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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Julian Huxley Versus Bergson's Élan Vital

And Why It Undercuts Wilber's Eros

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Bergson's élan vital can serve as a symbolic description of the thrust of life during evolution, but not as a scientific explanation. To read L'Evolution Créatrice is to realize that Bergson was a writer of great vision, but with little biological understanding, a good poet but a bad scientist. — Julian Huxley[1]

Introduction

Henri Bergson's élan vital and Ken Wilber's “Eros” share a seductive promise: that evolution is not blind but guided by an inner drive toward greater complexity and consciousness. This notion appeals to those who find Darwinian randomness philosophically or spiritually unsatisfying. But Julian Huxley, architect of the modern evolutionary synthesis, dissected and dismissed Bergson's élan vital as a pseudo-explanation—and his critique devastates Wilber's Eros just as effectively. What Wilber proposes as “Spirit-in-action” is little more than a reheated version of the vitalism Huxley spent his life repudiating.

Bergson's Élan Vital: Vitalism in Its Most Articulate Form

Bergson's élan vital was a brilliant but ultimately evasive concept. It smuggled teleology back into biology without evidence, presenting a metaphysical impulse rather than a mechanism. While its literary power was undeniable, it did nothing to explain how new forms actually arise. Instead of testable claims, it offered a poetic gloss on our desire for meaning in evolution.

Huxley's Critique: Pulling the Plug on Vitalism

Julian Huxley saw through this instantly. To him, élan vital was a “dormitive principle,” naming what it failed to explain. In Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), he rejected any life-force beyond physics and chemistry. Creativity, in Huxley's view, is not imposed from above or within by mysterious drives but emerges from natural selection, variation, and the self-organizing properties of matter.

This is not just a difference of style but of substance: Huxley replaced metaphysical comfort food with hard-won explanatory rigor. Vitalism was not merely outdated; it was an obstacle to progress. By treating life as exceptional, it distracted science from discovering the real, non-mystical mechanisms of change.

Wilber's “Eros”: Bergson Redux

Ken Wilber's “Eros” mirrors Bergson's élan vital almost point for point. Like Bergson, Wilber claims evolution is guided by an immanent drive. Like Bergson, he appeals to “creative advance” as proof. And like Bergson, he never offers a testable mechanism, relying instead on rhetorical flair and a selective reading of science.

Wilber even couches Eros in the language of systems theory and self-organization, but the pattern is clear: when science finds a naturalistic explanation, Wilber retrofits it as evidence of Spirit. In doing so, he reintroduces exactly the metaphysical placeholder Huxley spent decades rejecting.

Why Huxley's Argument Still Matters

Huxley's critique is devastating to Wilber's framework because it shows the logical dead end of vitalism in any form. Whether called élan vital or “Eros,” the argument boils down to this: evolution looks purposeful, so there must be a purpose-maker built into the process. But this is an aesthetic judgment, not a scientific explanation.

Modern biology has moved far beyond vitalism, showing how complexity and novelty emerge from blind but nonrandom processes, including natural selection, genetic drift, and self-organization. Huxley was right to insist that no hidden metaphysical force is needed. Invoking one only muddies the water.

The Earth-Centric Problem

A further, devastating question for both Bergson's élan vital and Wilber's Eros is: why does this supposed cosmic drive seem to operate only on Earth? If there is truly a universal “life-force” pervading the cosmos, why has it left the rest of our solar system barren? Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the outer planets show no hint of the biological complexity we see on Earth. No forests on Europa, no symphonies of whales on Titan.

The obvious answer from a scientific standpoint is that life arose on Earth because conditions here allowed for it—iquid water, stable temperatures, a protective atmosphere, chemical diversity—not because of a metaphysical drive embedded in the fabric of the universe. Life is not a cosmic inevitability but a planetary contingency.

Yet Bergson and Wilber's formulations imply something more: a universal force pushing matter toward life and mind everywhere. But the silence of our solar system is deafening. If élan vital or Eros were real, we should expect life everywhere—or at least in multiple, parallel instances nearby. We do not see this.

Huxley's naturalism fits the data: life is a rare emergent phenomenon under very specific conditions, not a cosmic destiny. By contrast, vitalism has to explain why its universal force behaves like an absentee landlord, appearing only on one small planet and ignoring the rest. This is not an incidental problem but a direct contradiction of its universalist claim.

This “Earth-only” pattern reveals the anthropocentric heart of vitalism. What Bergson and Wilber present as a cosmic truth looks, on closer inspection, like a projection of our own local good fortune. The cosmos is not pointing to us; we are simply here to notice it.

The Persistent Temptation of Vitalism

Why do ideas like élan vital and Eros persist despite their intellectual bankruptcy? Because they offer meaning. They turn the messy, contingent story of evolution into a comforting narrative of spiritual ascent. Yet this is precisely why we must be suspicious: they fulfill a psychological need rather than a scientific one.

Wilber's Eros appeals to the same yearning Bergson tapped over a century ago. But yearning is not evidence, and metaphysical poetry is not science.

Conclusion: Huxley Wins, Again

Julian Huxley's dismissal of Bergson's élan vital was not just a historical skirmish; it was a decisive stand for explanatory integrity. His arguments slice straight through Wilber's Eros, revealing it as a 21st-century revival of a discredited 19th-century impulse.

Bergson wrapped vitalism in metaphysical grandeur; Wilber wraps it in systems theory and integral jargon. But the substance remains the same—a mystical life-force without mechanism. Huxley's lesson endures: if you want to understand evolution, look to the natural processes we can study, not to metaphysical drives we only imagine.

NOTES

[1] Quoted in: Michael Ruse, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?, Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 254.