Matter and Light in Bergson’s Creative Evolution

Bergsonism is characterized by its quest for a “living unity” that would link life, consciousness and the material universe. Clearly, for a philosopher who takes as his starting point the experience of conscious life, and whose line of inquiry concerns what our experience registers, the most difficult aspect is to connect this psycho-vital experience to matter. This difficulty is not unique to Bergsonism; most of the philosophies of nature at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century that consider the question of cosmological unity (especially those of Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Tarde) find that matter poses a problem. The concept of matter seems heavily saturated with intellectual representations that prevent its being included in the “living unity” of the cosmos. Therefore it is not surprising that Bergson considered one of the most important stakes of Creative Evolution to be the comprehension of the material universe as being of the same nature as the self. Thus he told the Société Française de la Philosophie in 1908 that “One of the objects of Creative Evolution is to show that All is […] of the same nature as the I, and that one grasps it by a more and more complete immersion in oneself” (Mélanges, 774).