A Bergson: Creative evolution. creative evolution
French philosopher.
In 1907 he wrote a book: Creative Evolution / L "Evolution créatrice, where he introduced the concept . For this book, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927.
The book, among other things, affirmed the presence of creativity in living organisms, which governs evolution. This statement, very attractive to people, apparently, was born in opposition to other hypotheses, which claimed that in the evolution of living things there is nothing but the struggle of physical and chemical forces ...
“... life as a whole is like a huge wave that spreads from the center and stops almost on the entire circumference and turns into oscillation in place: only at one point the obstacle was defeated, the impulse passed freely. This freedom marks the human form. Everywhere, with the exception of man, consciousness was driven into a dead end: only with man did it continue on its way.
Anri Bergson, Creative Evolution, M., Canon Press; "Kuchkovo field", 1998, p. 260.
"Unlike Darwin, Bergson explored the evolution of the most complex phenomena - creative behavior.
The biology of that time was dominated by genetic determinism. Weisman who claimed that all brain function is predetermined by genes. Weisman believed that imagination, intuition, creativity are also due to special genes in the brain. Bergson, on the other hand, saw in man, first of all, a creator according to the situation.
Any creativity becomes an extrabiological phenomenon, because it oversteps all instincts, adaptive behavior.
Since the fundamental human sciences were in their infancy at the beginning of the 20th century, Bergson's views on human creativity were far ahead of his era. He was the first to draw attention to the fact that in rich information systems, the forces of adaptation and survival in econiches acquire the character of symbiosis or cooperation. In his opinion, the emergence of novelty occurs not so much with the help of legs and adaptive crawling, but due to "creative wings" that raise the individual above the situation.
Repin V.S., Evolution in systems biology, journal "Problems of Philosophy", 2010, N 11, p. 42.
“Heredity transmits not only signs, it also transmits the impulse by virtue of which the signs change, and this impulse is vitality itself.”
Anri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Moscow-St. Petersburg, 1914, p. 207.
"The whole philosophy Bergson is based on the theory of a certain “impulse” that moves living matter. In his later work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson ( Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932 - Approx. I.L. Vikentieva) creates models of two types of society.
In the "normal" state, society is a closed and self-reproducing system that resists something new.
Myself Society cannot move into a new state, accept a new morality or a new religion.
This can be done only by individual, “heroic” and at the same time, from the point of view of traditions, “criminal” personalities who create new values, and then by example, charm or force drag others along, become reformers and leaders of the masses.
Translation from French by M. Bulgakov, revised by B. Bychkovsky
© Text IP Sirota, 2018
© Publishing House Eksmo LLC, 2019
According to Bergson, instinct relates to intelligence as:
1. Feeling to thought.
2. Irrational to rational.
3. Sight to touch.
4. Past to the future.
You can find out the correct answer by reading this book ...
Henri Bergson
(1859–1941)
Henri Bergson: “Intuition is an instinct that has become disinterested…”
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is a representative of such philosophical trends as intuitionism and the philosophy of life. The founder of the latter is Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that we live in the worst possible world. The German genius stood on the positions of irrationalism - this concept denies the human mind the ability to comprehend the world and puts revelation, intuition, instinct, even animal, in the first place. Schopenhauer argued that the driving motive of all things is an insatiable will to live. This theory was later developed by Friedrich Nietzsche with his statements about the death of God, the superman, the perniciousness of morality...
The philosophy of life, ambiguous and controversial, reaches its peak at the end of the 19th - the first third of the 20th century, in parallel with world wars and scientific achievements.
Bergson argued that the concepts that have long been key in world philosophy - matter and spirit - in themselves do not have much meaning. They acquire it only in connection with the true, true reality - life. It is impossible to comprehend it either with the intellect or with the help of the mind - only intuitively. But this ability is not given to everyone: intuition, inseparable from creative abilities and the ability to transform the world, is the lot of a select few.
Controversial, bold, ambiguous? Yes. But the purpose of philosophy is not to force people to agree with this or that thinker at all costs, but to awaken the mind and make them think.
1868-1878 - studied at the Fonteyn Lyceum.
1881 - graduated from the Higher Normal School - to this day one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world.
1889 - Bergson received his Ph.D.
