Ezra Klein hosts a podcast at NYTimes.com; it’s called The Ezra Klein Show. You can watch it as a video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript. I recently read Klein’s interview with Jonathan Haidt, who’s described as a “social psychologist.” Haidt is a public intellectual who doesn’t get involved in partisan politics. Haidt has been a prominent figure for decades (I wrote about him in 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2023). Haidt is becoming even more prominent now as a result of his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
The Anxious Generation is taking the world by storm. Even in Australia, people are reading it, and trying to reduce the impact of smartphones on children. Many American states are banning smartphones in schools. Haidt thinks that this movement is gathering strength, and may be victorious. He says that social media is a trillion-dollar industry, and “That entire value is created by breaking up the day into tiny little bits and sucking out the attention and selling it to advertisers and selling the data.”
Youngsters can’t concentrate long enough to read a book or watch a movie. Haidt teaches at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He works with his students to regain attention, regain concentration. “We work on turning off almost all notifications, on moving social media off your phone, onto your computer and then, for some, deleting it from the computer.”
Haidt recommends three books to his students:
All three of these books could be called contemporary self-help books. Does Haidt see any value in reading the classics? According to Wikipedia,
| Haidt argued that exposure to stories about moral beauty... cause a common set of responses, including warm, loving feelings, calmness, and a desire to become a better person. Haidt called the emotion moral elevation, as a tribute to Thomas Jefferson, who had described the emotion in detail in a letter discussing the benefits of reading great literature. |
Haidt doesn’t mention meditation in the interview with Klein. Meditation seems to offer a way to concentrate, and block out external stimuli.
In November 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was fighting for the North in the Civil War, wrote to his sister:
| I’ve pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence and I am almost ready to hope spring will see an end.... Believe me, we shall never lick ’em. The Army is tired with its hard, and its terrible experience and still more with its mismanagement and I think before long the majority will say that we are vainly working to effect what never happens — the subjugation... of a great civilized nation. We shan’t do it — at least the Army can’t.1 |
Isn’t this what J. D. Vance and other members of Team Trump are saying about Ukraine? “They can’t win on the battlefield. It’s impossible. They must negotiate.” Nobody knows how Ukraine’s war will turn out, but Team Trump may be able to make Ukraine’s victory impossible by saying it’s impossible.
Vance said to Zelensky, “You guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems.” The North had similar problems in the Civil War; the supply of volunteers dried up, a draft was instituted in March 1863, and there were riots against the draft; the Army had to fire on the rioters.
“Ukraine is very small compared to Russia. In the Civil War, the North had no such disadvantage.” But Afghanistan was also small compared to Russia, but Russia couldn’t defeat Afghanistan, and eventually withdrew. Japan is small compared to Russia, but defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.
When Team Trump says to Ukraine, “You must negotiate,” I’m tempted to add “from a position of strength.” It’s impossible to negotiate with Putin from a position of weakness.
The same is true of China and Taiwan. The pro-peace party in Taiwan says “We can’t stand up to China militarily, especially with U.S. support slipping. We must make peace.” But you can’t negotiate with China from a position of weakness, they will dominate Taiwan as they dominate Hong Kong, Tibet, etc. If Taiwan made a total commitment to standing up to China, and the U.S. made a total commitment to helping Taiwan, perhaps China could be resisted.
The Taiwanese seem softer than the Ukrainians, less willing to fight to the death. Perhaps the Taiwanese feel that life under China’s dictatorship wouldn’t be a bad life, whereas Ukrainians feel that life under Putin’s dictatorship would be a bad life. The Ukrainians want to “face west,” not “face east.”
There are different roads to philosophy. Ruskin approached philosophy through the study of painting and architecture; Alan Watts, through the study of Eastern religion (Zen); Jung and Freud, through the study of psychology; Hegel, through the study of history; Kierkegaard, through Christianity; Thoreau, through nature. Much of my writing could be called literary criticism; I approach philosophy through literature. I’m now reading Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution; Bergson approaches philosophy through the study of biology.
