Editing Henri Bergson (section)

===Creativity===
Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasizes pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a [[process philosophy]]. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, [[free will]], perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the [[foundation of mathematics]] and the limits of reason.<ref>Bergson explores these topics in ''Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness'', in ''Matter and Memory'', in ''Creative Evolution'', and in ''The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics''.
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Criticizing [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]]'s theory of knowledge exposed in the ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'' and his conception of truth – which he compares to [[Plato]]'s conception of truth as its symmetrical inversion (order of nature/order of thought) – Bergson attempted to redefine the relations between science and metaphysics, intelligence and [[intuition (Bergson)|intuition]], and insisted on the necessity of increasing thought's possibility through the use of intuition, which, according to him, alone approached a knowledge of the absolute and of real life, understood as pure [[Duration (philosophy)|duration]]. Because of his (relative) criticism of intelligence, he makes frequent use of images and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use of [[concept]]s, which (he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things. For instance, he says in ''The Creative Evolution'' (chap. III) that thought in itself would never have thought it possible for the human being to swim, as it cannot deduce swimming from walking. For swimming to be possible, man must throw himself in water, and only then can thought to consider swimming as possible. Intelligence, for Bergson, is a practical faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty, a product of evolution used by man to survive. If metaphysics is to avoid "false problems", it should not extend the abstract concepts of intelligence to pure speculation, but rather use intuition.<ref>Elie During, [http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=63 « Fantômes de problèmes »] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080428142556/http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=63|date=28 April 2008}}, published by the [[Centre International d'Études de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine]] (short version first published in ''[[Le magazine littéraire]]'', n°386, April 2000 (issue dedicated to Bergson)</ref>

''The Creative Evolution'' in particular attempted to think through the continuous creation of life, and explicitly pitted itself against [[Herbert Spencer]]'s evolutionary philosophy. Spencer had attempted to transpose [[Charles Darwin]]'s theory of [[evolution]] in philosophy and to construct a [[cosmology]] based on this theory (Spencer also coined the expression "[[survival of the fittest]]"). Bergson disputed what he saw as Spencer's mechanistic philosophy.<ref>''The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics'', pages 11 to 14</ref>

Bergson's ''[[Lebensphilosophie]]'' ([[philosophy of life]]) can be seen as a response to the [[mechanism (philosophy)|mechanistic philosophies]] of his time,<ref name="Creative_Mind">Henri Bergson, ''The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics'', pages 11 to 13.</ref> but also to the failure of [[finalism]].<ref name=Fagot-Largeau/> Indeed, he considers that finalism is unable to explain "duration" and the "continuous creation of life", as it only explains life as the progressive development of an initially determined program – a notion which remains, for example, in the expression of a "[[genetics|genetic]] program";<ref name=Fagot-Largeau/> such a description of finalism was adopted, for instance, by [[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz|Leibniz]].<ref name=Fagot-Largeau/>

Bergson regards planning for the future as impossible since time itself unravels unforeseen possibilities. Indeed, one can always explain a historical event retrospectively by its conditions of possibility. But, in the introduction to the ''Pensée et le mouvant'', he explains that such an event retrospectively created its causes, taking the example of the creation of a work of art, for example a symphony: it was impossible to predict a future symphony as if the composer knew what symphony would be best and wrote it. In his words, the effect created its cause. Henceforth, he attempted to find a third way between mechanism and finalism through the notion of an original impulse, the ''élan vital'', in life, which disperses itself through evolution into contradictory tendencies (he substituted for the finalist notion of a [[teleological]] aim the notion of an original impulse).