1896 - the work "Matter and Memory" was published. 1907 - Henri Bergson's most famous work "Creative Evolution" was published.
1917-1918 - the philosopher combines teaching and scientific work with diplomatic activity.
1927 - Bergson received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
"Evolution is an ever-renewing creativity"
Bergson's writings included catholic church in the "Index of Forbidden Books" ... Paradoxically, the philosopher never belonged to the category of convinced theomachists and recognized the ability of religion to change life for the better through the hands of holy passionaries who possessed intuition, and therefore, the powerful power of transformation and persuasion.
Apparently, the fact is that it is by no means faith and divine reason that Anri Bergson puts at the forefront, talking about driving force Universe. Having more than carefully read Darwin's theory of evolution in his youth, the philosopher builds his own concept, according to which evolution is set in motion by a vital impulse that transforms and modifies matter. The impulse of life can be compared with an electric discharge, with a meteorite, which, dazzlingly burning, crumbles into parts, while creating both matter (cooled parts) and spirit (those parts that continue to burn brightly, illuminating the path). An impulse is a conscious principle, or rather, even a superconscious one... But how, where, thanks to what does this impulse arise?
We invite you to read the first two chapters of Bergson's Creative Evolution. And, perhaps, further acquaintance with the works of this unusual thinker will continue on your personal initiative?
“Our mind is the metal extracted from the form,” wrote Bergson, “and the form is our actions.”
Introduction
The history of the development of life, with all its current incompleteness, already outlines for us the path that led to the establishment and organization of the intellect. It was a continuous progression along a series of vertebrates, ending with man. In our ability to understand, we see simply an addition to our ability to act, an ever more precise, complex and flexible adaptation of the consciousness of living beings to the given conditions of their existence. It follows that our mind narrow sense the purpose of words is to ensure that our body stays in the environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves, and finally, to comprehend matter by thought. This is one of the conclusions of this work. We shall see that the human mind is at home among inanimate objects, and in particular among solid bodies. Here our activity has its stronghold, here our technology takes its working tools. We shall see that our concepts are formed from the shape of solid bodies, that our logic is chiefly the logic of solid bodies, and that therefore our mind wins its best victories in geometry, where the kinship of logical thought with inanimate matter is discovered, and where the mind has only to follow its natural motion. ; after perhaps the slightest contact with experience, he makes one discovery after another, in the conviction that experience follows him and invariably justifies him.
“The theory of life, without a critique of knowledge, is forced to accept the views offered to it by reason as they are.”
But it also follows from this that our thought in its purely logical form is unable to imagine the real nature of life, the deep meaning of the evolutionary movement. Life created thought in certain circumstances to influence certain objects; Thought is only an emanation, one of the forms of life—how can it embrace life? Thought is only one of the stages of the evolutionary movement, how can it be applied to the evolutionary movement as a whole? One might just as well assert that the part is equal to the whole, that the action absorbs its cause in itself, that a stone left by a wave on the seashore depicts the shape of a wave. Indeed, we clearly feel that none of the categories of our thought, such as unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, rational purposiveness, and so on, can be accurately applied to living objects. Who can say where individuality begins and ends, whether a living being is one or many, whether cells unite into an organism, or whether an organism divides into cells? In vain we try to fit a living being into one or another framework. They all fall apart, because they are all too narrow, and most importantly, not flexible enough for this. Our thought, so sure of itself when dealing with inanimate objects, loses that confidence on this new ground. It was difficult to point to any biological discovery due to pure reasoning. And more often than not, when experience finally shows us how life achieves a certain result, we find that it is precisely such methods that we have never thought of.
