Bergson’s and Whitehead’s Philosophy of Evolution

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Table of Contents

Whitehead
Bibliography
Footnotes

The notion of evolution is infatuated to all thinkers. Both Bergson and Whitehead worked in the same philosophical areas and were involved in psychical research. Their philosophies are often visualized as distinct, even contradictory descriptions of viewpoint.

Bergson –Bergson focuses on modern science in an intuitive but coherent way. He observed change and evolution ubiquitously. In developing his philosophy, he discriminated between matter and consciousness. His philosophy shows that while the matter is perfunctory, consciousness is ingenious, managing newer and newer situations in the process of evolution which makes wider fields of consciousness from the situations of the past.

The description of God in Bergson’s viewpoint is limited, unaware of its future, not omniscient, not all-powerful, always in a weak position by the presence of matter, struggling against likelihood, finding with difficulty its next step in the obscurity of what is yet to come to it as experience. He stated that one can attain knowledge and consciousness in the future through evolution with the presence of omniscience and eternal astuteness in the deep alcoves of our own being, which we are only relating in the process of evolution. Bergson’s approach to defining evolution is under the grip of criticism. It is just a process of the life-force without an end or a purpose.

Bergson mistakenly recognized the unchanging Reality with phenomenal life-force and mind which are subject to change and evolution in time. With this faulty vision, he thought that intend of evolution is in every immediately subsequent stage and not in any eternally fixed being. It is totally flawed thinking. Even God cannot destine the goal of evolution. The errors, bungling, and apparent regressions observed in life do not establish that evolution is not directed by a final aim and that it is all new invention at every succeeding stage of evolution. His spirit of life seems to be a thoughtful perception of the flow of the psychological consciousness and not the recognition of the highest consciousness with a pure being.

The main problem in the philosophy of Bergson is the principle of the psychological functions and naturally, a matter which is presented as the body of the cosmos should be sovereign of these functions. In reality, Bergson explains that intellect is only one of the expressions or adaptations of life in its progress. If instinct becomes self-conscious and ennobled can be recognized with insight, intellect too can become intuition when it is divested of its space-time relations.”

It appears to be a current passing from one germ to another through the medium of a developed organism, an internal push that has carried life by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies.” It is a self-motivated continuity, a continuity of qualitative progress, a duration that leaves its bite on things. ¹ Finally, in reviewing the evolutionary process explained by Bergson that evolution manifests a radical contingency. He indicates that between the ideal humanity and ours one may visualize many possible mediators, equivalent to all the degrees conceivable of Intelligence and Intuition.

Whitehead

Whitehead created two unrelated types of process philosophy. With reference to an evolutionary cosmology, it is apparent that Whitehead himself did not devise an explicit evolutionary cosmology, although he is understood to have formulated a process cosmology. According to his explanation of evolution, the living organ or experience is the living body as a whole. Human experience has its source in the physical activities of the whole organism which tends to readjustment when any part of it becomes unbalanced. Whitehead detained that person cannot decide with what molecules the brain begins and the rest of the body ends.

The human experience is considered as an act of self-origination, including the whole of nature, limited to the perspective of a focal region, located within the body, but not essentially persisting in any fixed coordination within a definite part of the brain. Based on this notion of human experience, Whitehead created a new philosophy of the organism, his cosmology, his defense of speculative reason, his ideas on the process of nature, his rational approach to God. The objective of his exploratory philosophy was to outline a logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms from which every item of our experience can be inferred.

To define process and reality, Whitehead states that “There are two species of process, macroscopic process, and microscopic process. The former process is efficient; the latter process is teleological. The future is merely real without being actual; whereas the past is a nexus of actualities. The present is the immediacy of the teleological process whereby reality becomes actual. The former process provides the conditions which really govern attainment; whereas the latter process provides the ends actually attained”.²

Critics argued that Whitehead forsook substance as a category of existence. He could have reconstructed substance dynamically, but was deceived by the adverse prevalence of the view of substance as something both static and standing by itself. Whitehead contradicted realism every time except the instantaneousness of occasions. Whitehead botched to distinguish the omnipresent role of dialectic in existence, experience, and logic (Archie, 1953).

Although he identified the existence of various opposites and emphasized that opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. Whitehead observed God, in both its Primordial and Consequent Natures, as essential to his Philosophy of Organism.

For Organicism, the matter of whether one selects to regard existence, the universe, or Nature as atheistic or theistic is unimportant.³ In evaluating his philosophical thoughts of evolution, Whitehead is basically inclined with the emergence of new features in instant occasions of experience, beyond that indicated by the constraints of the immediate past on such experience. Whitehead is already at work creating an early account of what will finally become his micro-ontology of the genesis and generic features of actual entities and he finds prior accounts of emergence in evolutionary entirely unsuited to this explanatory task. He did not mention the larger macroscopic evolutionary cosmologies from which these accounts of emergence derive. ⁴

To conclude, Whitehead and Bergson mentioned a thought about the over-intellectualization of reality in explaining evolution. Whitehead believes that Bergson is dedicated to requirement about this built-in to the nature of human intelligence. Whitehead afterward shaped his view more refined and criticized that Bergson has been fraught with ever since he wrote creative evolution that the intellect necessarily deforms reality by spatializing it.

Bibliography

Archie,J. Bahm, Philosophy, An introduction. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1953.

George,R. Lucas, Jr., The Genesis of Modern Process Thought: An Historical Outline with Bibliography. “American Theological Library Association Bibliography Series, 7.” Metuchen, NJ., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1983.

Mason.The Philosophy of Evolution—lecture IV, of Lectures on Bergson, in Modern Philosophers, Pp. 270.

Organicism: The Philosophy of Interdependence,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 7,2 1967, 251-84.

Whitehead,Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology New York: The Free Press. Pp: 214.

Footnotes

Bergson Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution, pp. 27-29.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 214.
Organicism: The Philosophy of Interdependence,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 7,2. 1967, 251-84.
George R. Lucas, Jr., The Genesis of Modern Process Thought: An Historical Outline with Bibliography. “American Theological Library Association Bibliography Series, 7.” Metuchen, NJ., and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1983.

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Bergson’s and Whitehead’s Philosophy of Evolution

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