Andrew's Wiki
Creative Evolution (changes)

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Basic Ideas

No universal law unless it is continuous creation
- Anti-positivist
- Anti-determinist
  - Takes determinism out of Darwinism (as most people misunderstood Darwin as the erroneous Social Darwinism of Spencer etc)
No discrete states: only tendencies and changes
- We create ourselves continually (make your life!)
Time
- He builds up from his original commentary on time in Matter and Memory (1896):
  - Real present is duration: one foot in past and one in future
  - Memory coextensive with the present (you remember in the present)
  - Temps versus duree
    - Temps: scientific measured time, chunks, given interval, homogeneous, clear cut
    - Duree: lived, intense, not divided but linked, continuous, uneven
- Is a creative force, but without a telos
- Time is constitutive of life
- Time takes a bite out of objects
A philosophy of daily life, a revision of how we live
- Humans are significant but integrated into a whole made of all inorganic and organic
Qualitative Multiplicity: objects are related but not homogeneous (not quantitative multiplicity)
- There is no repetition (cf Stein)
Truth of life is Change: irreducible, irreversible, radical change

The communist body? “Things happen as if every higher organism was born of an association of cells that have subdivided the work in between them…in the genesis of the body, a haunting of the social form” (173)
“Hence, throughout the whole realm of life, a balance of individuation and association.” (172)
- Here, he’s talking about a poem, then says it applies to microorganisms as well
Introduction: “We must break with scientific habits” because they can’t understand the irreversible, irreducible movement of time. Life may be a mechanism, he says, but an organic mechanism.

Revised on August 21, 2008 18:01:23 by Shawna? (71.58.78.59)