However, evolutionary philosophy, without hesitation, extends to living beings those explanations that turned out to be suitable for dead matter. First, she showed us the intellect as a separate manifestation of development; he was a lamp, perhaps accidental, illuminating the wanderings of living beings in the narrow field of their actions. And suddenly, forgetting what she just said, she turns this flashlight, shining in the depths of the dungeon, into a sun that illuminates the world. With the help of one speculative thought, she boldly proceeds to explore all things, even life. True, she encounters such enormous difficulties along the way; her logic leads to such strange contradictions that she soon retracts her original claims. We comprehend, she says, not reality itself, but only its fake, more precisely, its symbolic image. We do not know and will never know the essence of things: the absolute is inaccessible to us; one must stop before the Unknowable. The former excessive pride in the human mind has been replaced, to tell the truth, by its excessive humiliation. If the intellectual forms of a living being gradually adapted to the actions and interactions of known bodies and their material environment, then why should we not learn something about the very essence of these bodies? Action cannot take place in unreality. It can be assumed that the mind, created for speculation or dreams, remains alien to reality, that it remakes and transforms it, that perhaps it even creates it, just as we create with our imagination the figures of people and animals from fragments of passing clouds. But a mind directed to real actions and their inevitable reaction, touching objects in order to receive changing impressions from them at every moment, such a mind is in some way in contact with the absolute. Would it have occurred to us to doubt the absolute value of our knowledge if philosophy had not shown what contradictions are encountered in our speculation, what blind alleys it leads us into? These difficulties and these contradictions occur because we apply the usual forms of our thought to things for which the methods of our technique are not applicable, and for which our categories are therefore not suitable. Insofar as knowledge refers to a certain side of dead matter, it, on the contrary, gives a true snapshot of it. But it becomes relative when, as such, it wants to represent to us life, that is, the photographer himself who took the picture.
Creative evolution. However, it is precisely these ideas about the relationship between freedom and necessity, which really represent the interpenetration of spirit and matter, that prepare the output of Bergson's main metaphysical work Creative Evolution, in which the unity of life will become the main subject of research. Bergson in this period already critically evaluates all existing evolutionary concepts, primarily Darwinism, as well as the evolutionism of G. Spencer, under whose influence he was at the beginning of his philosophical evolution. The process of development, from the point of view of these concepts, is teleological, and even Spencer's evolution can be traced through individual changes that are fixed by rational analysis as changes in forms - this is the so-called dysmorphism.
At the same time, the unity of life is understood not as an abstract unity grasped by the intellect. Bergson criticizes the foundations of Hegelianism and believes that the theory of life should receive its anti-intellectualist theory of knowledge based on what constitutes life itself. One must experience life, or, as Bergson puts it, try to scoop up water with a sieve. This is possible only with the help of intuition. Only in intuition is given the contemplation of movement in the same continuity as the variability of consciousness.
That is why Bergson begins with the problem of psychophysical parallelism, appealing to Descartes and formulating his position on the relationship between brain and mind: brain and mind are solidary, but not identical. What is in the soul is not mind - instinct: "a force that acts on matter and organizes it in accordance with the goal required by life." This distinguishes instinct from automatic behavior, of which Bergson cites many examples. This is primarily the world of insects, where the wasp "knows" how to paralyze the victim.
Unlike automatism, instinct presupposes some sympathy, spiritual openness to the world, knowledge of the unity of life, not thought out in advance, not specially learned, but discovered by actions, experienced and expressed. If the mind is directed to a set of objects and reveals their similarities and differences, comparing each element of the set with each other, then the instinct grasps one object or part of it, but grasps in a special way - in its variability. The mind establishes relationships between things, you-
divides the properties and on the basis of this is able to manufacture artificial tools. The mind selects the required function and links it with one or another property,
which is characteristic of a number of subjects. The instinct does not calculate or analyze, but it is thanks to it that the predator catches up with its prey, grabbing it in motion, and not drawing and not calculating the trajectory of its path. Thanks to instinct, natural tools appear that use the object as a whole or part of it. This is partial knowledge, but since it is integral in this part, only instinct is able to know movement and life. But most importantly, instinct is able to realize itself. On this, for example, aesthetic perception is built, which is closest to the philosophy of life. Philosophy must cease to be a science in order to know not relatively, but absolutely - this is one of Bergson's aphorisms. Traditional science relies on comparison and symbolic designation of the subject and gives knowledge that is not identical to the subject. The main method should be intuition, direct knowledge. This is a double movement of tension and relaxation, which is first directed at the Self itself. This is the necessary push to get the right direction of the cognitive search. Thus, psychological introspection becomes the first in the picture of the world, on the basis of which, by analogy, a picture of the Universe is built. Here, at the stage of metaphysics, reason is connected. The philosophy of intuition will thus be able to build a metaphysics of the absolute, to grasp the quality of life, that is, life in formation and movement, and will be able to understand the present, and not just the past, as evolution.
