Creative Evolution

1. Real Duration: Life's Essence is Continuous, Irreversible Becoming.

For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Our inner experience. We perceive our own existence as a continuous, irreversible flow, where the past constantly accumulates into the present, creating something absolutely new at every moment. This "real duration" is not merely one instant replacing another, but a ceaseless swelling of our being, much like a snowball rolling down a hill. Our memory, far from being a static storage, is this very prolongation of the past into the present, shaping our character and actions.

Inertia's illusion. In contrast, our intellect tends to view unorganized matter as a collection of discrete, unchanging parts, where time is merely an abstract measure of simultaneities or correspondences. This scientific perspective, while useful for action, treats objects as if they do not "grow old" or have a history, implying that their future is entirely calculable from their present. However, even in the material world, phenomena like sugar dissolving in water reveal an undeniable, absolute duration that cannot be sped up or slowed down at will, hinting at a deeper, continuous reality.

Beyond static views. The universe itself endures, constantly inventing and creating new forms. The systems science isolates are mere abstractions, convenient for study, but never fully detached from the continuous flow of the Whole. True understanding requires recognizing that duration means invention, the creation of forms, and the continual elaboration of the absolutely new, a process that cannot be captured by static, mathematical models alone.

2. Intellect's Bias: Designed for Action on Inert Solids, Not Life's Fluidity.

Our intellect, in the narrow sense of the word, is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among themselves—in short, to think matter.

Action's blueprint. The human intellect, shaped by the evolutionary needs of action, is primarily a tool for manipulating inert matter, especially solids. Our concepts, logic, and even language are modeled on the properties of stable, divisible objects, allowing us to predict, construct, and control our environment. This inherent bias makes our intellect triumph in fields like geometry, where it can follow its natural movement with minimal reliance on experience.

Life's elusive nature. However, this practical orientation renders the intellect ill-equipped to grasp the true nature of life, which is fluid, continuous, and constantly evolving. Life's processes—such as individuality, growth, and creative evolution—resist being forced into the rigid, discontinuous molds of intellectual thought. When applied to the living, our reasoning often feels uneasy, and biological discoveries rarely stem from pure intellectual deduction, suggesting that life overflows our conceptual categories.

A symbolic truth. When the intellect attempts to explain life, it inevitably reduces it to mechanical or finalistic terms, treating the living as if it were inert. This yields a symbolic, artificial understanding, useful for scientific action but not for direct insight into life's essence. To truly comprehend life, we must acknowledge the intellect's limitations and seek a different mode of knowing, one that can embrace continuity, real mobility, and reciprocal penetration, rather than dissecting reality into static, external parts.

3. Life's Divergence: A Single Impetus Splits into Vegetative Torpor, Instinct, and Intelligence.

The evolution movement would be a simple one, and we should soon have been able to determine its direction, if life had described a single course, like that of a solid ball shot from a cannon. But it proceeds rather like a shell, which suddenly bursts into fragments, which fragments, being themselves shells, burst in their turn into fragments destined to burst again, and so on for a time incommensurably long.

A branching river. Life's evolution is not a linear progression but a dynamic, divergent process, like a bursting shell scattering fragments. This branching is driven by an internal "explosive force" (an unstable balance of tendencies) and the "resistance" of inert matter. The initial vital impetus, a unified tendency, splits into multiple paths as it grows, with some leading to dead ends and others to higher forms.

Two primary paths. The first major divergence separated plants from animals.

• Plants: Chose a path of fixity and insensibility, focusing on accumulating solar energy by creating organic matter from mineral elements (e.g., chlorophyllian function). Their consciousness, if present, remains largely "asleep."
• Animals: Chose a path of mobility and awakened consciousness, expending accumulated energy in discontinuous, locomotor actions, necessitating the development of sense organs and nervous systems.

Further divisions. Within the animal kingdom, the vital impetus further bifurcated into two main highways:

• Instinct: Culminating in insects (e.g., hymenoptera), characterized by specialized, inborn mechanisms and an "acted" knowledge.
• Intelligence: Culminating in man, characterized by the ability to create and use unorganized, artificial instruments.

These are not successive stages of a single tendency, but fundamentally different, complementary directions of an activity that has split up as it grew, each retaining traces of their common origin.

