2020 Global Bergsonism Research Project: "Creative Evolution," Tano Posteraro and Emily Herring

2020 Global Bergsonism Research Project Webinar
November 6-7, and 13
November 7, Session 1 Creative Evolution: Philosophical and Biological Perspectives
Moderator: Yasushi Hirai, Fukuoka University, Japan
Tano Posteraro, Penn State University, USA
“Canalization and Creative Evolution: Images of Life from Bergson to Whitehead and Beyond”
Emily Herring, University of Ghent, Belgium
“Bergson’s Creative Evolution and 20th Century Biology”

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Thanks for all this. I am not a 'Bergsonian', except, perhaps by intuition. I have read a couple of his books and found him very sympathetic to my anti-mechanistic leanings. So I was surprised, Emily, to hear you citing Huxley as a sympathiser of sorts. If you read Huxley's autobiography, towards the end it is hideously, almost brutally, mechanistic, advocating the use of eugenics (after World War II and the Nazis!) and the atom bomb to remove the antarctic ice-cap, amongst other things. He calls down anathema and ridicule on the heads of those of us who criticise such solutions. I read his autobiography while writing a booklet on D H Lawrence and vitalism and Lawrence quarrelled with Huxley in no uncertain manner, even though he was already ill and confined to bed.