Henri Bergson and Evolution

Progressive mastery of the environment under Bergson’s watch

Mechanical and moral, mystic and material, man and religion in the creative evolution of Bergson.

This ends of the chapter on the control of the environment.

Its conclusion is simple: humanity constantly optimizes its adaptation to the environment, the ultimate goal being to adapt human to his environment. To close this chapter, we shall rely on a few sentences by Henri Bergson about mechanical progress:

“Human will not rise above earth if powerful tools are not provided to support. He will have to weigh over material in order to detach from it; in other words, the mystic calls for the mechanics; it has not been noted so far, because mechanics, by an accident of switch, was launched on a highway towards exaggerated well-being and luxury for a limited number instead of release for all”.

We fully share this philosophical point of view. Like Bergson, we say that technical progress is a global factor of mystical development. We only disagree about "pollution, waste, and the exaggerated luxury". In our view, those are not "errors of switches" but logical developments.
Current humanity is still marginally aware; it ignores how to progress without excess and violence; in other words how to evolve "consciously". To advance, it often uses primary protocols; it discovers, exaggerates, and goes up to the accident then corrects its course; (discovery, exaggeration, accident, and rectification).

Generally time gradually refocuses progress, leading it towards liberty for all. The archaic evolution will end one day, depending on the level of evolution to reach certain level of consciousness.
Moreover, Bergson well approached it when he concluded: “the origins of this mechanical are perhaps more mystical as one would believe; It (mechanical) will find its true direction - to render services commensurate with his power - only if humanity it has curved, comes by to recover, and watch sky (and all guides in our humanity in this sense)”.

Henry Bergson, creative evolution

The major directions of evolution

under Bergson’s watch

Obsessed by his technical progress, the West has often a grandiose idea of itself. This vision does not reflect reality.
By certain sides, industrialized societies exceed in barbarity so-called primitive societies. They exceed in perversion strongly spiritualized societies that they elected as new enemies.
We are often in denial about our own violence; we dare not ace our monstrosities; we call them «crusade for the Good ", "fight against Evil", "just wars", only to conceal our contempt of others.
Perverse arguments are used to test on humans the latest weaponries. The list is long, all obscenities perpetrated for the Reason. These insults to the Reason require facing our level of evolution; we are much closer to the perturbed young than to the mature man who has reached the age of reason.
But humanity is evolving, and its progress will one day free up all these impulses. Finally, here are a few lines from Henri Bergson the philosopher:

As far as human intelligence is concerned, it was not sufficiently noted that the mechanical invention was initially its essential way, that even today our social life is centered on manufacture and the use of artificial instruments, that inventions are tracing the direction.
We are meeting difficulty in noticing it, because humanity changes are usually delayed on the transformations of its tools. Our individual and even social habits are surviving longer after the circumstances for which they were made, so that the deep effects of an invention are noted when we have already lost sight of the novelty.
[…]
In thousands of years, when the decline of the past would only have left see its outlines, our wars and revolutions will count for little, assuming that one can remember them; a s far as the steam engine or any inventions of all kinds, they are called to talked about bronze as the carved stone, used to define an era. If we could get rid of all pride, and to set our case, we could stick strictly to what history and prehistory present us as constant feature human and intelligence, we might perhaps called ourselves not as Homo Sapiens but as Homo Faber.
Ultimately, intelligence considered in what appears to be the original approach, is the ability of making artificial objects, in particular the tools to make tools and in varying indefinitely its manufacture. Henri Bergson, The creative evolution. Chapter II: "The major axes of Evolution (1907)".

2001


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