​Chapter 15. Life

Call the act expenditure, the will spending itself as energy, and a mistake opens the moment the words land. It is the warmest mistake on offer, and it sounds like life. Energy, becoming, flow, creation — the whole vocabulary leans toward the philosophies that set life or process at the root and call the living the real. Substance is dead, and what is primary is a moving thing; the tradition that says so has done real work clearing the corpse of fixed essence off the table. Then it sets a living thing in the empty place and calls that the ground; a nature like any other, only warm. Life is already a form — a continuity, a power that repeats itself, and what repeats has already set into the answer it keeps giving. But warmth is not freedom. The act comes before nature has settled into either the dead or the living.

Bergson is the one to meet first. He stands against the mechanism, which builds the new from rearranged old parts and never reaches anything that was not already there. He is right that reality cannot be caught whole in spatial, motionless categories, that the intellect freezes the living into fixed schemes the way a film cuts motion into stills. Novelty is no reshuffling of what was.

What Bergson does with it is give the act to duration. Durée is continuity — inner time, memory, the past swelling forward into the present and carried in it, a flow that holds itself together. He freed time from the clock, and then made it the medium the act lives in. For us time is the first thing the gesture deposits, the earliest residue, with the act before it. So durée arrives too late by a whole order: by the time there is a duration to flow in, a memory gathering, the gesture has already hardened into the before and after that duration is made of.

Élan vital comes nearer still, near enough to the language of energy to be taken for it. Energy here is the will in the moment of spending, the pressure of the act. The élan vital is a vital surge running through evolution, through forms and branching lines of development, carrying a direction and a history. It is energy that has become a current. It has a memory and a tendency; it holds itself through time and presses the way it has been pressing. The act has no current and no behind — it is the break, sourced in nothing it carries forward. Bergson escaped dead nature by making nature alive, and a living nature is still a thing that continues itself, a flow keeping its shape across the moments.

Bergson has an answer ready: he has real novelty, a creative evolution that brings forth what no calculation held. Granted, and it falls short of freedom. A novelty that rises within a flow is the flow's own novelty, a new state the current throws up, owned by the current and sourced in its tendency — process making more process, surprising and continuous at once. The act does not belong to the flow as one of its states. It is the break before the flow has set as such, the answer the current did not contain and could not become.

Whitehead is more dangerous for us, as his world is already made of processes. He starts from no things at all; reality is actual occasions, drops of process that arise, take in the occasions before them, come to be, and perish. He is right against substance, that the thing is secondary to the happening and that permanence is the derived thing and process the basic one. What appears to be a thing is actually the settling of an event into material for the next one. The occasion perishes and becomes a datum for what follows.

That is where he can be answered. The perishing of the occasion into datum, the inheritance of the spent event by the one arising, is the cooling, the very moment a gesture stops being enacted and turns into something for the next gesture to lean on. Whitehead found the residue and made it the structure of reality. The actual occasion never escapes the process that frames it: prehension, concrescence, the inheritance of the past, the lure toward order — the event is a unit of process, domesticated by the grammar it lives in. And over the whole, Creativity stands as the ultimate principle, the category through which every becoming is understood. A principle of all becoming is a nature of all becoming. The act cannot be the universal rule of process; a principle that yields a kind of happening is a residue, and the rule of all becoming is the deepest residue there is, the one no becoming climbs out from under. Whitehead handed the process the office substance used to hold, and an office filled is still a nature.

So both warm the dead world back to life and call the warmth the truth. The living world is realer than the mechanical one, and it is residue still — the warmest residue, the last disguise nature wears and the hardest to strip as it feels like being alive. The act is colder and earlier than that: before the flow, before the current finds its direction and the occasion settles into a datum. What can ever be met is the trace it leaves, warm or cold, and the trace is met only once it stands forth.