A radical view of evolution, founded on a very different understanding of time and knowledge.

The full text of this book can be found here.

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Prerequisites: None, but a basic understanding of the history of evolution would be useful.

Originally Written: April 2020.

Confidence Level: Not my ideas.

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Chapter I

Bergson starts with a description of what it is like to experience time.

My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration it accumulates.

p. 8

The present contains all of the past. Even if it’s not explicitly remembered, it builds on our character. The future is larger than the present and so it cannot, in principle, be predicted – a predicted future is smaller than the present. Anything which builds on itself has this sense of time – psychology, species, life as a whole, the entire universe.

Mechanistic science has time as a parameter. It selects some simple system and artificially isolates the system from the rest of the world. Because it is simple, its future can be exactly predicted by its present – using a differential equation. This is an insufficient understanding of time to describe anything that really builds on itself / has duration / endures.

Science can work only on what is supposed to repeat itself – that is to say, on what is withdrawn, by hypothesis, from the action of real time. Anything that is irreducible and irreversible in the successive moments of history eludes science.

p. 36

Both the mechanistic and finalistic views come from humans’ need to design tools. In building a tool, we think of it as a collection of simple interacting parts – the mechanistic view of science. The tool also has a purpose (an end cause) – the finalistic view of teleology. Neither is an accurate depiction of time. They can both be explained by tendencies of the human intellect which help us survive.

For life, we can’t separate out a simple system because things have identity. An animal exists in a sense that a rock does not because the animal’s parts are bound together and it can only exist as a whole. Along with this tendency towards identity, life has a contradictory tendency towards reproduction. He describes all reproduction as a form of budding – splitting off a little piece of a creature, which can then exist on its own. This binds all life together as a current of continuous progress. The entirely of life has duration – not just individuals. Organic evolution resembles the evolution of consciousness.

Next comes a description of various contemporary (1907) models of evolution:

• Darwinism: mechanistic – accumulations of random variations – negative selective pressure – gradual, infinitesimally small changes.
• Punctuated equilibrium: similar to Darwinism – large, abrupt changes.
• Lamarckism: certain organs are strengthened or weakened by use or disuse – these changes are inherited.
• External environment: imposes its form on the creatures.
• Teleology: biology has an end goal – all life is one.
• Bergson’s own view: original impetus of all life – elan vital (more on this later).

I had previously had a much simpler view of the contending theories.

Bergson criticizes all of these:

• Teleology has an inaccurate notion of time. The end can’t be known from the beginning because the future is bigger than the past. The unity of life is in the past, not the future.
• Bergson’s criticism of the external environment is easier to explain using post-Shannon language. The environment transmits less information than the organisms gain.
• A review of the available evidence for Lamarck vs Darwin (gradualism) vs punctuated equilibrium:
  • The main evidence for Lamarck is alcoholism and an experiment where you cut a nerve of a guinea pig & its descendants have epilepsy. Giraffes are not mentioned at all.
  • Despite this, most, if not all, acquired traits are not inherited.
  • He doesn’t have a strong opinion on gradualism vs punctuated equilibrium.
• Bergson’s criticism of all three (Lamarck, Darwin, & punctuated equilibrium) is that they don’t explain similar structures arising in different evolutionary branches. Convergent evolution can explain some of these. The main example he uses is that vertebrates and cephalopods have the same eye structure.

Chapter II

Life has an original impetus / tendency, which drives it to increasing diversity. Along the way, life develops many (subsidiary?) tendencies. Although the ideal might be to achieve all of them at once, that is typically unrealizable. Different branches of life increasingly focus on one at the expense of others. The tendencies are complementary and antagonistic. Groups should be defined by their tendencies in a certain direction, not the presence of measurable properties.

Adaptation to the environment is a necessary constraint, but it does not explain the driving force.

The first main division in life is between the impetuses of the two kingdoms: animals and plants. Plants have tendency to gather and store large amounts of potential energy; animals have a tendency to release potential energy explosively/abruptly. Storing potential energy is inherently tied to creating organic matter out of mineral elements and to immobility (both can be referred to using ‘fix’). Releasing potential energy is inherently tied to movement and consciousness, the means of directing movement.

