Racial Becomings: Materialism and Bergson in Spanish America, 1870-1920

• In Event: Race, Revolution, and Bergsonism in the Americas

Abstract

The important role that Bergson played among Spanish American intellectuals during the first half of the twentieth century has been poorly understood. The publication of Creative Evolution in 1907 offered intellectuals and scientists in Latin America the possibility to change some of the racial ideas that, over time, were connected with racial determinism and excessive materialism. Since Darwinian evolutionary theory could not posit exactly how heredity worked, and because the new evidence provided by genetics raised questions about the workings of natural selection, Bergson provided an explanation that introduced a new way to understand evolutionary continuity. According to this, all forms of life, including human, were related to the élan vital and not merely to the materialist and deterministic forces that had resulted from an understanding of natural selection in a mechanistic way. Philosophically this made possible a return to vitalism, an approach that had been important in the first half of the nineteenth century through Romanticism and then renewed at the end of that century by the reception of Nietzsche’s work. Elizabeth Grosz has dealt with these issues in her book The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, published in 2004, but in it there is no reference to the historical dimension that these philosophical concerns had over time. In this essay, Novoa analyzes how the philosophical connections made by Grosz were the historical realities of intellectuals in Spanish America by the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, Novoa emphasizes how racial ideas were important in the development of Bergsonism during that era, and how a new conception of philosophy and humanism emerged from the reception of Bergson’s ideas.

Author

• Adriana I Novoa, University of South Florida