The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (101 page)

In fact, no – though there is a point here that is certainly worth registering. My definition is meant to be broadly in accord with standard uses of the word ‘metaphysics’. That is precisely why it includes the idea of generality, which I take to be a common implication of such uses. But my definition is also meant to allow for just the kind of latitude that is exhibited here. It is meant to allow for the possibility that, because of the very nature of the sense-making involved, metaphysics lacks this or that generality.

Very well; what sort of generality does metaphysics lack on the intuitive conception? A very important sort, certainly; a sort which it has often been thought to possess. Metaphysics has often been thought to be concerned, not just with reality as it is, but with reality as it must be. On the intuitive conception it has no such pretension. On the intuitive conception, although metaphysics is concerned with the full sweep of the real, it is not concerned with the full sweep of the possible. So be it. As it happens, this is another hallmark of Bergson’s own conception of metaphysics that he is at pains to emphasize (‘Introduction II’, pp. 31–32 and 44).
⁵²

I am inclined to think that Bergson’s own conception does in fact equate with the intuitive conception, more or less; and that acknowledging this provides us with an instructive way of revisiting the former.

What then is the most general form, or the most general exercise, of Bergsonian intuition? Is it the turning of one’s mind’s eye, not just to one’s own consciousness, or to consciousness in general, or to life in general, but to the duration of all that is real?
⁵³
Yes, provided that this is done with suitable discipline, a proviso that has to be met if
sense
is to be made of anything and indeed if the exercise is properly to count as an exercise of
intuition
. What, then, counts as suitable discipline? The direction of concepts, provided – this is an equally important proviso – that concepts and their direction are both construed in an appropriate way. In what way? Not, obviously enough, so as to abnegate the fact that the sense-making involved is intuition rather than analysis. Concepts here, to echo the contrast that I drew in §2, need to be understood as features of the mind’s immersion in the ever-changing reality that it intuits; they must not be understood as context-independent meanings whereby the mind judges this reality. And their direction needs to be so understood that it is as much a matter of their being directed as it is of
their directing. The exercise of intuition needs to be entirely of a piece with what is being intuited. It must involve the evolution of new concepts, new ways of making sense of things, new forms of metaphysics itself. (It is here if anywhere in my book that its title is most apt.
⁵⁴
) Here is Bergson:

[Our mind] can be installed in the mobile reality, adopt its ceaselessly changing direction, in short, grasp it intuitively. But to do that, it must … reverse the direction of the operation by which it ordinarily thinks, continually upsetting its categories, or rather, recasting them. In so doing it will arrive at fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement of the inner life of things. (‘Metaphysics’, p. 190; cf. ‘Introduction I’, p. 29, and ‘Introduction II’, p. 68)

Metaphysics involves bringing about radically new ways of making sense of things, then. That, indeed, is its core activity. And, as we saw in §3, it is an activity which on Bergson’s view counts as an exercise of pure creativity.
⁵⁵

It seems to follow that Bergson has the clearest possible answer both to the Novelty Question and to the Creativity Question which I posed in §6 of the Introduction. To an extent he does. There is however a complication worth noting in connection with the Creativity Question. In my discussion of that question in the Introduction I suggested that it can be turned into a question about whether there is scope for our getting things right in metaphysics, whether our metaphysical sense-making can be an accurate reflection of reality itself. The thought was that, insofar as our metaphysical sense-making is creative, it is
not
an accurate reflection of reality itself. But such is the element of creativity involved in metaphysics on Bergson’s conception that he would, or at least could, see it as both. The development of new ways of making sense of things in metaphysics is the development of new ways for things to be: in intuitive knowledge there is no separation between the knower and the known. So although Bergson does have a clear answer to the Creativity Question, narrowly interpreted, there is a broader interpretation of the question, whereby it has additional connotations concerning the accuracy of metaphysical sense-making, on which we do better to see him as rejecting the question altogether,
à
la
Hegel.

Be that as it may, metaphysics is for Bergson a matter of free, creative self-development. It issues in radically new ways of making sense of things, including radically new ways of making sense of things that can be implemented in metaphysics itself. But ‘including’ is the operative word here. The transformative power of Bergsonian metaphysics is not just a power
to transform itself. As we saw earlier when drawing the analogy with Wittgensteinian therapy, Bergsonian metaphysics can have an influence on the operations of intelligence too. There is no reason whatsoever why it should not also issue in radically new ways of making sense of things that can be implemented in science.

This, in a curious way, harks back to Descartes, for whom metaphysics was in the service of science. And indeed Bergson does see metaphysics as capable of benefitting science (if not by providing it with Cartesian foundations) – just as he
sees science as capable of benefitting metaphysics. Here is one representative passage:

A truly intuitive philosophy would realize the union so greatly desired, of metaphysics and science…. It would put more of science into metaphysics and more of metaphysics into science. Its result would re-establish the continuity between the intuitions which the various positive sciences have obtained at intervals in the course of their history, and which they have obtained only by strokes of genius. (‘Metaphysics’, p. 192; cf.
Creative Evolution
, p. 218, and ‘Introduction II’, p. 44)

Nonetheless, Bergson’s real predecessor, as far as these views on the creative power of metaphysics are concerned, is not Descartes. It is Nietzsche. I can draw this chapter to a close in much the same way as I drew the previous chapter to a close. Here we have a conception of metaphysics whereby not only is there scope for us, as practising metaphysicians, to make radically new sense of things; we have no proper claim to the title of metaphysicians unless we do.