Plato and Aristotle agreed that philosophy begins in wonder.2 Few things are more likely to excite wonder than the behavior of animals. Bergson describes the behavior of a beetle called Sitaris:
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This insect lays its eggs at the entrance of the underground passages dug by a kind of bee, the Anthophora. Its larva, after long waiting, springs upon the male Anthophora as it goes out of the passage, clings to it, and remains attached until the “nuptial flight,” when it seizes the opportunity to pass from the male to the female, and quietly waits until it lays its eggs.
It then leaps on the egg, which serves as a support for it in the honey, devours the egg in a few days, and, resting on the shell, undergoes its first metamorphosis. Organized now to float on the honey, it consumes this provision of nourishment, and becomes a nymph, then a perfect insect. Everything happens as if the larva of the Sitaris, from the moment it was hatched, knew that the male Anthophora would first emerge from the passage; that the nuptial flight would give it the means of conveying itself to the female, who would take it to a store of honey sufficient to feed it after its transformation; that, until this transformation, it could gradually eat the egg of the Anthophora, in such a way that it could at the same time feed itself, maintain itself at the surface of the honey, and also suppress the rival that otherwise would have come out of the egg. And equally all this happens as if the Sitaris itself knew that its larva would know all these things. The knowledge, if knowledge there be, is only implicit. It is reflected outwardly in exact movements instead of being reflected inwardly in consciousness. It is none the less true that the behavior of the insect involves, or rather evolves, the idea of definite things existing or being produced in definite points of space and time, which the insect knows without having learned them. |
Doubtless there are many examples of such instinctive knowledge in the animal world. The behavior of this beetle is unusually complex, but it’s only different in degree from the behavior of other animals, it’s not different in kind. Some questions arise: How did this behavior evolve? How is it transmitted to the next generation? Is this behavior impelled by the same forces that impel physical evolution — the eye of the eagle, the neck of the giraffe, etc.?
Bergson says there are two kinds of consciousness, instinctive and intelligent. When life began to evolve, these two kinds of consciousness were inter-mixed. Later, they traveled different evolutionary paths, they became specialized. Even today, however, they’re not completely distinct: an instinctive animal has a little spark of intelligence, and an intelligent animal like man has some instinct, some intuition.
Bergson asks, How does the Sitaris larva know so much? It’s astonishing that animals have so much knowledge, without any learning/teaching. But if we’ve studied the behavior of particles, if we’ve studied quantum physics, we know that particles have a remarkable amount of “knowledge,” and they aren’t even living things.
So the knowledge of the Sitaris beetle isn’t unique to organic life, it’s a characteristic of the universe. Both particles and organisms operate in a holistic way; they see the end of the chain, not just the next link; somehow they’re aware of what’s around them; they aren’t discrete things, they’re part of a larger whole. They seem to be aware of the future, as well as the present; their awareness seems to extend in time as well as space.
Particles seem to possess knowledge-at-a-distance, just as animal-instinct is knowledge-at-a-distance. Science is uncomfortable with knowledge-at-a-distance and action-at-a-distance, it prefers to explain things by physical contact, by the tangible and visible.
Alas, Bergson doesn’t seem aware of quantum physics. It would have interested him greatly.
Let’s look at another example of instinctive knowledge: the paralyzing stings of certain wasps.
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The different species of [wasps] that have this paralyzing instinct lay their eggs in spiders, beetles or caterpillars, which, having first been subjected by the wasp to a skillful surgical operation, will go on living motionless a certain number of days, and thus provide the larvae with fresh meat. In the sting which they give to the nerve-centers of their victim, in order to destroy its power of moving without killing it, these different species of [wasp] take into account, so to speak, the different species of prey they respectively attack.
The Scolia, which attacks a larva of the rose-beetle, stings it in one point only, but in this point the motor ganglia are concentrated, and those ganglia alone: the stinging of other ganglia might cause death and putrefaction, which it must avoid. The yellow-winged Sphex, which has chosen the cricket for its victim, knows that the cricket has three nerve-centers which serve its three pairs of legs — or at least it acts as if it knew this. It stings the insect first under the neck, then behind the prothorax, and then where the thorax joins the abdomen. The Ammophila Hirsuta gives nine successive strokes of its sting upon nine nerve-centers of its caterpillar, and then seizes the head and squeezes it in its mandibles, enough to cause paralysis without death. The general theme is “the necessity of paralyzing without killing”; the variations are subordinated to the structure of the victim on which they are played. |
A good book could be put together from examples of instinctive behavior, instinctive knowledge, just as a good book could be put together from examples of occult phenomena. Both animal behavior and occult phenomena are mind-boggling, both stimulate wonder, hence both are of special interest to philosophy.
