Bergson versus Descartes: The conflict of worldviews upon which our future may depend

Seeing | Philosophy of Science

Prof. John Lawrence Nazareth, PhD | 2026-02-20

We live today during an era of immense promise and enormous threat. On the one hand, there has been an explosive growth in scientific knowledge and engineering skills across all fields of human endeavor, coupled with the ability to communicate information of every kind, almost instantaneously, across the entire planet. On the other hand, these advances and attendant human hubris have brought us to the very brink of catastrophe: nuclear annihilation; climate change caused by our excessive extraction and burning of long-sequestered coal, oil, and natural gas; and human-caused mass extinction of plant and animal species upon which human survival is ultimately dependent. There appears to be something profoundly wrong with our entire view of the world in which we live, demanding a reappraisal akin to the replacement of the Ptolemaic world model by the Copernican.

In a recent book, The Nature of No-Thing: Reflections of an Algorithmic Scientist on an Era Between Gods [1], I have described how the “natural philosophy of organism” of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), in conjunction with that of other great philosopher-scientists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, provides the means for achieving a revolutionary transformation in our conception of the world, by replacing the Cartesian worldview with the Bergsonian.

In this short essay, I will follow the same line of argument as in my book, but now only in outline, and with much more of a personal flavor. I will discuss, in turn, the strengths and weaknesses of symbolism, the Cartesian dictum-and-worldview of “things,” and the Bergsonian dictum-and-worldview of “no-thing.”

 

The Latin word “sapiens” means “wise” or “discerning,” and it is a testament to human hubris that we define our species as “Homo sapiens,” sometimes even doubling down on that label as “Homo sapiens sapiens.” In fact, Homo symbolicus would be much more appropriate, because symbolism is the very hallmark of the human species, the source of both its strengths and its weaknesses. It is the means whereby we live and die!

Symbolism is most easily understood within the context of linguistics, and an eye-opener for me was The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by the eminent anthropologist and neurologist, Terrence Deacon [2]. It is our ability to operate with spoken and written symbols that sets us apart. Most people have an intuitive notion of the meaning of the word “symbolic,” namely, the use of “something” to represent, signify, and stand for “something else.” However, the word is employed in three very different senses, which specialists in linguistics distinguish by the names iconic, indexical, and symbolic, a terminology that was introduced by the philosopher Charles S. Peirce. He used the term sign to embrace all three usages and reserved the name “symbolic” for the third, which lies at the very foundation of modern human language.

Informally stated, a sign is a stimulus pattern, or signal, that has a meaning, and the way that the meaning is attached to the sign tells us whether it serves as an icon, an index, or a symbol. Thus, an icon is a sign that bears a physical resemblance to the “something else” it is chosen to represent. An index is a sign that correlates with the “something else” in our environment that it signifies. Finally, a sign, now possibly just an arbitrary pattern, is said by linguists to be a symbol when it gets its meaning primarily from its mental association with other symbols and only secondarily from its resemblance or correlation with environmentally relevant properties.

Signs in general can run the gamut from visual to audible to tactile, even to symbols that arise in our dreams. Indeed, any signal or pattern that is accessible to our senses can serve as a sign in one or more of its three manifestations. The claim made by Terrence Deacon and others is that only the human species is capable of full-blown symbolism through the various forms of spoken and written human language and its ultimately refined expression that is modern mathematics. This symbolizing ability developed in parallel with human brain evolution over an extended period of at least a million and a half years. In contrast, Deacon speculates that other species of animals are capable of using only iconic and indexical signs and do most of their thinking on the basis of associated visual, audible, and olfactory images (and perhaps other types too that are not available to humans). We humans, instead, capture the world through a “net” spun from symbolic words—spoken, written, signed, or even just silently comprehended—that provide us with our primary means for locating and obtaining food, attracting mates, and establishing status, the three activities that occupy much of a human being’s waking hours.

