Creative Evolution
In recent essays, I’ve been essentially arguing that the Enlightenment’s greatest legacy to human experience is its elongation of time. No longer do we live in a world created by God in 4000 BCE. We live in a world composed of natural processes that have their own durations, their own trajectories, and their own indifferent powers over us.
Thomas Malthus was among the first to fully articulate the entrapment of humanity in the flow of time dictated by nature’s indifference. His ability to see time unfolding this way was in part made possible by Enlightenment geologists such as Buffon and Hutton who simply could not reconcile what they were seeing in fossils and rock strata with a relatively young creation.
Darwin, influenced deeply by both Malthus and Enlightenment geology, could still marvel at the elongation of time as late as 1859:
We can best gain some idea of past time by knowing the agencies at work, and learning how deeply the surface of the land has been denuded, and how much sediment has been deposited. As Lyell has well remarked, the extent and thickness of our sedimentary are the result and the measure of the denudation which the earth’s crust has elsewhere undergone. Therefore a man should examine for himself the great pile of superimposed strata, and watch the rivulets bringing down mud, and the waves wearing away the sea-cliffs, in order to comprehend something about the duration of past time, the monuments of which we see all around us. (The Origin of Species, 1859, 266).
That the long duration of past time is something that humanity still had ‘to gain some idea of’ is an easily overlooked remark. But we are staring into a moment of humanity realizing something profoundly disturbing about itself and its place in the world but which we take for granted—the earth is much older than 6000 years.
As the Enlightenment became Modernity, this consciousness of time became the water in which we swim—it became normalized. But this elongated time drained meaning from the 4000 BCE consensus not simply by making God’s death definitive but by wrapping human consciousness in a twofold problem: 1) We are not special creations of God in His own image; 2) Living is reduced to surviving—all aspirations, all emotions, all that makes us human is only the expression of a desire to survive in a hostile world.
This change in consciousness placed us in time in a way that even Copernicus did not. Copernicus was an astronomer, and his On the Heavenly Rotations was not an atheist’s manifesto so much as a specialist’s attempt to argue that our received astronomical calculations work better if we see the Earth rotating on its own axis while it also rotates around the Sun. He saw the symmetry and beauty of this motion as confirming God, not dethroning Him.
Darwin did much more to make the human condition fundamentally temporal, but in doing so, he didn’t drain the Earth and human existence of meaning. Rather, he gave the human condition a definitive meaning: we exist to survive because we are nothing more than one species among others.
‘Natural selection’ thus became the new Malthusian trap—Darwin was explicit about this. Evolution moves at a pace that humanity does not control. It is slow, plodding, driven by mistakes and experiments, and deeply indifferent to our desires and aspirations—which themselves are nothing but veiled expressions of a will to survive in a fundamentally competitive world.
Nature does the selection; we are merely along for the ride.
Enter Henri Bergson, who saw intelligence and intellect as life’s power to increasingly wrest control over the process of selection from nature.
This is a crucial moment in the history of human consciousness. We are accustomed to a standard Enlightenment narrative of the rise of reason and the fall of superstition, but this story is too simple, too schematic.
This is a story of life and the evolution of intelligence.
Bergson knew the story well.
Élan Vital
In taking up Bergson, I’m interested in the problem of how improbability and indeterminacy are fundamental features of what we call living. In other words, for any thing to be what we call living, it must have some ability to influence the movements and energies in its vicinity with some level of intention.
We shall return to the scope of vicinity in later essays, but for the moment, Bergson helps us understand life as the capacity to influence what is happening, and this influence means introducing indeterminacy into tendencies and trajectories that would otherwise behave differently.
… the rôle of life is to insert some indetermination into matter. (CE 126)
Clearly life means more than simply trying to survive. The power of indetermination is the power to create possibilities. Life itself, if it is to be considered ‘intelligent’, must have this creative ability to ‘insert some indetermination’ into what is otherwise operating on its own.
And here is where the dangers and the possibilities merge, as Zarathustra said to the tightrope walker who has just fallen to his demise: ‘You’ve made your vocation out of danger, and there is nothing contemptible about that. Now you perish of your vocation…’ (Z I 6).
The tightrope walker has embraced a weak form of indetermination that hangs out in an in-between merely as an entertainer for the herd of Last Men watching below. Time neither moves forward nor backward in this in-between—it is locked up in a stasis that weakens the soul as it entertains the crowd.
What is intelligence?
Here is my answer to the question ‘what is intelligence?’ It is the adaptable and expansive capacity to make the future less like fate and more like an open field of possibility.
My answer puts intelligence squarely into a lineage that we can trace back to Henri Bergson in the early twentieth century. Bergson argued in Creative Evolution that if we are to break the hold of intelligence from Platonic transparency and Darwinian survival, we have to understand its relationship to life itself.
For Bergson, to be a living thing means having a capacity to ‘engraft onto the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount of indetermination’ (114). To be alive, in other words, is to break the deterministic hold of time so as to create the possibility for other possibilities. This is a key feature of intelligence, and it is what differentiates it from mere instinct. Both of which, we must note, are manifestations of the same élan vital but are divergent tendencies within élan vital.
A practicing Stoic should easily see this in Seneca’s writings. When he tells us that we can suspend the given meaning of our initial impressions before we act on them—I have been insulted and therefore should see revenge—he is arguing for the expansion of our intelligence as this capacity for indetermination.
In other words, our culture inhabits us so thoroughly that something like an ‘insult’ seems natural and instinctual. There is, according to the Stoics, the presence of ‘assent’. When your impression leads to action without pausing for reflection—I have been insulted—you are behaving mechanically and without freedom. We should, rather, learn the capacity to suspend the culturally given meaning of an immediate intuition to envision other possibilities.
This is intelligent behavior, and it is not easily shoehorned into a definition of intelligence that sees it as getting the correct answer (Plato), nor one that seeks survival and continued existence as its fundamental drive (Darwin).
Thus intelligence must have some capacity to suspend automatic flows that seem like necessity. This suspension opens the possibility for other possibilities. This, of course, is not all that intelligence is, but it does help us to break the narrow hold on intelligence as either transparent accuracy or as a simple will to suvive.
Read more from the Wednesdays series.
This essay is also part my series on Our Computational World.
For more on cultivating our power of purpose, see ‘Cultivating Purpose and Discernment in a Computational World’.
Read my Substack posts on Purpose and Discernment and Faster than Nature for deeper dives into these themes.