Bergson's basic definitions of life turn out to be metaphorical. The most enduring is the image of an uninterrupted creative impulse (élan vital), which is described as “a rocket, the extinct remnants of which fall in the form of matter ... also that which is preserved from the rocket itself and, cutting through these remnants, ignites them into organisms” (2: 233). Another definition emphasizes the role of consciousness, which is the driving principle of evolution. However, there is no unequivocal opinion in the literature whether, on this basis, Bergson's concept can be considered idealistic, whether the basis of life can be interpreted as super-consciousness. Indeed, according to Bergson, a spontaneous vital impulse underlies those manifestations and creative search in matter that respond with irritability (in plants), instinct (in animals), intellect and intuition-instinct - Bergson uses both terms - (in humans).
Society. Society, which Bergson calls open and distinguishes from closed, and its spiritual basis - dynamic, in contrast to static, morality and religion, must also correspond to this vital response. The social concept completes the philosophy of spiritual life and creative impulse: as an organizing principle, love for humanity must be established on the basis of a new metaphysics of the intuitive philosophy of life. In closed societies that exist for the sake of self-preservation and protect the interests of a small group of people, the main moral principle is moral duty - the basis of the will as a common habit. This is a supra-individual social requirement of a closed society requiring discipline and hierarchical subordination. A static religion serving a closed society creates myths that soothe and protect against the fear of death and the omnipotence of the intellect. But even in a closed society, heroes appear who carry with them the creative principle.
and openness. In a static religion, texts preaching brotherly love may appear, as, for example, in the gospel Sermon on the Mount. True religion itself is built on a creative impulse and love, it is mystical, because mysticism corresponds to the variability of life. Dynamic morality is designed to develop love for humanity and God - each individual person responds emotionally to the calls of moral heroes. Only in an open society, each individual person is an individual, thanks to which society is constantly developing. Such societies are the future. Based on these ideas of Bergson, the concept of "open society" by K. Popper appears. IN social utopia Bergson's qualities were most clearly manifested, which were named by P. Valery at a special meeting of the Academy dedicated to the memory of Bergson in 1941: when the world thinks and reflects less and less, when civilization seems to turn from day to day into ruins and memories...” (1: 49).
Literature
Bergson A. Collected works: In 4 volumes. Volume 1. M., 1992.
Bergson A. Creative evolution M., 1998.
Bergson H. Oeuvres. Ed. de centenaire. Texts annot. par A. Robinet. Introd. par H. Gouhier. P., 1959.
Blauberg I. Henri Bergson. M., 2003.
Antliff M. Inventing Bergson, 1993.
Kolakowski L. Bergson, 1985.
Soulez F. Henry Bergson, 1986.
Chapter 11. PRAGMATISM
Pragmatism is the most important direction of American philosophy. Its early representatives were C. S. Pierce, W. James, and J. Dewey. Charles Sanders Pierce is rightfully considered one of the most original and versatile philosophers that America has ever produced. As an innovative intellectual, he anticipated the development of various scientific disciplines. His research left a noticeable mark both in the exact and natural sciences and in the humanities. He was a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, surveyor, cartographer and engineer, but also a psychologist, philologist and historian of science. He was one of the first in the United States to become involved in experimental psychology and the first to use the wavelength of light as a measure of measurement. His posthumous fame was in the fields of logic and semiotics, but he was also the author of an original metaphysical system. C. S. Pierce entered the history of philosophy as the founder of the philosophy of pragmatism, another direction of his intellectual creativity.
A. Bergson. creative evolution
bergson evolution philosophical creative
"Creative Evolution" ("L йvolution cryatrice", 1907) - the work of Bergson. The book consists of an introduction and four chapters. According to Bergson, the thought of duration gives rise to the idea of evolution, the thought of reason - the idea of life. Contrasting his own reasoning with Descartes' well-known maxim ("I think, therefore I am"), Bergson interprets the mind as a product of life. Denying the radical mechanism and finality of the previous philosophical tradition, Bergson postulates: "A theory of life that is not accompanied by a critique of knowledge is forced to accept, as they are, the concepts placed by the understanding at its disposal: it can only freely or forcefully place facts in given frames, which it considers as final.