4. Instinct vs. Intelligence: Two Complementary, Divergent Modes of Knowledge and Action.

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.

Opposite yet intertwined. Instinct and intelligence represent two radically different, yet complementary, ways of knowing and acting upon the world. They are divergent developments of a single original psychical activity, never found in a pure state, but always retaining a "fringe" of the other. This intermingling often leads to misunderstandings, as we mistakenly try to reduce one to the other.

Instinct's intimate knowledge. Instinct is characterized by an innate, implicit knowledge of specific things, often manifested as a natural ability to use or even construct organized, inborn instruments. It is a "knowledge at a distance," like vision to touch, operating from within the object.

• Nature: Innate knowledge of a matter (specific objects).
• Action: Uses organized, natural instruments.
• Consciousness: Often unconscious or "neutralized" by action, only flashing out when thwarted.
• Example: A wasp's precise paralyzing sting, acting as if it "knows" the victim's nerve centers through a kind of "divining sympathy."

Intelligence's formal grasp. Intelligence, conversely, is the faculty of manufacturing and using unorganized, artificial instruments. It possesses an innate knowledge of relations (forms), allowing it to adapt to diverse situations and create new solutions.

• Nature: Innate knowledge of a form (general relations).
• Action: Constructs unorganized, artificial instruments.
• Consciousness: Normally conscious, as it constantly faces difficulties and choices.
• Example: Human tool-making, where the tool is external and adaptable, leading to unlimited possibilities.

While intelligence can seek universal truths, it struggles with the intimate, specific knowledge instinct possesses. Instinct, though profound, is limited to its specialized object and does not "speculate."

5. The Illusion of Nothing: A Pseudo-Idea Born from Practical Disappointment.

The idea of the absolute nought, in the sense of the annihilation of everything, is a self-destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word.

The void is full. The concept of "nothing" or "non-existence" is not a pure intellectual idea but a "pseudo-idea" rooted in our practical, action-oriented minds. When we imagine "nothing," we are actually oscillating between the perception of an external void (absence of one object, presence of another) and an internal void (absence of one state of consciousness, presence of another). We cannot truly conceive of the absolute annihilation of everything, because the act of conceiving itself implies existence.

Negation's subjective nature. Negation is not a symmetrical opposite of affirmation. Affirmation directly states what is; negation, however, is a judgment about a judgment. When we say "This table is not white," we are implicitly correcting a potential belief that it is white, and suggesting that some other color exists. This act of denial is inherently pedagogical and social, aimed at warning or correcting, rather than simply describing reality as it is.

Action's influence on thought. Our daily lives are driven by desires and the need to fill perceived "voids" – not an absence of things, but an absence of utility. We act to create something we want, moving from a state of "nothing" (what we lack) to "something" (what we achieve). This practical habit of moving from "void to full" unconsciously shapes our speculative thought, leading us to believe that reality itself fills a pre-existing "nothingness." Dispelling this illusion is crucial for a philosophy that embraces duration and free creation.

6. The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought: Intellect Captures Static Snapshots, Missing True Movement.

The process then consists in extracting from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular movement by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes. Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge.

Static views of flux. Our intellect, designed for action, naturally perceives reality through a "cinematographical mechanism." It takes a series of static "snapshots" of continuous becoming—qualities, forms, positions—and then strings them together with an abstract, uniform "movement in general" to simulate change. This method is practical for predicting and manipulating, but it fundamentally misrepresents the true, indivisible flow of duration.

Zeno's paradoxes. The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea brilliantly exposed the inherent flaw in this intellectual approach. His paradoxes, like the "flying arrow" or "Achilles and the tortoise," demonstrate that trying to reconstruct movement from a series of static positions leads to absurd contradictions.

• The arrow: If the arrow is at rest at every point in its trajectory, how can it move? The error lies in assuming movement is the sum of motionless points, rather than an indivisible act that creates the trajectory.
• Achilles: If Achilles must first reach where the tortoise was, and then where it moved to, and so on, he will never catch it. This fallacy arises from arbitrarily dividing continuous motions into discrete, static intervals.

