The formality of taking Place

Evoluzione creatrice, arte e psicopatologia

Abstract

The fundamental insight of Bergsonian Creative Evolution is the ‘open totality’. The error of ‘scientific’ cosmology, on the other hand, is to conceive of the totality as a given totality. It treats the whole (the universe) as if it were an isolated, closed system. In Creative Evolution, Bergson interprets the openness of the whole as a ‘tendency’ that splits into diverging lines. How, then, is the unity of the tendency to be conceived in its splitting, a unity which does not exist before the divergence, but which is the event of the divergence, which is its ‘taking place’? Art and psychopathology provide a ‘mediating image’ of the creativity of the Whole and introduce us to a theory of pure experience that will be the subject of a ‘new physics’ indeterminism.