Within plants, the next big division is between fixing nitrogen and fixing carbon. Bergson correctly recognizes that fungi don’t fit well in this description, but explains that as a regression or torpidity of plants, not as a kingdom with its own impetus.

Within animals, the main division is between an impetus towards instinct and an impetus towards intelligence. Many animals have gotten stuck in torpidity by seeking defense in a hard shell, instead of further pursuing movement – echinoderms, most mollusks, some arthropods, early fish. Intuition has reached its fullest development in ants. Intelligence has reached its fullest development in man. Although both are always intertwined, intuition is stronger most of the time, even among vertebrates.

Intuition is the capacity to use a ready-made tool (a body part) for a particular job. Intelligence is the capacity to design tools for any job. Humans should be considered Homo faber, defined by our ability to make tools.

Consciousness is the difference between thoughts and actions. The unconsciousness of an ant is very different from the unconsciousness of a plant or stone. The later has no thoughts. The thoughts of the former are exactly realized in action. In colloquial language, a ‘conscious choice’ is one in which we are thinking about other alternatives as well as the choice we are making.

It lights up the zone of potentialities that surrounds the act.

p. 182

Innate knowledge for instinct is about things/matter. Innate knowledge for intelligence is about relations/form. Intuition is intimate and full, but is limited to a few objects, especially natural instruments (your own body parts). Intelligence is external and empty, which allows it to describe infinitely many objects, and construct artificial instruments. Only intelligence can ask about the essence of things, but only intuition could understand it.

Our intelligence primarily understands immobile, discontinuous, unorganized solids that can be dissembled and reassembled. It is particularly poorly suited to understand life.

Instinct is molded on the very form of life. It is impossible to distinguish where anatomy and physiology separate. Instinctual knowledge is built using the whole of our past, including the ancient unity of life. There is no reason to think instinct (the direction of one branch of life) can be entirely understood in terms of intelligence (the direction of a different branch).

Wasps which paralyze caterpillars know precisely where & how many nerve centers to strike. This knowledge is built by the species’ instinctual effort. It is complicated and can’t be built piecemeal entirely by small random mutations. It does not represent habit formed by intelligence – wasps never were intelligent. Bergson considers this a form of sympathy: shared knowledge as a result of deep history. Sympathy here is not an ethical term, as this example clearly indicates.

Bergson then introduces / redefines ‘intuition’. Intuition is conscious instinct reflecting on and enlarging itself. It is not just whatever your gut tells you. Art shows that intuition is possible. Bergson calls for an organized effort towards intuition, which relates to instinct and art the way science relates to intelligence and observation. Both intuition and science should continually inform and strengthen each other.

The evolution of life is a broad current of consciousness with an enormous multiplicity of interwoven potentialities. Each branch focuses more on its own particular goals rather than the work of the whole. Instinct at first seems to be the more effective strategy, since it remains focused on itself, but it is limited. Intelligence first concentrates on external matter, then gains the ability adapt to many objects, and so can awaken the potentialities of intuition. Gaining mastery by invention is more useful than the material invention itself. Humans are unique not just because we are more intelligent than animals, but because our intelligence has set consciousness free.

Chapters III & IV

There are two more chapters that I will not summarize, for several reasons:

• Bergson rarely leads with his thesis statement. Instead, he tries to gradually build understanding through examples, metaphors, and contrasts. When writing this summary, I’ve used simpler explanations from later in the book when Bergson first begins to hint at an idea. So I’ve included much of the material from later in the book in the summary of the earlier chapters. The best thesis statement of the book is the last section of Ch. III.
• The remaining material is more philosophical than scientific (What is the difference between order and disorder? How is modern science different from ancient natural philosophy?) and is of less interest to me personally.
• I like the way this summary ends.