Mathematics is, of course, the most elevated and precise form of symbolization of them all. Beginning with the concept of number and its representation by decimal numerals—i.e., sequences composed from the symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, … , 9—it has evolved over time into the magnificent edifice that today serves as the `language’ of modern science. Consider the number `zero’ and its associated symbol `0,’ whose use today for counting, accounting, and innumerable other purposes is so routine that one hardly gives it a second thought: it was unknown to great civilizations of the past, such as the Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman. It was the mathematicians of ancient India who made the crucial step of elevating the concept of `zero’ to full-fledged number status—the genius of the modern, symbolic system of decimal notation. In a landmark book, Number: The Language of Science [3], Tobias Dantzig tells us that it was “destined to become the turning point in a development without which the progress of modern science, industry, or commerce is inconceivable.” And furthermore (the emphasis is mine):

The influence of this great discovery was by no means confined to arithmetic. By paving the way to a generalized number concept, it played just as fundamental a role in practically every branch of mathematics. In the history of culture the discovery of zero will always stand out as one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.

The next step beyond mathematics is machine computation, i.e., the formal manipulation of symbols by automata. It undergirds our twenty-first-century world of digital computers (now globally connected through the internet); computer programs, or “computer software,” that run on digital computers and render them usable; and algorithms, or formal procedures, that are the very heart of these digital programs. Most recently, it has led to significant advances in artificial intelligence (AI), and to the creation of large (symbolic) language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, which are having a profound influence not only in our daily pursuits within science, engineering, commerce, and industry, but also on the very way that we humans view ourselves as a species.

The philosophy of symbolic forms and their meaning and effect has been discussed much more broadly in renowned works of Alfred North Whitehead and Ernst Cassirer—the latter has even used the term “animal symbolicum” to characterize the human species—but this will not be pursued further here. Instead, let us now turn to the way that symbolism is employed within the two opposing scientific worldviews—Cartesian versus Bergsonian—that are the focus of this essay.

 

Cartesianism derives its names from that of the great French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes (1596-1650), whose declaration “Cogito Ergo Sum,” known as the Cartesian dictum and translated as “I think therefore I am,” was a clarion call that marked the birth of the scientific era.

In A History of Western Philosophy, the renowned philosopher, Bertrand Russell [4], tells us that Descartes’ decision to regard thoughts rather than external objects as prime empirical certainties was of great importance, and that it had a profound effect on all subsequent philosophizing. In place of nature being composed of substances of a single fundamental type, Descartes now postulated two fundamental and fundamentally different constituents of the world: res cogitans, the thinking substance, and res extensa, corporeal things that have extended substance. Res cogitans and res extensa mysteriously made contact within the human brain, specifically within the pineal gland. Furthermore, as Russell notes, “[Descartes] regarded [animals] as automata, governed entirely by the laws of physics, and devoid of feeling or consciousness.”  While today this sounds bizarre, it was nevertheless a useful philosophical sleight-of-hand. Res cogitans, which endowed humanity with intelligence and free will, thereby served as the means for unlocking the door to natural philosophy—the precursor of the natural sciences—and the hidden codes of res extensa; i.e., it unlocked the door to the scientific exploration of nature. Later, says Russell, “it was not difficult to extend the theory that animals were automata: why not say the same of man, and simplify the system by making it a consistent materialism? This step was actually taken in the eighteenth century.”

What precisely did Descartes mean by “I think” in his famous dictum?  To once again quote Bertrand Russell:

`Thinking’ is used by Descartes in a very wide sense. A thing that thinks, he says, is one that doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, imagines, and feels—for feeling, as it occurs in dreams, is a form of thinking. Since thought is the essence of mind, the mind must always think, even during deep sleep.

And this observation is given greater clarity by Stanislas Dehaene [5], a leading cognitive neuroscientist, in his Consciousness and the Brain (the emphasis is mine):

René Descartes was certainly right in one thing: only Homo sapiens use words or other signs by composing them, as we do to declare our thoughts to others. This capacity to compose our thoughts may be the crucial ingredient that boosts our inner thoughts. Human uniqueness resides in the peculiar way we explicitly formulate our ideas using nested or recursive structures of symbols.

