Creative Evolution

• “Et, le plus souvent, quand l’expérience a fini par nous montrer comment la vie s’y prend pour obtenir un certain résultat, nous trouvons que sa manière d’opérer est précisément celle à laquelle nous n’aurions jamais pensé.”

Ch1: De l’évolution de la vie — Mécanisme et finalité

• “Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although a small part of it only is known in the form of idea.”

• “De cette survivance du passé résulte l’impossibilité, pour une conscience, de traverser deux fois le même état. Les circonstances ont beau être les mêmes, ce n’est plus sur la même personne qu’elles agissent, puisqu’elles la prennent à un nouveau moment de son histoire. Notre personnalité, qui se bâtit à chaque instant avec de l’expérience accumulée, change sans cesse. En changeant, elle empêche un état, fût-il identique à lui-même en surface, de se répéter jamais en profondeur. C’est pourquoi notre durée est irréversible. Nous ne saurions en revivre une parcelle, car il faudrait commencer par effacer le souvenir de lout ce qui a suivi. Nous pourrions, à la rigueur, rayer ce souvenir de notre intelligence, mais non pas de notre volonté (will).” (p. 6)

• Irreversibility… each experiential moment is utterly unique, for experience depends on its historical genesis. Appending to that history necessarily changes it, and nothing is lost from it. It can’t turn back on itself because you can’t subtract to return to an older state, time only adds.

• Thus our futures are unpredictable. For if we could predict them, they would merely by representations of the past, but on the bleeding edge of the present the past ever changes. The portrait painter, even if who he paints remains relatively constant (though truly they are always changing), also changes himself as he paints, thus causing the resulting portrait to be unique and unforeseeable. We are all portrait painters.
• “Matter does not go to the end, and the isolation is never complete. If science does go to the end and isolate completely, it is for convenience of study; it is understood that the so-called isolated system remains subject to certain external influences. Science merely leaves these alone, either because it finds them slight enough to be negligible, or because it intends to take them into account later on.“

• The universe endures, and that duration is essentially creative and unique. Two principal motions, arising and falling. Falling depends on a prior rising, hence growth is primary.

• The stuff of which destruction is made is creation… relatively it can be negative, the rate of change can be negative? But it’s still essentially creative right?

• “Une définition parfaite [d’individualité] ne s’applique qu’à une réalité faite : or, les propriétés vitales ne sont jamais entièrement réalisées, mais toujours en voie de réalisation; ce sont moins des états que des tendances.

• States rather than tendencies. Tendency itself is life. If a state were to be achieved, life would cease.

• “But [the mathematician] is always speaking of a given moment—a static moment, that is and not of flowing time. In short, *the world the mathematician deals with is a world that dies and is reborn at every instant,— the world which Descartes was thinking of when he spoke of continued creation.”

• But life requires a connecting link, a an unbroken duration that links past to present

• “Regarded from this point of view, life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism. It is as if the organism itself were only an excrescence, a bud caused to sprout by the former germ endeavouring to continue itself in a new germ. The essential thing is the continuous progress indefinitely pursued, an invisible progress, on which each visible organism rides during the short interval of time given it to live.”

• Visible life as the organisms expressing a vital, continuous undercurrent. The organisms seem discontinuous, as the instantaneous change of a quanta’s spin seems discontinuous, but might there be an implicit current underneath these abrupt unfoldings?

• “Anything that is irreducible and irreversible in the successive moments of a history eludes science. To get a notion of this irreducibility and irreversibility, we must break with scientific habits which are adapted to the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence to the mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But that is just the function of philosophy.”
• “In vain, therefore, does life evolve before our eyes as a continuous creation of unforeseeable form: the idea always persists that form, unforeseeability and continuity are mere appearance, the outward reflection of our own ignorance.“

• “Radical mechanism implies a metaphysic in which the totality of the real is postulated complete in eternity, and in which the apparent duration of things expresses merely the infirmity of a mind that cannot know everything at once. But duration is something very different from this for our consciousness, that is to say, for that which is most indisputable in our experience. We perceive duration as a stream against which we cannot go. It is the foundation of our being, and, as we feel, the very substance of the world in which we live. It is of no use to hold up before our eyes the dazzling prospect of a universal mathematic; we cannot sacrifice experience to the requirements of a system. That is why we reject radical mechanism.”

• After listing off examples of mathematicians and biologists saying that a superhuman intellect, a mathematical expression of theory of all things, could solve all that is, could predict any future outcome. This is akin to saying the whole of time is determined, closed, an unchanging block. All is given in the present, so to speak. Nothing new, nothing unforeseen, is to be created.