Beyond the snapshots. To truly grasp movement and becoming, we must "install ourselves within it," experiencing its continuous, indivisible nature. The intellect, by its very structure, is unable to do this; it can only analyze the "already made" and reconstitute it from stable elements. This inherent limitation means that while the cinematographical method is indispensable for science and action, it is fundamentally inadequate for understanding the radical becoming that constitutes reality.

7. Evolution's True Nature: A Creative Impulsion, Not a Pre-Determined Plan or Accidental Accumulation.

Evolution is not only a movement forward; in many cases we observe a marking-time, and still more often a deviation or turning back.

Beyond mechanism and finalism. Evolution is neither a purely mechanical process of accidental variations accumulated by natural selection (Darwinism/Neo-Darwinism) nor the realization of a pre-determined plan (radical finalism). Both these views, by reducing becoming to "all is given," fail to account for the genuine novelty and unforeseeableness inherent in life. The appearance of identical complex organs (like the eye) on divergent evolutionary paths strongly refutes purely accidental explanations, suggesting a deeper, common driving force.

A deeper effort. Neo-Lamarckism, which posits that individual effort and acquired characters can be inherited, comes closer by introducing a psychological principle. However, it still struggles to explain the profound complexity of organ development and the irregular nature of hereditary transmission. The true cause must be a "deeper thing," an effort that is not purely accidental nor solely individual, but common to the species and inherent in the germ-plasm.

The vital impetus. This underlying force is the "original impetus of life," a need for creation that passes from generation to generation. It is a limited force, constantly striving to introduce indetermination and freedom into matter, but also encountering resistance and being diverted. This impetus explains the unity of life's movement, the divergence into different forms, and the occasional convergence on similar structures, as different species draw from the same original source to solve similar problems in their unique ways.

8. Man's Unique Freedom: Consciousness Breaks Automatism, Opening Unlimited Possibilities.

In man, and in man alone, it sets itself free. The whole history of life until man has been that of the effort of consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less complete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which has fallen back on it.

The chain broken. While animal consciousness is largely "captive" to the mechanisms it sets up, limited to variations on routine and creating new automatisms, human consciousness represents a radical break. Man's brain, with its unlimited capacity to form new motor mechanisms and oppose old habits, allows consciousness to disengage from automatism and achieve true freedom. This is a difference of kind, not merely degree, separating man from the rest of the animal world.

Language and society as liberators. Language plays a crucial role in this liberation, providing consciousness with an "immaterial body" to incarnate itself, freeing it from exclusive focus on material objects. Social life further amplifies this, storing collective efforts and setting a higher baseline for individual development. These external signs—brain, language, society—all point to a unique internal superiority, a singular success in life's evolution.

The ultimate goal. Man, therefore, can be seen as the "term" and "end" of evolution in a special sense: he is the point where the vital impetus has most freely passed, overcoming obstacles and opening an unlimited horizon. While life's journey has involved "losses" (represented by other species that fell into torpor or limited instinct), humanity embodies the triumph of consciousness in creating an instrument of freedom out of matter, using determinism to transcend mechanism.

9. Philosophy's Task: To Transcend Intellect through Intuition and Embrace Absolute Duration.

Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis.

Beyond intellectual limits. Traditional philosophy, by relying solely on the intellect and its static, cinematographical method, often falls into pseudo-problems and an incomplete understanding of reality. To truly grasp life and duration, philosophy must transcend the intellect's natural bent, making a "leap" into intuition. This is a "painful effort," doing violence to our intellectual habits, but it is the only way to access the "more vast something" from which our understanding is cut.

Intuition as expanded instinct. Intuition is not irrationality, but "instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely." Just as an artist, through sympathy, enters the object to grasp its living intention, intuition allows us to place ourselves within life's movement, experiencing its reciprocal interpenetration and endlessly continued creation. It is the "lamp almost extinguished" in man, which philosophy must seize, sustain, and expand.

A unified knowledge. By combining scientific knowledge (which, when applied to inert matter, touches the absolute) with metaphysical knowledge (derived from intuition into life's duration), we can achieve a more complete and profound understanding of reality. This approach reveals the unity of spiritual life and the true relationship between body and spirit, showing how consciousness, distinct from the brain, is freedom itself, flowing through humanity and creating souls. Philosophy, thus understood, becomes the study of becoming in general, a true evolutionism that continues and completes science.