'Creative Evolution': Bergson's Critique of Science and its Reception in the German-Speaking World

In L'evolution creatrice (1907), Bergson reviewed the thinking of the biologists of his day about evolutionary and organic processes, and drew some distinctive conclusions about the nature of human understanding, notably privileging intuition over intellect when it comes to grasping the nature of life and evolution. This chapter examines the character of Bergson's arguments, the circumstances in which his text came to be translated into German in 1912, and the range of responses that the work elicited from German intellectuals of the time. It identifies some senses in which Bergson's arguments were assimilated to expectations moulded by German philosophical traditions, and considers what the reception of Bergson's text reveals about the conflicts at work in German literary and intellectual culture in the decade before the First World War.