‘The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.’
Creative Evolution is the most famous work of distinguished French philosopher Henri Bergson and contains the fullest expression of his philosophy. In the early 20th century, the two most popular versions of the theory of evolution was either Darwin’s natural selection or classical philosophy’s teleology. Bergson proposed a different theory of evolution that is not conditioned by either existing forces or future aims. For him, there exists a “life force” (élan vital) that generates a disordered and unpredictable creativity. This creativity is what drives evolution and is also what makes evolution nondeterministic. In outlining his theory of evolution, Bergson analysed in detail the ideas of thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to his contemporaries like Herbert Spencer. Bergson was a hugely influential thinker during his time, significantly influencing modernist writers such as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann as well as philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Creative Evolution was one of the most popular books of the early 20th century.
Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who was influential in the tradition of continental philosophy during the early 20th century. Bergson was known for his arguments regarding the importance of intuition and immediate experience over abstract rationalism. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature.