Creative Evolution

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

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 a consequential exchanges between philosophy and literature in the modern era.