Critique of knowledge for life.

 Henri Bergson Lecture on Creative Evolution

A theory of life that is not accompanied by a critique of knowledge is forced to accept, verbatim, the concepts that the understanding puts at its disposal: it can only enclose the facts, by choice or by force, in squares. pre-existing ones that it considers definitive. He thus obtains an easy symbolism, perhaps even necessary for positive science, but not a direct vision of his object. On the other hand, a theory of knowledge, which puts intelligence back into the general evolution of life, will teach us neither how the frames of intelligence are constituted, nor how we can extend or surpass them. It is necessary that these two investigations, theory of knowledge and theory of life, come together, and, by a circular process, push each other indefinitely.

In this way they will be able to solve by a safer method, closer to experience, the great problems that philosophy presents. Because, if they were successful in their common enterprise, they would make us witness the formation of intelligence and, therefore, the genesis of this material whose general configuration draws our intelligence. They would delve to the very root of nature and spirit.

They would replace Spencer's false evolutionism —which consists of cutting the current reality, already evolved, into small pieces no less evolved, then recomposing it with these fragments and thus giving oneself, in advance, everything that is trying to be explained— by an evolutionism true, in which reality would be followed in its generation and growth.

But a philosophy of this kind will not be done in a day. Unlike the systems properly speaking?, each of which was the work of a man of genius and presented itself as a block, which can be taken or left, can only be constituted by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers too, completing, correcting, straightening each other. But neither does the present essay try to solve the most important problems at once. I would simply like to define the method and suggest, on some essential points, the possibility of applying it.

 

The plan has been drawn by the object itself. In a first chapter, we test for evolutionary progress the two garments available to our understanding: mechanism and purpose 1; we show that neither one nor the other is valid for us, but that one of the two could be cut, re-sewn, and, in this new form, fit less badly than the other. To go beyond the point of view of understanding, we try to reconstruct, in our second chapter, the great lines of evolution that life has traveled alongside the one that led to human intelligence. The intelligence is thus placed, once again, in its generating cause, which it would then try to apprehend in itself and follow in its movement. It is an effort of this kind that we attempt—albeit incompletely—in our third chapter. A fourth and last part is destined to show how our understanding itself, subjecting itself to a certain discipline, could prepare a philosophy that surpasses it. For this, a look at the history of systems would be necessary, at the same time as an analysis of the two great illusions to which it is exposed, since human understanding speculates about reality in general.