SNP’s word of the day: Élan vital

Word: Élan vital

Meaning: Vital impetus, or the current of evolution.

Usage: “When I was just last in New York, I went for a walk, leaving Fifth Avenue and the Business section behind me, into the crowded streets near the Bowery. And while I was there, I had a sudden feeling of relief and confidence. There was Bergson’s élan vital—there was assimilation causing life to exert as much pressure, though embodied here in the shape of men, as it has ever done in the earliest year of evolution: there was the driving force of progress.”

You should know it because: C’est Paris Fashion Week, the one week each half-year when it’s okay to speak Franglais. It’s also the time in which, even from waaayyyy far away, you ponder the impossibility of so many extraordinarily attired, super-attenuated creatures flocking to one place. Time to brush up on creative-evolutionary theory, by which I mean, Wikipedia Henri Bergson. His theory of “élan vital,”—sort of like a macrocosmic take on Freud’s idea of “life instincts”—explains why things develop in an increasingly complex manner. He thought people could self-evolve; that through the forces of creativity, which he equated with life itself, some people could literally be more alive than others. I don’t know about that, but maybe it explains why fashion people can survive for four weeks without once eating solid food?

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