Bergson argues that the establishment view of evolution is too mechanical, too passive. It emphasizes chance and natural selection, and it overlooks what Bergson calls “the explosive force... which life bears within itself.” One might describe this force as vitality, or as a life-instinct. Bergson seems to recognize that this force doesn’t operate alone, there’s also a contrary force, a death-instinct; Bergson speaks of “the explosive force — due to an unstable balance of tendencies — which life bears within itself.” As I said elsewhere, Bergson believed in “two tendencies of life (degradation towards inert matter and mechanism, and continual creation of new forms).”
Bergson argues that the human mind developed to make tools, to mold matter for human ends. Bergson views man as Homo faber. So the human mind is at home with objects, with things, with inanimate matter, and struggles to understand life and movement. When the mind deals with something that’s not an inanimate object, it tries to make it into a thing; this is what we mean by thinking with “distinctness and clearness.” Bergson says that concepts are
| like objects in space.... Taken together, they constitute an ‘intelligible world,’ that resembles the world of solids in its essential characters.... Our logic triumphs in that science which takes the solidity of bodies for its object, that is, in geometry. Logic and geometry engender each other.... Geometry and logic are strictly applicable to matter.... The intellect always behaves as if it were fascinated by the contemplation of inert matter.... Hence its bewilderment when it turns to the living. [It cannot] think true continuity, real mobility, reciprocal penetration — in a word, that creative evolution which is life.... We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life. |
The human mind is comfortable with causality, uncomfortable with creativity. “The causality it seeks and finds everywhere expresses the very mechanism of our industry, in which we go on recomposing the same whole with the same parts, repeating the same movements to obtain the same result.”
While human intellect struggles to grasp life, animal instinct is at home with life:
| Instinct [is] molded on the very form of life. While intelligence treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life. For it only carries out further the work by which life organizes matter. |
Notice that last phrase “life organizes matter.” Bergson isn’t using “organize” as it’s usually used (or perhaps I should say, “Bergson’s translator isn’t using ‘organize’ as it’s usually used”). If you were going to “organize” a pile of bricks, you would put the bricks in rows/stacks; this is the usual meaning of “organize.” But Bergson uses “organize” in a different sense, he uses it to mean “to make organic.” So when Bergson says “life organizes matter,” he means “life brings inorganic matter into the organic realm, i.e., life animates matter.”
This notion of organizing/animating could be applied to the first spark of life, which turned matter into organism. This notion of organizing/animating can also be applied (and I believe Bergson so applies it) to the evolution of life — the evolution of the eye of the eagle, the neck of the giraffe, etc. Evolution is about the spirit of life (the will, the life-instinct) molding matter, “organizing” matter. Bergson compares this molding process to the development of complex instinctive behaviors, and Bergson thereby enriches our understanding of evolution, of instinctive behavior — of life in general.
I discussed two examples of complex instinctive behavior (the reproductive behavior of the Sitaris beetle, and the paralyzing stings of wasps). How do such complex behaviors arise? They arise under pressure, under the pressure to survive, just as physical evolution happens under the pressure to survive. Bergson is a student of memory (as was Proust), so Bergson compares instinctive behavior to remembering: “It is impossible to consider some of the special instincts of the animal and of the plant, evidently arisen in extraordinary circumstances, without relating them to those recollections, seemingly forgotten, which spring up suddenly under the pressure of an urgent need.” The pressure of an urgent need is what leads to complex instinctive behavior, and sudden remembering, and physical evolution.3
Bergson doesn’t subscribe to Lamarck’s theory of evolution, but he does see some merit in it. Bergson thinks Lamarck is right when he says that “at the origin of instinct [and at the origin of species] there is an effort (although it is something quite different, we believe, from an intelligent effort).” When organisms are under great pressure, they make great efforts, but these efforts aren’t intelligent in the way that a chess-player is intelligent; rather, these efforts have an intuitive, non-rational kind of intelligence.