Thus, the theory of life achieves a symbolism convenient or even necessary for positive science, but by no means a direct vision of the object itself. On the other hand, a theory of knowledge that does not include the mind in the general evolution of life will not teach us how the framework of knowledge is formed, nor how we can expand it or go beyond it. Bergson considered these two tasks to be inextricably linked. Bergson begins his presentation of the first chapter on "the evolution of life, mechanism and finality" by "trying on" the evolutionary movement of the "two ready-made dresses" that our understanding of "mechanism and finality" has.
According to Bergson, both of them do not fit, but "one of the two can be reshaped, altered, and in this new form it can fit better than the other." According to Bergson, "duration is the constant development of the past, which corrodes the future and swells, moving forward. And since the past is continuously increasing, it is also infinitely preserved ..." According to Bergson's scheme, "... the past is preserved by itself, automatically At every given moment, it follows us all in its entirety: everything that we felt, thought, wanted from early childhood is here, projected onto the present and, connecting with it, presses on the door of consciousness, which in every possible way rebels against it. A person, from Bergson's point of view, thinks only with an insignificant fragment of the past, but - on the contrary - we wish, we act with the whole past. The evolution of consciousness is due precisely to the dynamism of the past: "existence consists in change, change in maturation, maturation - in the endless creation of oneself." "Duration" Bergson also sees in "unorganized" bodies. He writes: "The universe lasts.
The more we delve into the nature of time, the more we will understand that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the constant development of absolutely new things. Systems within science last only because they are inextricably linked to the rest of the universe. They also develop." Then Bergson considers "organized" bodies, which, above all, are characterized by "individuality." Individuality, according to Bergson, implies an infinity of degrees. Nowhere, even in man, is it fully realized. But this is a characteristic of life. Life never is not realized, it is always on the way to realization, it seeks to organize systems closed by nature, even if reproduction goes by destroying a part of the individual in order to give it a new individuality.
But a living being is also characterized by aging: "All along the ladder of living beings from top to bottom, if I move from more differentiated to less differentiated, from a multicellular human organism to a single-celled organism, I find: in the same cell - the same process of aging" . Wherever something lives, there is a "tape" where time is recorded. At the level of personality, aging causes degradation, loss (of cells), but at the same time accumulation (of history). Bergson moves on to the question of transformism and how to interpret it. He admits that at a certain moment, at certain points in space, a clearly visible stream was born: “This stream of life, passing through the bodies that it organized, passing from generation to generation, was divided between individuals and dispersed between individuals, without losing anything from its strength. , but rather, gaining intensity as we move forward."
Considering radical mechanism - biology and physical chemistry - Bergson shows that within its framework it is customary to give a more advantageous place to "structure" and completely underestimate "time". According to this theory, "time is devoid of efficiency, and as soon as it ceases to do anything, it is nothing." But in the radical finality, biology and philosophy are considered in a rather controversial way. For Leibniz, for example, evolution fulfills a predetermined program. For Bergson, this type of finality is only a "mechanism in reverse."
Everything is already given. However, there is also the unforeseen in life: "Thus, mechanism and finality here are only views from the outside on our behavior. They extract intelligence from it. But our behavior slips between them and extends much further." Bergson is looking for an evaluation criterion, considers various transformist theories on a specific example, analyzes the idea of "imperceptible variation" in Darwin, "sharp variation" in De Vries, Eimer's orthogenesis and "heredity of the acquired" among neo-Lamarckists. The result of Bergson's consideration is the following: evolution is based on the initial impulse, the "life impulse", which is realized through separation and bifurcation. Life can be seen through many solutions, but it is clear that they are answers to the problem posed: the living must see in order to mobilize his abilities to act for action: “at the basis of our surprise is always the thought that only a part of this order could be realized that its full realization is a kind of grace." And further in Bergson: "Life is the desire to act on raw matter."
