Negative Evolution

Duration is lived experience. Time, as we know it, is an artifice -- an attempt by the perceiving mind to order experience according to utility. We think of time in terms of what we can do with it. Thus we carve up our lives into years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, vainly attempting to impose finite, metric order upon infinite duration. Nevertheless, spacetime is in constant motion, and the accumulation of that duration, what we call the past, both constitutes and eats into the present. Duration is therefore a creative process, constantly producing the past, present, and future, not to mention evolutionary movement.

These are precepts of Henri Bergson's philosophy, as laid out in Creative Evolution (1907). To make an argument here, I would need to go into much deeper detail, but I want to sketch out a critique (which I'm sure has been made many times since Bergson's argument appeared): is development always positive?

For Bergson, duration is always a creative process that, like a snowball rolling down a hill, accumulates more and more as it moves: more life, more experience, more emotion, more energy, and so forth. He is critical of the so-called "life-sciences," which he argues are only capable of examining the ways in which energy wastes away -- death processes -- rather than truly generative phenomena, such as evolution.

But surely there is a moment for negation? Bergson is not a dialectician, and it shows -- for Hegel, writing a century earlier, there was no movement without the negative. Things only emerge or move that have tarried with and incorporated the negative, through a dialectical process of development. Bergson seems to do away with the negative, as if all development were positive, just experience accumulating upon experience, not toward anything necessarily (he critiqued teleological "finalism"), but nevertheless forward.

Contemporaries of Bergson, most notably Nietzsche, would argue for the possibility (even necessity) of negative development. Not every step is a step forward. History moves, but is it always moving forward? Surely there is a role for retrogression, as well as progression, in the study of life, or society, or history. I don't mean to say that the past is repeatable -- you can't go home again -- at least, you could go home, but it wouldn't be the same home, or you wouldn't be the same, which amounts to alienation in either case. No, the past isn't repeatable, but duration, for me, is not just a process by which things are created. It can also be a process by which they are destroyed.