MYSTICISM AND THE OPEN SOCIETYSocial life is immanent to instinct as well as to intelligence, and the ‘‘habit of taking
up habits’’ that lies at the origin of morality and religion produces results comparable to
those produced by instinct. There is thus a ‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘biological,’’ or ‘‘evolutionary’’
ground under the layer of acquired habits, of culture, if you like. It is a ground that is
always present and at work in human societies, which does not change, or changes very
little, and which one would be wrongphilosophicallyandpoliticallynot to take into ac-
count. According to Bergson, the ‘‘primitive’’ are not the only others: we, the ‘‘civilized,’’
are just as ‘‘primitive’’ in this respect.^17
The biological ground Bergson is speaking of, however, should not be confused with
any form of ‘‘social Darwinism,’’ ‘‘evolutionary sociology,’’ or the like. True, for Bergson,
humans are, in the first place, ‘‘living animals,’’ and if there is in his philosophy a meta-
physical desire to go beyond the human condition, such a desire is not one of stripping
humanity of its bodily life in favor of a purely spiritual, ghostly existence. There is nothing
about animality, about biological forms of embodiment, to be despised, for the very rea-
son that life as such is identified by Bergson with a tendency to change, with an essential
mobility, an aspiration to novelty that runs through all living forms. The privilege of
humans, what singles out humanity, is a greater capacity for freedom and change. This
privilege, however, does not separate humanity from the realm of the living; it does not
open up an ontological gap in a Kantian or Heideggerian manner. Rationality itself is, in
Bergson’s view, deeply rooted in life to the extent that life as such is endowed with a
highly cognitive competence: the capability of solving problems. More precisely, life is
definedby this capability. InCreative Evolutionthe fundamental biological category is that
of theproblem, not that ofneed. Nutrition, before being a need to be satisfied, is a problem
to be solved. According to Bergson, the problem of nutrition is addressed, and solved, in
‘‘different but equally elegant’’ ways by vegetal and animal forms of life. Living beings are
thus cases of solutions to problems. The superiority of humanity, if one wishes to use this
vocabulary, lies in the wider range of different solutions it can make available to itself, in
the greater, though not absolute, freedom of coming up with new and different solutions
to new—and old—problems. Instruments and machines prolong and extend such a ca-
pacity. According to Bergson, not only does technology play a crucial role in human
history, a role that exceeds the one played by political events, but its transformative power
in turn affects and modifies biological forms of life. Bergson clearly understands that no
absolute line can be drawn between organic and inorganic tools, between organs and
machines. Once life is conceived in terms of a creative capacity to solve problems, organic
and inorganic tools certainly differ—namely, in the way in which they are produced—but
they do not belong to different ontological domains; rather, they supplement each other
in multiple and unpredictable ways.^18
If we now return to the question of human societies, from which the ‘‘natural
ground’’ never disappears, we can see that they resemble each other in one decisive re-
spect: they areclosedsocieties. The fact that modern nation-states are much, much larger
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