Knowing also that Descartes was a mathematician of note—for example, he invented what today are called Cartesian coordinates—and that mathematics is a discipline whose ultimate truths require precise statement and justification in symbolic form, we can conclude with a certain measure of certainty that Descartes’ dictum means:  “I think, symbolically, therefore I am, experientially.” And, following the advent of the electronic computer in the mid-1900s and the ensuing digital computing revolution—the processing of symbols by automata using algorithms, as we have stated earlier in this essay—this dictum has been further broadened to a principle that now governs our modern scientific era, namely, ‘I compute, algorithmically, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I am, experientially.’

Accordingly, Cartesian-minded individuals believe that the universe is governed by symbolic, or at least symbolizable, law. For the religious-minded, such laws are God-given. For agnostics and atheists, laws simply define the fabric of the universe. Cartesians believe that the universe is inherently rational, and that its fundamental nature and governing laws can be comprehended by the human mind and described by scientific theories, which often take the form of simple mathematical formulae or computational rules.

Cartesianism builds from the bottom up. At its foundation lie mathematics and physics.  For example, the renowned physicist, John Archibald Wheeler, used to write physics equations on the blackboard, stand back, and say, “Now I’ll clap my hands, and a universe will spring into existence.” Physics provides the foundation for chemistry, and biology and life sciences are then built on chemistry and physics. Our main scientific disciplines thus form what can be termed a “Cartesian hierarchy,” wherein properties unique to objects studied within one discipline then mysteriously emerge from properties of objects within disciplines lower in the hierarchy. Two of the great unsolved mysteries of Cartesian-based science are the emergence of the animate “cell” from inanimate organic and inorganic matter, and the emergence of “consciousness” from the brain and nervous system.

 

The “Bergsonian dictum”—“I am, experientially, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I compute, algorithmically”—reverses the Cartesian dictum, and derives its name from that other great French philosopher, Henri Bergson (1859-1941). In The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, which was written late in his life, Bergson [6] describes the very heart of his philosophical method and opens a window on the continuous creativity that is on display through his entire oeuvre (in the quotation below, italics, [except where explicitly noted in square brackets], are Bergson’s and serve to identify his three key works):

Tension, concentration, these are the words by which I characterized a method which required of the mind, for each new problem, an entirely new effort. I should never have been able to extract from my book Matter and Memory, which preceded Creative Evolution, a true doctrine of evolution (it would have been one in only appearance); nor could I have extracted from my Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness [English title—Time and Free Will] a theory of the relations of the soul [consciousness] and the body like the one I set forth in Matter and Memory (I should have had only a hypothetical construction); nor from the pseudo–philosophy [italics mine] to which I was devoted before the Immediate Data—that is to say from the general notions stored up in language—could I have extracted the conclusions on duration [italics mine] and the inner life which I presented in this first work. My initiation into the true philosophical method began the moment I threw overboard verbal solutions, having found in the inner life [italics mine] an important field of experiment. After that, all progress was an enlarging of this field.

Bergson tells us how this “true philosophical method” led him to his great idea of duration—“lived time” as contrasted with the “spatialized time” of Einstein—and then, in turn, to his revolutionary ideas on free will, on memory at the intersection of mind and matter, and on the inherent creativity within evolution, which he called the Elan Vital. More detail on these ideas, supported by poetically transcribed quotations from Bergson’s three key works, can be found in Nazareth [1].

In A Pluralistic Universe, one of Bergson’s great defenders, William James [7], tells us that (the emphasis is mine)

the essential contribution of Bergson to philosophy is his criticism of intellectualism. In my opinion he has killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don’t see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer of reality.

Furthermore, James tells us that, alone among philosophers of his time, Henri Bergson (the emphasis is again mine)

denies that mere conceptual logic can tell us what is impossible or possible in the world of being or fact; and he does so for reasons which, at the same time that they rule logic out from lordship over the whole of life, establish a vast and definite sphere of influence where its sovereignty is indisputable.

