Novum sub Sole : Organicity and Temporality in Kant and Bergson

In his book Creative Evolution, Bergson characterizes the project of the élan vital as that of accumulating (solar) energy and dispensing it in an act of singular creativity. The living organism can thus be viewed as the material process that breaches the material order. In this way, the virtual becomes operative in the real through the anticipative procedures of the organism, giving rise to novelty. A similar idea is entertained by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where he links the idea of the inexplicability of the organism with that of a breach in the immanent order without appealing to anything beyond mateial forces. In this paper, an attempt is made at clarifying the precise way in which the organism is recalcitrant to traditional notions of explication by examining and relating the views of Kant and Bergson on the subject. Both thinkers struggle to clarify the relation between organization on the one hand and temporality on the other. I suggest that their casting talk of organization in terms of retrograde temporality is an attempt to come to terms indirectly with the challenge the organism poses to any traditional model of temporality.