The meaning of this impact, of course, is not predetermined: hence "the unforeseen variety of forms that life, developing (evolving), sows on its way. But this impact always has ... a random character." In the second chapter, The Divergent Directions of the Evolution of Life, Insensitivity, Reason, Instinct, Bergson notes that the diverging directions of evolution cannot be explained by adaptation alone. According to Bergson, "It is true that adaptation explains the tortuousness of evolutionary movement, but not the general directions of movement, and still less the movement itself." The same applies to the idea of the development of some primordially existing plan: "The plan is a kind of limit, it closes the future, the form of which it determines. Before the evolution of life, on the contrary, the doors of the future remain wide open."
Only vital impulse and energy make it possible to understand why life is divided into animal and vegetable. By their very nature they are not different. "The difference is in proportions. But this proportional difference is enough to determine the group where it occurs ... In a word, the group will be determined not by the presence of certain signs, but by its tendency to strengthen them." For example, the animal nervous system and plant photosynthesis are two different responses to the same problem of energy storage and reproduction. Bergson seeks to define the scheme of animal life.
This, according to his theory, is a higher organism, which consists of a sensory-motor system installed on devices for digestion, respiration, blood circulation, secretion, etc., whose role is to serve it and transmit potential energy in order to convert it into movement of movement : "When nervous activity emerged from the protoplasmic mass in which it was immersed, it inevitably had to attract all kinds of activities on which it could rely: the same could only develop on other types of activity, which, in turn, attracted its other types, and so on ad infinitum.
These were devices for digestion, respiration, circulation, secretion, etc. The structure of life is a dialectic between life in general and the concrete forms it takes, between the creative impulse of life and the inertia of materiality in which it is given in fixed forms. Vegetative insensitivity, instinct and reason cohabit in evolution. They are not in order. There are returns. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers of nature have erred in "seeing in vegetative, instinctive, and rational life three successive degrees of one and the same tendency, which develops, while these are three divergent directions of activity, which separates as it grows." Instinct, instantaneous and reliable, is incapable of solving new problems that the mind can solve with amazing adaptability: "A complete instinct is the ability to use and even create organized tools; a complete mind is the ability to produce and use disorganized tools."
The consciousness of a living being is connected with the ability to distance itself from instantaneous action: "It measures the gap between representation and action." Thus, Bergson's philosophy of life becomes a theory of knowledge. The mind, by its very nature, is powerless to understand life. Instinct is sympathy: "If we consider in instinct and in the mind what they include from innate knowledge, it will be seen that this innate knowledge refers in the first case to things, and in the second to connections." After that, Bergson tries to define the mind. According to his theory, the main object of the mind is an unorganized solid body. Reason operates only intermittent. It can dismember according to any law and reunite in the form of any system: "An instinctive sign is a frozen sign, an intelligent sign is a mobile sign." That which is connected with instinct is directed to inert matter. Intuition is that band of instinct that resides in the mind. It is unnatural, like the twisting of the will around itself, thanks to which the mind can coincide with the real, the consciousness of life - with life: expand it."
In the third chapter - "On the meaning of life, the order of nature and the form of reason" - Bergson tries to establish a connection between the problem of life and the problem of knowledge. He formulates the question of the philosophical method - see "Bergsonism" (Deleuze). The possibilities of science show that there is order in things. This order can be explained by passing a priori to the categories of intellect (Kant, Fichte, Spencer). But in this case, according to Bergson, "we do not describe the genesis at all." Bergson refuses this method. He distinguishes between the geometric order inherent in matter and the order of life. Bergson shows how a real living being can switch to the mode of automatic mechanism, because it is "the same transformation of the same movement that simultaneously creates the intellectuality of the mind and the materiality of things."
And again, intuition makes it possible to establish a connection between instinctive cognition and reason: "There is no such stable system that would not be enlivened, at least in some of its parts, by intuition." Dialectics allows intuition to be tested and extended to other people. But at the same time, an intuitive attempt and an attempt to formulate a thought are opposed from different directions: “The same effort by which we connect thoughts one with another makes the intuition that thoughts have begun to accumulate disappear. The philosopher is forced to abandon intuition as soon as it gave him an impetus, and to trust in oneself in order to keep moving, putting forward concepts one by one." But then, according to Bergson, the thinker loses ground under his feet.
