Canalization and Creative Evolution

Images of Life in Bergson and Whitehead

Resumo

Whitehead famously wrote that the status of life in nature constituted the modern
problem both of philosophy and science. But Bergson could just as easily have penned those
words. Indeed, his Creative Evolution stands as one of the most serious engagements with the
problem of life in recent philosophical history. Life, for Bergson, was to be thought of as a kind
of impetus, a drive or force. But he insisted that this was only an image borrowed from
psychology, the best one available, but an image no less. This is because images are essential to
the organization of scientific discourse and practice. We think through them, use them not only
as explanatory aids, but as callipers first: without them, we are unable to grasp and articulate our
objects of study, even before the endeavour to communicate what it is that we have managed to
grasp. Perhaps most famous of the various images that animate Creative Evolution is that of the
canal, or canalization. It is striking that this image managed to find its way, through Whitehead’s
Process and Reality, into modern embryology, where it continues to serve as an image for the
way epigenetic landscapes operate in order to bring about, or canalize, a small number of end
results form a large number of developmental potentialities.
This paper briefly traces the history of that image from out of Bergson’s philosophy of
life, through Whitehead’s creative metaphysical appropriation of it, and into the embryology of
C.H. Waddington. In order to make sense of that history, I do three things: first, I situate the
image of the canal in Bergson’s Creative Evolution, elucidating its context and aims; second, I
demonstrate its utility for Whitehead’s metaphysics, the new purposes for which it was deployed;
and third, I argue that it was this latter reconfiguration of the concept that prepared it for its
enlistment as a key moment in embryological explanation.
I claim that the canal occupies a privileged position in Bergson’s philosophy of life, for it
is an image of life that is turned against itself as an image, meant to demonstrate the limits of
imagistic thought. I conclude the paper with a series of comments on this suggestion: that it was
the image of the canal that found its way into modern embryology tells us something important
about the relation between science and philosophy, or between image and imagination, matter
and life. On these points, Bergson and Whitehead converge on a novel philosophy of nature that
is capable both of responding to scientific discoveries as well as of accommodating them within
an enlarged process-oriented metaphysics.