The bio-philosophical "insufficiency" of Darwinism for Henri Bergson's metaphysical evolutionism

Abstract

The main goal of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of nature is to offer a dynamic understanding of living phenomena. It is in this context that we maintain that the author left us a “bio-philosophy”, that is, an interpretation which, by adopting a positive model of biology as a cognitive paradigm, describes the essential character of living activity as time or duration (durée). Bergson’s positive metaphysics, which brings scientific positivity to the metaphysical field and provides an inner perspective of the vital principle, consolidated itself in the study of evolutionary theories like Darwinism. However, the specificity of the perspective Bergson presents to us lies in the fact that he positions himself as a philosopher and not as a man of science: he does not seek a merely positive explanation of reality, but an integral vision that allows us to give scientific evolution a metaphysical reading. Thus, when Bergson upholds the insufficiency of pure Darwinism, and proposes a true evolutionism, it is because he considers that the only way to understand the evolutionary nature of life is by overcoming a strictly mechanistic perspective. For Bergson, such an interpretation results from the artificial way in which our intellectual functions deconstructs reality and leads to an incomplete and fragmented reading of the evolution of organisms. As a philosopher he seeks an explanatory level which, being positively based, is not restricted to the physico-chemical limits of reality. For that reason, Bergson claims that the inner cause of evolution is an activity where growth and division occur as a natural result of the divergence of life’s tendencies.