Other Quotes

Perhaps even it is necessary that a theory should restrict itself exclusively to a particular point of view, in order to remain scientific, i.e. to give a precise direction to researchers in detail. But the reality of which each of these theories takes a partial view must transcend them all. And this reality is the special object of philosophy, which is not constrained to scientific precision because it contemplates no practical applications.

p. 89-90

[Societies of bees and ants] are admirably ordered and united, but stereotyped; [human societies] are open to every sort of progress, but divided, and incessantly at strife with themselves.The ideal would be a society always in progress and always in equilibrium, but this ideal is perhaps unrealizable: the two characteristics which would fain complete each other, … can no longer abide together when they grow stronger.

p. 105

Nature is more and better than a plan in the course of realization. A plan is a term assigned to a labor: it closes the future whose form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on the contrary, the portals of the future remain wide open.

p. 109

Life in general is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution in general would fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn upon themselves, borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each of them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is materialized before our eyes.

p. 131-132

This is my favorite analogy from Bergson. If you combine this analogy with the taxonomic hierarchy, you get a turbulent cascade model for evolution. This is incredible intuition because this understanding of turbulence hadn’t been developed yet. Richardson’s poem,

Big whorls have little whorls
Which feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity.

is from 1922 and Kolmogorov’s theory is from 1941.

phantoms of ideas to which there cling phantoms of problems

p. 181

it is of the essence of the psychical to enfold a confused plurality of interpenetrating terms

p. 257

ancient science thinks it knows its object sufficiently when it has noted of it some privileged moments, whereas modern science considers the object at any moment whatsoever

p. 326

Modern science is the daughter of astronomy; it has come down from heaven to earth along the inclined plane of Galileo

p. 331

For simple common sense tells us that when we are possessed of an effective instrument of research, and are ignorant of the limits of its applicability, we should act as if its applicability were unlimited; there will always be time to abate it.

p. 343

My Comments

Are there any modern (post-1970) Bergsonian biologists?

My (limited) understanding of the history of evolutionary theory has continual conflict between gradualism, punctuated equilibrium, and Lamarckism. The acceptance of the viewpoints is still shifting, based on empirical evidence – mostly from the fossil record and from genetics & epigenetics. Teleology was once widely accepted, but has gradually lost favor over many decades. Bergson … has been completely ignored? Even if his arguments are not compelling enough to convince the entire scientific community, they are not completely ridiculous, and so should have convinced a few people to develop them further using modern evidence. My impression is that there are more biologists who are Spinozists than Bergsonians.

The particular examples are old and may have been solved or may have been forgotten. We figured out how fetal alcohol syndrome works without relying on Lamarck. Why do vertebrates and cephalopods have similar eyes? What was going on with the epileptic guinea pigs?

Bergson’s description of what it is like to experience time is especially lucid. He takes the experience of time as fundamental and explains how over understanding of mechanistic time arises from that. Most scientists today take the mechanistic description of time as fundamental. Can we derive the experience of time from mechanistic time?

I’ve raised a similar question when talking to other physicists about the arrow of time. They typically refuse to consider it as a valid question. I couldn’t elaborate on “Why do all observers experience time in one direction?” Bergson definitely can.

Bergson is sometimes described as being anti-intellectual. I think it’s more accurate to say that he is anti-exclusively-intellectual. I can see how misunderstanding what he means by e.g. ‘intuition’ could allow you to conclude that whatever you feel is right is better than thinking through things. But what he’s arguing for is a sincere / strenuous effort to improve human knowledge using both the intellect and anything we can learn through instinct. His criticism is not that we use intelligence too much but that we disregard anything coming from instinct.

Bergson develops, in detail, ideas that do not correspond to any of the words in current language. He refers to them using the closest available words (‘intuition’, ‘sympathy’, ‘duration’, etc), often in a highly unconventional way. Although this makes it easier for him to be misunderstood, the other option would be to invent new words, which would make more people not understand him at all.

The ideas presented here are complex and contrary to the worldview of most scientists (and people), but Bergson does find a way to explain them. Since he is challenging our understanding of knowledge, his ideas can’t always be given a precise definition. Instead, they are explained through examples, contrasts with other ideas, and vivid metaphors.