The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (100 page)

So what attitude would Bergson adopt towards (i) and (ii)? Like Nietzsche,
³⁵
he would not so much take issue with these principles, which effectively
define
the concept of numerical identity, as take issue with the concept of numerical identity itself. (And even then, again like Nietzsche, he would acknowledge the usefulness of the concept for practical purposes: cf. §2 above.) To take issue with the concept of numerical identity is to take issue with something at the very core of our linguistic sense-making. It is to take issue with the whole Fregean notion of an object, and therefore with those deep structural features of language which enable us to parse declarative sentences into Fregean names and their associated predicates. (See
Ch. 8
, §7.) Bergson writes:

All our ways of speaking, thinking, perceiving imply in effect that … immutability [is] there by right, that … change [is] superadded, like [an accident], to things which, by themselves, do not … change…. Such is the logic immanent in our language …: the intelligence has as its essence to judge, and judgment operates by the attribution of a predicate to a subject. The subject, by the sole fact of being named, is defined as invariable; the variation will reside in the diversity of the states that one will affirm concerning it, one after another. In proceeding thus, by apposition of a predicate to a subject, … we follow the bent of our intelligence, we conform to the demands of language. (‘Introduction II’, pp. 68–69)
³⁶

5. Bergson Compared with Some of His Predecessors

In this section I shall briefly compare Bergson with some of his predecessors.

(a) Bergson Compared with Fichte

There are striking parallels between Bergson and Fichte. Fichte presented us with, if not two kinds of sense-making, then two philosophical paradigms, one of which involved taking seriously the free subject’s self-consciousness
and the other of which was a form of naturalism. And he argued that it was only the former that enabled us to do justice to what he called ‘absolute, independent self-activity’ (Fichte (
1956
), p. 84); only the former, indeed, that we could properly ‘live’. (See
Ch. 6
, §2.)
³⁷
Fichte further anticipated Bergson by describing exercise of self-consciousness as a kind of intuition of how things are in themselves. However, whereas Fichte, who knew that this was in defiance of Kant, argued that it was in defiance only of the letter of Kant, not the spirit (
Ch. 6
, §3), Bergson is involved in a much more straightforward act of defiance (see e.g. ‘Change’, pp. 139ff., and ‘Metaphysics’, pp. 195ff.). This relates to the most fundamental difference between them. Fichte wanted to retain a Kantian idealism. Bergson, for whom intuition is not just a way of making sense of the self and its various aspects, but a way of making sense of what is beyond the self (see above, §2), does not.
³⁸

(b) Bergson Compared with Spinoza and Nietzsche

There are echoes in Bergson of the joyful affirmation of life that we saw in both Spinoza and Nietzsche. These are due to the way in which, for Bergson, intuition brings us into an awareness of the very heartbeat of reality: it is an expression of our symbiotic relationship with reality. Bergsonian intuition can usefully be compared with Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, which he (Spinoza) characterized as adequate knowledge of the essence of things (cf. ‘Intuition’, p. 113).
^39
,
40
There is no better way of capturing this evocation of Spinoza and Nietzsche than by quoting Bergson himself:

To the eyes of a philosophy that attempts to reabsorb intellect in intuition, many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a doctrine does not only facilitate speculation; it gives us also more power to act and to live. (
Creative Evolution
, p. 295)

If this [new kind of] knowledge is generalized, speculation will not be the only thing to profit by it…. Let us … grasp ourselves afresh as we are …;
let us grasp afresh the external world as it really is…. [Let] us in a word become accustomed to see all things
sub specie durationis
: immediately in our galvanized perception what is taut becomes relaxed, what is dormant awakens, what is dead comes to life again…. [Science,] with its applications which aim only at the convenience of existence, … gives us the promise of well-being, or at most, of pleasure. But philosophy could already give us joy. (‘Intuition’, pp. 128–129)
⁴¹

6. The Implications for Metaphysics

As with previous protagonists who distinguished between two kinds of sense-making, the implications of Bergson’s various doctrines for metaphysics can be discussed under three headings.
⁴²
There are the implications that his doctrines have on his own conception of metaphysics. There are the implications that they have on my conception of metaphysics, as the most general attempt to make sense of things, applied to the first of his two kinds of sense-making, analysis: call this the
analytic
conception of metaphysics. And there are the implications that they have on my conception, applied to the second of his two kinds of sense-making, intuition: call this the
intuitive
conception of metaphysics. (I leave open, at this stage, the possibility of partial or total overlap between Bergson’s own conception and either of these other two conceptions.)
⁴³

(a) The Implications for Metaphysics on Bergson’s Own Conception of Metaphysics

I have already remarked in §5(a) that Bergson is in revolt against Kant. His own conception of metaphysics is part of that revolt. Bergson holds, in opposition to Kant, that we can have insight into how things are in themselves. And he holds that it is the business of metaphysics to pursue such insight. It immediately follows, given the rest of what he thinks, that metaphysics must proceed by intuition. (See ‘Introduction II’, pp. 30ff. and 37.)

This in turn has a number of important consequences. The insights achieved by intuition resist linguistic expression, linguistic expression presupposing as it does the abstractions of analysis. So metaphysical insights must likewise resist linguistic expression on this conception.