Dialectic is that which reinforces thought itself. Nothing is given once and for all. The living being is a creation, it is an uplift, but matter is a creative act that is weakening. Even a living being longs for death. However, Bergson remains an optimist. "Life activity," he writes, "is the self-creation of one reality against the background of the self-destruction of another." And then Bergson explains that the impulse of life is the need for creation: “He cannot create, of course, because he meets matter in front of him, that is, a movement opposite to his own. But he captures this matter, which is necessity itself, and tries to introduce into as much uncertainty and freedom as possible." Consciousness is synonymous with ingenuity and freedom.
This definition points to a radical difference between the most intelligent animal and man. Consciousness corresponds to the powerful ability of choice that a living being has. So, if in an animal ingenuity is always just a variation on the theme of a skill, then in a person ingenuity is wider. A person manages to master his automatisms, to surpass them. He owes this to language and social life, which are concentrated reserves of consciousness and thought. Thus, a person can appear as the "limit", "goal" of evolution, even if he is only one of the very many directions of creative evolution: "All living things cling to each other and yield to a monstrous onslaught ... All humanity in space and time - this is a huge army that rushes beside each of us in front and behind in a fit of attack that can break any resistance and overcome a lot of obstacles, even death, perhaps."
In the fourth chapter, analyzing the "cinematic mechanism of thought", dividing the "history of systems", "real becoming" and "false evolutionism", Bergson opposes the illusion through which we go from emptiness to fullness, from disorder to order, from non-existence to being. . It is necessary to reverse the perception, whether it is about the emptiness of matter or the emptiness of consciousness, because "the representation of emptiness is always a complete representation, which is divided into two positive elements in analysis: the idea of replacement - clear or vague; a feeling experienced or imagined, desires or regrets" . The idea of non-existence as the abolition of everything is absurd, just as the idea of a rectangular circle would be absurd. An idea is always something.
Bergson argues that there is a plus, and not a minus, in the idea of an object conceived as non-existent, since the idea of a "non-existent" object is necessarily the idea of an existing object, moreover, with "the representation of the exclusion of this object as actual reality taken as a whole." A negation differs from an affirmation in that it is an affirmation of the second degree: "It affirms something of a statement, which, in turn, affirms something of an object." If I say that the table is not white, then I am referring to the statement that I dispute, namely, "the table is white." Every denial is built on an affirmation.
Therefore, there is no void. Therefore, one must get used to thinking about Being directly, without making a zigzag towards Non-Being. The Absolute "is found very close to us ... in us." If we accept the principle of constant change, which was formulated by Bergson in the first chapter, then it turns out that if anything is real, it is a constant change in form. In this case, "the shape is just a snapshot taken at the moment of the transition." Our perception fixes a stream of change in discontinuous images. We build average images that allow us to follow the expansion or contraction of the reality we want to comprehend.
Thus, knowledge gravitates more toward stable forms (state) than toward change itself. The mechanism of our cognition is similar to cinema (frame alternation, creating the impression of movement). Starting from this, Bergson again analyzes the entire history of philosophy, from the Eleatics to Spencer, in order to trace how time has been devalued by philosophers. He shows how physical mechanistic cognition could act as an illusory model of cognition: "Ancient science believes that it knows its subject sufficiently after it has identified the main points inherent in it."
Modern science, multiplying observations, for example, with the help of photographs, has approached the question of the movement of things. The science of the ancients is static. Galileo and Kepler introduced time into the analysis of planetary motion. They are interested in the connections between things. But, adds Bergson, "if modern physics differs from the old one in that it considers any moment of time, then it is entirely based on the replacement of time-duration by time-invention." Bergson sees the need for a different relationship to the time that is being created. This different attitude would make it possible to "shrink" being, which Spencer failed to do, since he recreated, according to Bergson, "evolution from the fragments of the developed." According to Bergson, the philosopher is called to go beyond the scientist.
He must work to discover real duration in the realm of life and consciousness. Bergson insists that "the consciousness that we have of our own personality, in the course of its continuous flow, leads us into the depths of reality, according to the model of which we must imagine others." I am part of everything. If I analyze my "I", then I get limited knowledge Everything, but this knowledge, although limited, is essentially a contact with the All. Through the analysis of myself, I qualitatively enter into Everything. My knowledge is not relative, but absolute, although I have access to only a part of the All. To reach the Absolute somewhere means to reach it everywhere, because the Absolute is not divisible. He is "one" everywhere, in everything that exists. My existence is "durability"; "to last" is to have consciousness. To think about one's own duration is to be able to come to the realization of the duration of the universe.
