Heroes Not Zombies

One of Henri Bergson’s concepts is that evolution is a creative process.

Bergson saw life as an immense current of consciousness, a spiritual force, brimming with potentialities, penetrating matter and organizing it, “colonizing” it, as it were, in the service of increasing its own freedom. Matter, resistant to life’s impulses, impedes its advance and scatters its energies. Yet, as he argues in Creative Evolution, this current of consciousness seems to have been successful in at least three attempts to gain a foothold on matter: in the plant world; in the world of the insects; and in the vertebrates, who have so far culminated in ourselves.

He says

The vegetable world has fallen asleep in immobility…..In the world of the insects, specifically in the ants, what life gained in social organization and cooperation, it lost in initiative and independence; here instinct rules supreme…..the ant shows little in the way of intelligence, being completely dominated by instinct

If in plants and insects life has “stalled,” in the vertebrates there still remains the possibility of setting free “something which in the animal still remains imprisoned and is only finally released when we reach man.”8 For Bergson, humankind is the front line of evolution, the tip of the élan vital’s advance, the being in which the life force has most successfully organized matter to its own end of increasing its knowledge of itself and its freedom