Does this mean that Bergson is committed to casting the metaphysician in the role of mystic – a casting that is liable to give pause even to those to whom the very role of mystic does not already give pause? In fact, as the material at the end of the previous section may already have intimated, Bergson does see such a role for the metaphysician.
⁴⁴
Even so, the thought that metaphysical insights resist linguistic expression does not have to be taken in quite such a heady way, and is not always taken in quite such a heady way by Bergson. Nor is it without precedent in this enquiry. In our discussion of the early and the later Wittgenstein we considered a conception of metaphysics whereby metaphysics is an activity rather than a body of doctrine. On that conception too, metaphysical insights resist linguistic expression. What prevents metaphysics from being unduly mystical on that conception is that, although the insights themselves resist linguistic expression, they are insights into how to recognize and combat confusions of various kinds, and their implementation involves saying a very great deal. Furthermore, it involves saying a very great deal in connection with traditional metaphysical debates, which is where the original confusions lie. We find something similar in Bergson.

Bergson believes that a typical contribution to a traditional metaphysical debate consists of some confused response to some ill-conceived question based on some misapplication of analysis. And he believes that one of the benefits of (properly conducted) metaphysics, if not perhaps the principal benefit,
⁴⁵
is that it enables us to see that this is so and to clear away the confusion by showing that we need intuition to understand what we could not understand by means of analysis.
⁴⁶
Such understanding cannot itself be put into words. But much can be said about the role that it plays in equipping us to overcome the confusion.

A clear case in point is the traditional metaphysical debate about the nature of freedom and its relation to physical determinism: we glimpsed Bergson’s views about these at the end of §3.
⁴⁷
Another well-known case in point turns on the ancient paradoxes of motion which I mentioned in §6 of the Introduction. Bergson believes that these paradoxes arise directly from the attempt to understand duration through analysis. Inevitably, when we make such an attempt, we come to regard change and movement as constituted
by infinitely many instantaneous states and as divisible into infinitely many discrete parts, and we are straightway ensnared in the paradoxes. Once we adopt an intuitive understanding of change and movement, Bergson insists, we shall be free of any such paradoxes. (See
Creative Evolution
, pp. 335ff., and ‘Change’, passim.)
⁴⁸
It is in the light of cases such as these that Bergson is emboldened to say, much as Wittgenstein was emboldened to say:

I believe that the great metaphysical problems are in general badly stated, that they frequently resolve themselves of their own accord when correctly stated, or else are problems formulated in terms of illusion which disappear as soon as the terms of the formula are more closely examined. (‘The Possible and the Real’, p. 95; cf. ‘Introduction I’, p. 17)
⁴⁹

But Bergson’s conception of metaphysics also allows for a substantial positive linguistic component as well as this negative linguistic component. For although it precludes the use of language to express metaphysical insights, it does not preclude the use of language to talk around them (as we have been doing). Nor indeed does it preclude the use of language to
evoke
them. ‘Comparisons and metaphors,’ Bergson says, ‘[can] suggest what cannot be expressed’ (‘Introduction II’, p. 42). A large part of metaphysical practice consists of attempts, by means of language, to evoke metaphysical insights.
⁵⁰

Metaphysicians who make such attempts naturally use the idioms of the epoch in which they find themselves (‘Intuition’, p. 111). But their use of these idioms can never be entirely straightforward. There is therefore no guarantee that they will use them in the same way as one another. So it can easily appear that metaphysicians are embroiled in dispute when really they are talking past one another, or that they are in accord when really they are trying to say quite different things. This is another consequence of Bergson’s conception of metaphysics that he is at pains to emphasize (see e.g. ‘Intuition’, pp. 112ff.). And I do not doubt that such would have been
his verdict on the constellation of views concerning substance which we witnessed in the first three chapters of this book, and which I summarized at the beginning of
Chapter 4
.

(b) The Implications for Metaphysics on the Analytic Conception of Metaphysics

The analytic conception of metaphysics is clearly quite different from Bergson’s. But what exactly does it come to? Is metaphysics, on this conception, merely the most general of the natural sciences, say physics? Or is it perhaps mathematics?

Here we need to remember how generous Bergson’s notion of analysis is. The very use of language in attempting to make sense of things ensures that the sense-making in question consists of analysis. So on the analytic conception, metaphysics might in fact just be the sort of thing that Bergson himself engages in in works such as
Time and Free Will
. For that matter it might be the sort of thing that he engages in in works such as ‘Metaphysics’, where he discusses and promotes what he himself counts as metaphysics. The second of these possibilities would constitute something structurally analogous to what we saw in
Chapter 2
. In that chapter I represented Spinozist metaphysics as the sort of thing that Spinoza engages in in the main part of the
Ethics
: pursuit, at the highest level of generality, of knowledge of the second kind. But this in turn centrally includes discussion and promotion of knowledge of the third kind, which, like Bergsonian intuition, resists (finite) linguistic expression. (See
Ch. 2
, §6.)
⁵¹

(c) The Implications for Metaphysics on the Intuitive Conception of Metaphysics

To turn finally to the intuitive conception of metaphysics: what does
this
come to? Does it simply equate with Bergson’s own conception?

One reason not to accede to this conclusion without further ado is that, whereas my definition of metaphysics explicitly includes the idea of generality, intuition is by its very nature a way of making sense of what is particular. This does not of course mean that there is no such thing as its most general form. Nor does it mean that there is no such thing as pursuit of it in its most general form. There is such a thing and it may yet prove to be the
same as what Bergson counts as metaphysics. But even if it does,
just
to say this would run the risk of being seriously misleading. For it may be that the very attempt to apply my definition to intuition in this way is offensive to the spirit of my definition. Metaphysics, on the intuitive conception, may be completely unlike anything that my definition is intended to capture. Is this a genuine concern?