Henri Bergson was born in 1859, the same year as John Dewey and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. His major works were Time and Freewill (1889), An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), Creative Evolution (1907), and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Bergson taught at the University of Paris for most of his career, but he was well-known all over the world. Bergson died in 1941 at the age of 82.
At the core of his evolutionary philosophy was the distinction between two entirely different ways of knowing reality, that of objective external analysis and that of internal, direct intuitive experience. The former provides relative, limited knowledge of its subject while the latter, according to Bergson, yields absolute knowledge of its subject. Following the objective analysis of a phenomenon we obtain factual and physical knowledge of its nature, but in following our intuitive knowledge of a phenomenon we gain direct knowledge of its essential nature. While the former method provides us with an external, scientific understanding of its nature, the latter provides us with an internal, deeper understanding.
Our objective knowledge of an object or situation is relative and subject to error, while our intuitive, direct knowledge of it goes directly to its essential situation in time and space is always limited to our perspective and position in the world, while our direct, intuitive knowledge engages the reality in question as it is in itself, not in relation to any observer. Our knowledge of both time and space, as well as the realities in them, is thus always subject to error and misunderstanding.
When moving from epistemological questions to those of metaphysics Bergson focused on that which he contended characterizes the basic nature of reality, namely a driving force, which he labeled elan vital, at the heart of all existence. Bergson taught that at the core of this driving force is a power which seeks to eternal extend itself beyond the present toward self-fulfillment in the future. He claimed that this elan vital is clearly seen at work in the process of evolution as it displays itself down through history. This process has produced a vast display of life forms and developments here on earth, culminating in humans.
Thus, we see that Bergson’s philosophy bears a striking resemblance to the evolutionary science developed and propagated by Charles Darwin’s evolutionary works. However, where Darwin failed to see any moral dimension at the heart of the evolutionary process, Bergson sought to ground the understanding in both morality and religion in it. In his book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion Bergson argued that human moral and religious thought arise from the powerful dynamic created by two contrary human tendencies. One, the drive to preserve what human societies have always sought, to codify whatever insights and directives have been established in the past as providing guidelines for a society’s future.
Secondly, these same societies have always found a need to drive beyond these very standards and directives to establish what are thought to be higher, better standards by which to live. Bergson labelled the former efforts the static drive or dimension within human culture and society, while the latter he labelled the dynamic force within the development of cultures. Human history, according to Bergson has and will be driven by the dynamic relation between these two behavioral forces.
Bergson seemed not to have believed that either of these two forces is more worthy or important than the other: both are necessary and both are inevitable. Thus, he did not seek to establish any moral value to the various stages or levels of the evolutionary process. In this sense he did not seem to believe in any notion of moral progress or development within human history. I had a friend who wrote his doctoral dissertation on just this issue, and he concluded that Bergson was entirely without any views concerning the superiority of any value system over another. So, this raises the question as to whether he was really an evolutionary thinker.