Bergson says that these efforts aren’t individual efforts, they’re group efforts. “The effort by which a species modifies its instinct, and modifies itself as well, must be a much deeper thing [than individual effort].” When a group of organisms is under great pressure, they make great efforts, group efforts, and these efforts lead to the development of complex instinctive behaviors, and complex physical organs, such as the human brain.
So Bergson emphasizes the group, the group will. One might say that there’s a “groupiness” in Bergson’s thought, just as there’s a groupiness in quantum physics (especially in the Double Slit experiment), and in my philosophy of history (which says that group instincts — life- and death-instincts — cause renaissance and decadence).
Let’s return to the paralyzing wasps. How do the wasps know how to paralyze the caterpillar? The wasp is not like “the entomologist, who knows the caterpillar as he knows everything else — from the outside, and without having on his part a special or vital interest.” Bergson believes that the wasp’s knowledge comes from
| a sympathy [i.e., co-feeling, feeling together] between the [wasp] and its victim, which teaches it from within, so to say, concerning the vulnerability of the caterpillar. This feeling of vulnerability might owe nothing to outward perception, but result from the mere presence together of the [wasp] and the caterpillar, considered no longer as two organisms, but as two activities. |
I’m reminded of the “sympathy” between paired particles, a sympathy that results from their “mere presence together.” I’m also reminded of the sympathy that we find in telepathy; telepathy is often based on a feeling of closeness — love or hate or kinship. As Bergson says, animal-instinct resembles human feeling, “unreflecting sympathy and antipathy.” The wasp knows how to sting the caterpillar through “an intuition... which is probably like what we call divining sympathy.”4
Does the wasp have this “divining sympathy” with the caterpillar? This sympathy is related to particle-entanglement, so we can call it a fundamental property of matter, a fundamental property of the universe, as well as a fundamental property of living things. This closeness is a plausible explanation of paralyzing wasps.
Does every generation of wasp discover by sympathy how to sting the caterpillar? Perhaps not. Once the paralyzing sting is “established behavior,” it may be transmitted to the next generation as part of its “inherited knowledge,” as humans inherit archetypes and behaviors. The experiences of the ancestors leave an imprint on the next generation — among people and among animals.
Bergson probably understood animal behavior better than anyone understood it before him. And I doubt that anyone after him has understood his explanation, so his explanation is probably still unsurpassed. Science has no truck with sympathy or telepathy; as Bergson says, philosophy begins where science ends.
As I’ve argued that only the philosopher, only one who looks at the whole, can understand evolution, so only the philosopher can understand the instinctive behavior that we see in the wasp. Bergson says that his explanation of instinctive behavior isn’t scientific, it’s metaphysical, just as Shaw said that only metaphysics could grasp evolution.
How do other scientists account for complex instinctive behavior? Bergson says that one school regards it as “pure mechanism... mere reflex,” while another school regards it as a kind of intelligence. Both schools have a “field day” criticizing the other school’s theory. When dealing with the mysteries of evolution and instinct, it’s far easier to criticize the other person’s theory than to develop a convincing theory of one’s own. (I’m reminded of how easy it is for Democrats to criticize Trump, and for Republicans to criticize Biden.)
© L. James Hammond 2025
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | In the same letter, Holmes wrote “I prefer intervention to save our credit.” What does this mean? It probably means, “I want Britain to intervene on the side of the South, so we don’t have the disgrace of losing to the South alone.” I found the letter in Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, Ch. 2. back |
| 2. | See this essay by Jeff Malpas, who quotes Plato’s Theatatus and Aristotle’s Metaphysics; Malpas also mentions an essay on wonder by R. W. Hepburn.
I recently read the second chapter of Bergson’s Creative Evolution. A year ago, I read, and wrote about, the first chapter; Creative Evolution has four chapters in all. back |
| 3. | Cf. the Jungian view of evolution: “A species of animals, under great pressure or in great need, could produce ‘meaningful’ (but acausal) changes in its outer material structure.” back |
| 4. | Bergson contrasts intelligence and intuition. He says that intelligence “goes all round life, taking from outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life that intuition leads us — by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious.” When a scientist or philosopher makes a big discovery, he’s often using intuition; he feels the truth, he sees the truth, he doesn’t reach truth by reasoning, or collecting data. back |