Studies In Comparative Philosophy

by Swami Krishnananda

Bergson, the philosopher of intuitionism and of creative evolution, conceives Reality as a vital impetus, an elan vital, whose essence is evolution and development. The elan vital is a growing and flowing process, not a static existence which admits of no change whatsoever. Logic and science, intellect and mechanism cannot fathom the depths of the vital impetus which is the basis of all life. There is change and evolution everywhere, nothing merely is. All existence is a flux of becoming, moving and growing, a succession of states which never rest where they are. The intellect works mechanistically and constructs rigid rules and systems which cannot accommodate the rolling evolution of Reality. There can be no enduring substance in the river of life. Everything is changing, goes beyond itself. We can never get immutable things anywhere in the universe. Even consciousness is not unchangeable. It is a living, moving, growing and evolving process. Consciousness is the essence of the elan vital which is the great Reality. It is impossible to know Reality through logic and science. It is known only in intuition which is a direct vision and experience transcending intellectual processes and scientific observations and reasonings. The elan vital is a creative spirit which defies the attempts of the mathematical manner of approaches to it, and demands a deeper sympathy and feeling which will enter into its very essence. In intuition we comprehend the truth of things as a whole, as a complete process of the dynamic life of the spiritual consciousness. Instinct is nearer to intuition than is intellect. Intuition is instinct evolved, ennobled and become disinterested and self-conscious. Instinct, when not directed to action, but centred in knowledge, becomes intuition. Intuition has nothing of the mechanistic and static operations of the logical and the scientific intellect. Intellect is the action of consciousness on dead matter, and so it cannot enter the spirit of life. Any true philosophy should, therefore, energise and transform the conclusion of the intellect with the immediate apprehensions of intuition. Reality has to be lived, not merely understood.

Bergson distinguishes between matter and consciousness. While matter is mechanical, consciousness is creative, organising newer and newer situations in the onward march of evolution which constructs wider fields of consciousness from the situations of the past. The creative consciousness is at every moment in a newer condition, and does not repeat its experiences unless, of course, there is a regression. Though it evolves thus, it does not consist of differentiated parts; it always retains its indivisible character. Consciousness is free and is not determined by any necessity, either of mechanism or of finalism. It is unrestricted in its evolutionary march. We see in Bergson a touch of the Sankhya when he makes matter an instrument for the evolutionary activities of consciousness, though conscious- ness in the Sankhya never changes or evolves in itself. Bergson's consciousness and matter ought really to be conceived as expressions of a deeper impulse in which both have their common ground. But he generally maintains a dualism of matter and consciousness, though very rarely he gives a hint to this monism. Consciousness, he says, grows by drawing material from within itself and not from outside. Matter acts as a resisting force as well as an instrument in rousing the activities of the evolving consciousness. Matter thus provides an opportunity to put to proof the force of consciousness and stimulate its efforts towards further enrichment of itself in self-evolution. Every succeeding stage in evolution is a transcendence of the past, and not a loss of it. Consciousness remains undivided in spite of its change and growth. Bergson conceives Reality as consciousness which is endless duration, Time, becoming and change. God and life are one.

The God of Bergson is a finite, limited movement, ignorant of its future, not omniscient, not omnipotent, always hampered by the presence of matter, struggling against odds, finding with difficulty its next step in the darkness of what is yet to come to it as experience. Bergson's God is not yet born; he is trying to create himself. Who created his future fields of experience, who gives him the impetus to move forward, and from where does he acquire knowledge and consciousness in the future? Where is freedom for consciousness if it is its necessary impulse to act, incapable of check, and dragging everything forward by its impetuous pull? Is not consciousness, then, the tool of an irresistible urge? What is this pull, this urge? Why should it be there at all? How can we say that Bergson is wiser than the great Spinoza who said that even a piece of stone, if it were endowed with a mind, would think that it is freely moving upward when it is really thrown by us into space? What does freedom mean if it is the nature of evolution not to cease and to struggle and again struggle, knowing not where to move? Freedom is always directed by a conscious desirable end, and when such an end is absent, freedom becomes a myth; there remains merely a groping of the impulse to urge itself forward to a destination which is not known. No one knows the purpose of Bergson's evolution. It has no purpose; that is all. The God of Bergson does not appear to be very different from the individuals on earth, who too struggle but know not for what, who too are not omniscient, not omnipotent, and are obstructed from all sides by external forces, who too are suffering through an inevitable strife throughout their life. A God who is constantly dying in the process of becoming is no God. And yet this seems to be Bergson's conception of God. Bergson does not notice that even the concept of change is impossible without an unchanging Reality underlying all change. Who is it that knows that there is change? How does Bergson know that there is ceaseless change, if he himself is moving on, never existing at any moment but only passing away incessantly? How can there be movement alone without something that moves? Who is it that evolves? Certainly, it cannot be evolution itself that evolves, nor is it change that undergoes change. Something ever-enduring, some pure being different from the process of change ought to be admitted in order that we may accept the validity of change and be aware of its existence. Conscious- ness cannot change or evolve; for it is consciousness that knows the fact of change and evolution. Consciousness is not created, but only unveiled; it is eternal being, not becoming. Becoming is the outer crust and the relative object of being. We cannot say that there is an evolution of consciousness as such, for this contradicts the glaring fact that there cannot be a consciousness of evolution without a consciousness that does not evolve. What evolves is mind, not consciousness which is above and behind the mind. God does not create himself, for he is eternal existence. The fields of experience that are open to consciousness in the future stages of evolution are comprehended in this eternal, unchanging experience of God-Being; else there could be no evolution. How can a forward or upward motion of ours be possible if there is nothing ahead of us or above us? All evolution is within God who is at once omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. It is not God that evolves, but the individual and the phenomenal Nature. The Reality behind the elan vital is God whose essence is consciousness. The elan vital itself cannot be God, for it never is, it ever becomes.

There is change and evolution on account of a longing inherent in all individuals to attain their perfection in God. God is the Absolute in relation to the universe. Evolution has an end, a final aim, an eternal purpose towards which everything moves systematically and not blindly or gropingly, and by which it is directed with omniscience. This aim is the Absolute. There is universal evolution because the Absolute is universal being. It has to be realised universally, infinitely, eternally in the consciousness of pure being. The Absolute impels all individuals to evolve, internally as well as externally, for it is inside as well as outside. This impulsion is an inward necessity and not an outward compulsion in the sense that even the outside is an inside in the Absolute, for it is infinite being. What we call an outward universe is really an inward being in eternal consciousness.