Bergson Henri
Creative evolution. Matter and memory
Mn.: Harvest, 1999. -1408 p.
Series classical philosophical thought
ISBN 985-433-532-1
Format: djvu, pdf
Quality: good, scanned pages + text layer + table of contents
Language: Russian
Readers are offered the works of Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941), a French idealist philosopher, a representative of intuitionism and philosophy of life.
CONTENT
Brockhaus and Efron. Bergson 5
CREATIVE EVOLUTION. Per. from French M. Bulgakova
Introduction 8
Chapter first. Development of life, mechanism and expediency 15
About time in general. inorganic bodies. Organic bodies: diligence and individuality. On transformism and how to interpret it. Sequential
mechanical view: biology and physical chemistry. Sequential teleology: biology and philosophy. The search for criteria. The study of various transformist theories on a particular example. Darwin and his subtle variations. De Vries and its sudden variations. Eimer and orthogenesis Neo-Lamarckism and the heredity of the acquired. Life breakthrough.
Chapter two. Various directions in the development of life. Immobility, Intelligence, Instinct 115
The general idea of the evolutionary process. Height. Divergent and complementary trends. The meaning of progress and adaptation. The relationship of animal to plant. Diagram of animal life. Development of the animal world. The main directions of the development of life: immobility, intellect, instinct. The original function of the intellect. The nature of instinct. Life and consciousness. Man's place in nature.
Chapter three. About the meaning of life. Order in nature and the form of consciousness 206
The relation of the problem of life to the problem of cognition. philosophical method. The apparent vicious circle of the proposed method The actual vicious circle of the reverse
method. On the possibility of the simultaneous genesis of matter and intelligence. Essential functions of the intellect. A sketch of a theory of knowledge based on the analysis of the idea of disorder, the problem of species and the problem of laws. Disorder and two orders. Creativity and evolution. Material world. Origin and purpose of life. Essential and accidental in life processes and in evolutionary movement. Humanity. The life of the body and the life of the spirit
Chapter Four. The cinematographic mechanism of thinking and the error of the mechanical worldview. System history overview. The Real Becoming Process and False Evolutionism 300
Essay on the critique of the system, based on the analysis of the ideas of "nothing" and "immobility". Existence is nothing. Formation and form Philosophy of form and its concept of formation. Plato and Aristotle. Natural inclination of the intellect Becoming, according to the teachings modern science. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. Criticism of Kant. Spencer's evolutionism
MATTER AND MEMORY. Per. from French A Bowler
Foreword
Chapter first. The choice of images for presentation. The role of the body
Chapter two. Image recognition. memory and brain
Chapter three. About saving images. memory and spirit
Chapter Four. on the differentiation and fixation of images.
Perception and matter. Soul and body
General conclusions
DIRECT DATA OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Per. from French B. S Bankovsky
Preface 670
Chapter first. Intensity of psychological states 672
Chapter two. On the plurality of states of consciousness. Duration Idea 730
Chapter three. On the organization of states of consciousness. Free will 783
Conclusion 850
Application. Rajo. Psychophysiology and philosophy of A. Bergson 866
QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY. Per. from French V. Flerova
Perception of variability 926
Psychophysiological paralogism 960
Dream 980
Memory of the present 1005
Intelligent effort 1050
A note on the psychological origin of our belief in the law of causality 1089
Application. Jussain. Romanticism and Philosophy Bergson 1102
INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS. LAUGHTER. Per. from French V. Flerova and I. Goldenberg
Introduction to Metaphysics 1172
Psychophysical parallelism and positive metaphysics 1223
Laughter 1278
- The meaning of the all-seeing eye tattoo The symbol of the pyramid with an eye in Orthodoxy
- Dream Interpretation: kissing a man in a dream, why?
- Help of a conspiracy for the growing moon Rite for the growing moon for bread
- Dream Interpretation: A cat is giving birth To dream that a cat has not given birth