Bergsonism is “top down.”  It views symbolism and rationality in their proper perspective, as mediators between consciousness (“no-thing”) and matter (“things”). Reaching for an image, one can think of symbolism as a horse, consciousness as its rider, rationality as the “reins” used to establish control, and matter as the solid ground over which the horse gallops. When the reins are held loosely, we are in the realm of metaphor and poetry; held more tightly, we enter the realm of ordinary human communication; even more tightly, they bring us into the realm of science; and when the reins are held as tightly as possible, we enter the formal world of mathematics.

When viewed from the perspective of the “natural philosophy of organism” and the Bergsonian dictum, the world becomes so much richer! Here are some of its many implications:

• Consciousness is recognized as a foundational and widespread phenomenon; yet, simultaneously and paradoxically, contrary to our usual logic, consciousness is unitary; it is one and not many, it exists only in the singular but manifests itself in a myriad different ways.
• There is a duality between consciousness and matter, one cannot exist without the other; they are two sides of the same coin, a one-sided, Mobius coin beyond human imagination!
• Science is seen as the task of creating human-centric, rationally consistent, symbolic models, which are effective for our practical needs and evolve over time, rather than seeking to discover universal laws. The Cartesian hierarchy is thereby “flattened.” Instead, symbolic models are developed to meet the needs of each scientific discipline within its associated arena of human endeavor (enlarged by manufactured instruments, for instance, the microscope and telescope). The concept of emergence can be discarded, along with the need for a “theory of everything.” And, guided by the “natural philosophy of organism” and the Bergsonian dictum, computation and artificial intelligence (AI) are also placed in proper perspective and seen to be a derivative of symbolism, rather than foundational in nature.
• The Bergsonian dictum also serves to legitimize the study of psychic phenomena, such as synchronicity, telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and so on, which are currently sidelined or even considered illusory by today’s scientific mainstream.
• Furthermore, the Bergsonian dictum invalidates much of modern, Cartesian-based philosophy with its undue emphasis on human language. In marked contrast, recent seminal works by eminent philosopher-scientists, such as The Matter with Things by McGilchrist [8] and Irreducible by Faggin [9], exemplify and are in much fuller accord with the Bergsonian dictum.
• The Bergsonian dictum provides a bridge to the “perennial philosophy,” the foundation for all the world’s religions, as was first promulgated by the great German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
• The Bergsonian dictum validates the goal of “enlightenment” within the mystical traditions, the experience of the “ocean” being poured into the “drop,” of the “whole” becoming contained within the “part.”
• The Bergsonian dictum also provides an explanation for the genius of rare individuals within other spheres: art, music, mathematics.
• And, finally, the Bergsonian dictum and the natural philosophy of organism could even provide the basis for a new spirituality, as is discussed in more detail in Nazareth [10].

 

References

Note: when an item has two associated dates, then the first is the original date of publication and the second is the date of the publication cited.

[1] Nazareth, J.L. [2025], The Nature of No-Thing: Reflections of an Algorithmic Scientist on an Era Between Gods, Atmosphere Press, Austin, Texas.

[2] Deacon, T.W. [1997], The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London.

[3] Dantzig, T. [1930], Number: The Language of Science, (Fourth Edition, Revised and Augmented), The Free Press, New York, NY, 1954.

[4] Russell, B. [1945], A History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1964.

[5] Dehaene, S. [2014], Consciousness and the Brain, Viking, The Penguin Group, New York, NY.

[6] Bergson, H. [1934], The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, Dover Publications, Mineola, New York, NY, 2007.

[7] James, W. [1909], A Pluralistic Universe, BiblioBazaar, Charleston, South Carolina, 2006.

[8] McGilchrist, I. [2021], The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (in two volumes), Perspectiva Press, London, England.

[9] Faggin, F. [2024], Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature, Essentia Books, John Hunt Publishing, Hampshire, UK.

[10] Nazareth, J.L. [2025], “My spiritual journey from Roman Catholicism to Elan Vitalism.” The Philosophical Salon, December 8, 2025. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/my-spiritual-journey-from-roman-catholicism-to-elan-vitalism/.