacles in both pies, and I ask for respect for my ethnicity.
I write in vernacular LaTeX and I believe I don’t abuse it, aside from an occasional diacritic. I do not intend or mean to be annoying or to disrespect our host, but I believe we should be told…
Dear Stu,
We meet from time to time in my dormiveglia. I did ask for his email address but I forgot it on waking, alas…
Some people have all the luck.
Speaking of LaTeX fluency, this morning my son woke me up out of a dream in which I was editing a LaTeX manuscript, going through all the equations to make sure they were formatted according to a particular journal’s style.
I know enough LaTeXMex to get by on, but I’m not fluent.
cf `Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, we don’t need no stinking html…
I was relieved to discover (talking of LaTeX) that the Language Science Press do not in fact require all submissions to be in LaTex: they’re prepared to accept formats more innumerate-friendly, like .odt (and capitalist exploiter formats like .docx, too, but we do not speak of that.)
(You just have to use their templates, which is fair enough.)
let a hundred flowers bloom…
It all started with the “Personal Computer”. Now everybody has to be their own secretary, typesetter and graphic designer. And for what ? So everybody can get their own special Message across ? Nobody’s listening !
“I don’t have to show you any formatted documents, you god-damned cabrón and chinga tu madre!” [after B. Traven]
I would be happy with Blei und Block.
On the other hand, since I need to get a new computer, maybe I’ll buy a Surface with that cute formula-and-diagram drawing monitor.
@ Stu,
that’s new to me, thanks: something new every day…
Surface Pro. Sees wan. None of those hegemogeneous MacBooks, thank you very much.
Actually it started with Donald Knuth thinking he could design a better font for The Art of Computer Programming than the ones the publishers had. So we got METAFONT and TeX, but only one out of seven projected volumes of TAoCP. There are people who think that was a bad tradeoff. (This all ran on mainframes).
Literate programming was not such a bad idea, though. But more fun if he had also designed a language that was better suited for it than Pascal without forward declarations.
@DE: …I was relieved to discover (talking of LaTeX) that the Language Science Press do not in fact require all submissions to be in LaTex…
Are you hinting that you’re going to publish something through them? Your Oti-Volta monograph?
Yes.
It needs a lot of work yet, though.
I had some very useful feedback from one of their editors, which among other things reinforced my own feeling that it’s no use knowing what you’re talking about if you haven’t managed to express yourself lucidly enough that someone can understand you even if they aren’t as familiar with the material as you are yourself.
The revision process is complicated by the fact that I’m still discovering new stuff. It’s a bit like trying to rewire a house without turning the electricity off.
I’m also planning on taking up J Pystynen’s suggestion, to the extent of adding an appendix of reconstructed forms with relevant etymological sets.
And after you’re satisfied with it, and it gets published, a year will pass, and you’ll have a great insight that you’ll forever be mad at yourself for not having included it in the book…
The first thing historians of modern times have to do, I am told, is to decide on a terminus ad quem for a new project: otherwise the research can go on forever.
Robert Caro, 87, is continuing his work on the final volume of Lyndon Johnson’s biography. In the recent documentary Turn Every Page, he sounds unimpressed by the one big terminus ad quem, and he is not taking shortcuts.
Apropos of nothing: I just came across a nice illustration of a specifically distributive meaning from a verb-deriving suffix in Waama:
yari [H.H], yari, yaru v. se marier (fille)
yarisan, yarisambi, yarisanti v. se marier (plusieurs filles en même temps, mais pas au même homme)
(It’s as well to be clear about these things.)
So nobody else needs to pay for a secretary, a typesetter or a graphic designer. Capitalism!
@de
What verb is used when several women marry the same man? Have Mormon missionaries not been successful in Waama-speaking areas?
Or, more likely, Muslim missionaries.
The next traditionally monogamous West African society I hear about will be the first. It seems to be one of the more striking trans-Saharan differences.
The usual explanation for having only one wife where I lived was that you were too poor or just too much of a skinflint to support more (neither reflected well on you, particularly the latter.) Or, of course, that you were foreign, and could be excused accordingly for your strange practices.
However, times change …
Assuming young male mortality wasn’t much higher than female mortality, how were the leftover bachelors accounted for, socially? (Assuming most marriages are endogamous.)
The usual question people ask locally re monogamy, is “What about all the left-over women?”
It seems to be regarded as quite settled that that’s the way things are.
I once eavesdropped on a conversation between two male and one female member of my operating staff on the subject of polygamy, which was quite educational. The woman, who was not shy of expressing her opinion on the matter, was agin it, but it was interesting that her arguments were almost entirely conducted on the level of economics: basically it was not fair for the man to divide up his resources between several women (she had the same objection to his having girlfriends: a resource sink, from the wife’s point of view.) She wasn’t at all arguing the issue in the way I would have expected.
She (no mean debater) was definitely getting the better of the argument all round when one of the men came out with “What about all the left-over women?”, and she reluctantly conceded that her monogamy ideal, though desirable on grounds of natural justice, was unrealistic.
@DE, on the other hand, when people argaue against “the way things are” they often need some excuse, like “it is inefficient” (“i just don’t like it” may sound crazy, naïve – or it can be not too easy for the person itself to realise what she wants and take it seriously. In this case it is wanting from another person an exclusive relationship – not “little” – or, in this case even more – reshaping the whole world. Easier for her, because there is a model (western society), but try to seriously argue for polygamy in a monogamous society. Not an easy thing too. *).
* and “I like women and want to have more of them” may not be your first argument if you try {I do not assume that this is what you want. I’m speaking hypothetically}
the one big terminus ad quem
I don’t know if you mean Caro’s death or Johnson’s. Surely if he reaches (or shortly surpasses) the latter, he’ll have to stop.
basically it was not fair for the man to divide up his resources between several women
This is the reason for Islam setting a maximum of four wives. Furthermore, the historical context of sura Al-Nisa’ was the battle of Uhud, in which a large fraction of the early Muslim community was wiped out in a single day. Hence the verse says (emphasis added) “If you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three, or four; but if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly (with them) then only one.”
Surely if he reaches (or shortly surpasses) the latter, he’ll have to stop.
He doesn’t work chronologically. The end is apparently done (or nearly so). He, like his subject, is mostly stuck in the messes of 1967. Among other things, Covid prevented a trip to Vietnam.
basically it was not fair for the man to divide up his resources between several women (she had the same objection to his having girlfriends: …
When I was very young, there was a program ‘Listen With Mother’ on the BBC Radio Home Service at 1:45 after lunch and before afternoon nap.
It was played out by a lovely lullaby-like piece for piano four-hands by Fauré, “Berceuse” from “Dolly suite”. “Dolly” was his pet name for his daughter.
Only many years later did I discover “Dolly” was the “daughter of the singer Emma Bardac, with whom Fauré had a long-running affair.” [wp]
On the BBC! Shock horror! Lord Reith would never have allowed it!
a large fraction: of the males, presumably.
@Lars t.o.o.: So we got METAFONT and TeX, but only one out of seven projected volumes of TAoCP.
You should get out less. I have the boxed set of 4 vols. in 5 pieces.
So maybe it was three back when I last checked, 25 years ago. (Note the hiatus from 1998 to volume 4A in 2011). They would indeed look good on my bookshelf. The projected completion year of 2030 might appear just slightly optimistic to a less generous observer than my self..