• Finalism vs. Mechanism. Finalism implies a telos from future that draws all to a determined end, an eventual perfection. Mechanism implies a push from the past, an impulse composed of the sum of all the parts that ever were. Both neglect the current of time, both imply a sort of determinism (determined by past vs. future)
• “In considering reality, mechanism regards only the aspect of similarity or repetition. It is therefore dominated by this law, that in nature there is only like reproducing like. The more the geometry in mechanism is emphasized, the less can mechanism admit that anything is ever created, even pure form. In so far as we are geometricians, then, we reject the unforeseeable.“
• “If everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality never recurs. Repetition is therefore possible only in the abstract: what is repeated is some aspect that our senses, and especially our intellect, have singled out from reality, just because our action, upon which all the effort of our intellect is directed, can move only among repetitions. Thus, concentrated on that which repeats, solely preoccupied in welding the same to the same, intellect turns away from the vision of time. It dislikes what is fluid, and solidifies everything it touches. We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect.”
• “Plato was the first to set up the theory that to know the real consists in finding its Idea, that is to say, in forcing it into a pre-existing frame already at our disposal—as if we implicitly possessed universal knowledge. But this belief is natural to the human intellect, always engaged as it is in determining under what former heading it shall catalogue any new object; and it may be said that, in a certain sense, we are all born Platonists.”
• The élan vital likened to a primordial gust of wind branching off after striking a body; a fluid source branching off into rivulets; something of this Whole, this initial impulse, abides in the part. Breath of life, spirit.
• The mechanistic notion of evolution unravelling as a series of random mutations selected for is extremely unlikely if, for two very different species, the same organ/adaptation is adopted. Rather, this would indicate something of a similar living spirit in each of them, an impulse
• “In any particular case one talks as if the process of adaptation were an effort of the organism to build up a machine capable of turning external circumstances to the best possible account: then one speaks of adaptation in general as if it were the very impress of circumstances, passively received by an indifferent matter.”
• On discussing the common evolution of eyes from distant species, the following hypotheses are considered: “Interrogeons sur ce point, tour à tour, les deux systèmes opposés d’explication évolutioniste, l’hypothèse de variations purement accidentelles, et celle d’une variation dirigée dans un sens défini sous l’influence des conditions extérieures.”
• “Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.”
• “We must get beyond both points of view, both mechanism and finalism being, at bottom, only standpoints to which the human mind has been led by considering the work of man.”
• Grappling the contrast of extreme complexity and simplicity. The eye is structurally complex, and yet its function as a whole, sight, is extremely simple. Could the ‘simple’ be the original impetus, around which complexity organizes and strives to reveal?
• Gives a metaphor of a painter and mosaicist. The mosaicist recreates an original painting by overlaying many little squares. The mechanistic view is to see the painting as a collection of little squares. The finalistic view is to see that, on top of the squares, the squares have come together as a plan of the artist. But both are working with squares, while the real source is the painting.
• “But in neither case should we have got at the real process, for there are no squares brought together. It is the picture, i.e. the simple act, projected on the canvas, which, by the mere fact of entering into our perception, is de-composed before our eyes into thousands and thousands of little squares which present, as re-composed, a wonderful arrangement.”
• “So the eye, with its marvellous complexity of structure, may be only the simple act of vision, divided for us into a mosaic of cells, whose order seems marvellous to us because we have conceived the whole as an assemblage.”
• Analogy of movement from A to B. The movement affords the steps from A to B. No amount of steps recreates the movement. In this sense mechanicism and finalism can’t go far enough. But there is also something elegant and simple about the movement, and in this sense accumulating parts goes too far.
• Representing organisation as fabrication is a mistake. The latter gathers many into one, but the former goes from one to many. Fabrication compresses and concentrates, but organisation unravels a concentrate, explodes, radiates outwards (like a seed)
• “Now I recognise that positive science can and should proceed as if organization was like making a machine. Only so will it have any hold on organized bodies. For its object is not to show us the essence of things, but to furnish us with the best means of acting on them.”
• “For us, the whole of an organized machine may, strictly speaking, represent the whole of the organizing work (this is, however, only approximately true), yet the parts of the machine do not correspond to parts of the work, because the materiality of this machine does not represent a sum of means employed, but a sum of obstacles avoided: it is a negation rather than a positive reality.”
• “The vision of a living being is an effective vision, limited to objects on which the being can act: it is a vision that is canalized, and the visual apparatus simply symbolizes the work of canalizing. Therefore the creation of the visual apparatus is no more explained by the assembling of its anatomic elements than the digging of a canal could be explained by the heaping-up of the earth which might have formed its banks. A mechanistic theory would maintain that the earth had been brought cart-load by cart-load; finalism would add that it had not been dumped down at random, that the carters had followed a plan. But both theories would be mistaken, for the canal has been made in another way.”

II: Les directions divergentes de l’évolution de la vie

• “[Evolution] is a creation that goes on for ever in virtue of an initial movement. This movement constitutes the unity of the organized world—a prolific unity, of an infinite richness, superior to any that the intellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its aspects or products.”

• “Is consciousness here, in relation to movement, the effect or the cause? In one sense it is the cause, since it has to direct locomotion. But in another sense it is the effect, for it is the motor activity that maintains it, and, once this activity disappears, consciousness dies away or rather falls asleep.“

• Isa Upanishad. Knowledge vs. action.

• “probably the nervous current may choose its course.
• “…the role of life is to insert some indetermination into matter. Indeterminate, i.e., unforeseeable, are the forms it creates in the course of its evolution.”
• The nervous system as a reservoir of indeterminacy, a reservoir of freedom.