1
And some have declined to draw such a distinction, in a way that has critically shaped their contribution to it. I have in mind the naturalism of Quine and Lewis (see
Ch. 12
, §8, and
Ch. 13
, §4, respectively).

2
Throughout this chapter I use the following abbreviations for Bergson’s works: ‘Change’ for Bergson (
1965e
);
Creative Evolution
for Bergson (
1975
);
Duration and Simultaneity
for Bergson (
1965g
); ‘Introduction I’ for Bergson (
1965a
); ‘Introduction II’ for Bergson (
1965b
); ‘Intuition’ for Bergson (
1965d
);
Matter and Memory
for Bergson (
1991
); ‘Metaphysics’ for Bergson (
1965f
);
Mind-Energy
for Bergson (
1920
); ‘The Possible and the Real’ for Bergson (
1965c
); and
Time and Free Will
for Bergson (
1910
).

3
In §§5 and 6 we shall note similarities between this distinction and the distinction between Spinoza’s second and third kinds of knowledge.

4
See Williams (
1978
), pp. 64–65, to which I referred parenthetically in
Ch. 15
, n. 19. As I indicated in that same note, I try to develop and defend Williams’ argument in Moore (
1997a
),
Ch. 4
.

5
There is much here with which Nietzsche could and would have agreed. His principal quarrel would have been with what is to come.

6
I have already remarked that Bergson takes intuition to be the method of metaphysics. At one point he accordingly defines metaphysics as ‘the science which claims to dispense with symbols’ (‘Metaphysics’, p. 162, emphasis removed).

7
So indeed is its concern with them.

8
Cf. the pitfall to which I referred at the end of Introduction, §4: even on a looser, non-Bergsonian conception of analysis and intuition, it is a familiar fact that making sense of something by analyzing it can militate against other, more intuitive ways of making sense of that same thing.

9
Cf. Deleuze (
1988b
), p. 88, and Turetzky (
1998
), pp. 202–203.

10
This goes some way towards accounting for an apparent anomaly in
Time and Free Will
, p. 129, where Bergson says that what is required, to recover the intuitable from the analyzed, is ‘a vigorous effort of [further] analysis.’ Cf. Mullarkey (
2004
).

11
Cf. Deleuze (
1988b
), pp. 107ff., and Lacey (
1989
),
Ch. 6
, §4. (Not that analysis on its own can generate intuition. ‘It cannot be too often repeated,’ Bergson avers: ‘from intuition one can pass on to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition’ (‘Metaphysics’, p. 180).)

12
Cf. ‘Change’, pp. 137–138.

13
On the material towards the end of this section, and for an anticipation of what is to come, see Ansell Pearson (
1999
), pp. 35ff., and Sacks (
2000
), pp. 131ff.

14
Can it foreclose this possibility by including among the features with which the analysis is concerned haecceities? No. That is simply not how analysis, as Bergson conceives it, works. Analysis, as Bergson conceives it, is concerned with
general
features of things.

15
Cf.
Time and Free Will
, pp. 115ff.

16
Cf.
Duration and Simultaneity
, p. 49.

17
Cf.
Creative Evolution
, pp. 7–8, and
Duration and Simultaneity
, pp. 46–47. In the former he writes, ‘What are we …, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth – nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions?’

18
Not that Bergson’s use of the word ‘intuition’, to register such grasping, is anything like Descartes’: see
Ch. 1
, §4.

19
This is a convenient excuse to mention an important objection to Bergson’s account of the difference between differences of degree and differences of kind. The objection concerns non-spatial differences between material things: differences of colour, taste, heat, and suchlike. On Bergson’s account these must all be classified as differences of kind – a classification which this concession to Cartesian dualism, however minimal, serves to reinforce, since Descartes would have said that such differences were not differences in the material things themselves but differences in how the mind perceives them (Descartes (
1985c
), Pt One, §§68–70). Yet some of them, surely, are differences of degree. Can a material thing not be more or less hot, for example?

Later we shall see Deleuze develop this objection and turn it into the very cornerstone of his own rival account (
Ch. 21
, esp. §3). Not that Bergson is unaware of the objection. He addresses it in, e.g.,
Time and Free Will
, pp. 57ff. Roughly, his response is that there is nothing in these non-spatial differences between material things to warrant the measurement that genuine differences of degree require. (Cf. Moore (
1996
),
Ch. 2
, §F.) This response, it must be said, has an air of special pleading.

20
Deleuze raises this question and has characteristically fascinating things to say in response to it, to which I am indebted: see Deleuze (
1988b
),
Ch. 4
.

21
See Turetzky (
1998
),
Ch. 13
, esp. pp. 207ff.

22
I do not mean to suggest that these two ideas are a non-negotiable feature of
any
acceptable conception of the possible/real distinction: Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §194, contains an apparent repudiation of (1). (I say ‘apparent’ because, as always with Wittgenstein, there is an issue about whether his target is the idea itself, or our mishandling of the idea. There is also an issue, especially in the light of ensuing sections, about whether his ultimate concern is in fact with something more like the virtual/actual distinction. Note in addition that Wittgenstein talks of the possible as being ‘like a shadow’ of the real. But that is not strictly part of (1). Indeed, Bergson himself insists that ‘there is more and not less in the possibility of each of the successive states [of the world of life] than in their reality’ (‘The Possible and the Real’, p. 100).)