Creative Evolution

Henri Bergson, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 for the brilliance of his prose, was one of the most influential philosophers of the early twentieth century. Creative Evolution introduced the concept of the élan vital—a vital impulse driving the evolutionary process—and developed his revolutionary theory of duration as lived time, fundamentally distinct from the measurable clock time of the sciences. His ideas profoundly shaped the work of Marcel Proust, Gilles Deleuze, and William James.

Writing in the fertile intellectual atmosphere of pre-World War I France, Bergson challenged the mechanistic worldview that dominated late nineteenth-century thought, proposing instead a philosophy rooted in intuition, creativity, and the irreducibility of lived experience. His influence on Proust's treatment of time and memory in In Search of Lost Time represents one of the most consequential exchanges between philosophy and literature in the modern era.