The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (98 page)

Intuition is different in every respect. It is not normally pursued for some practical purpose. It is most characteristically pursued for its own sake. It dispenses with representations and symbols.
⁶
It seeks knowledge of things in their own terms. It also seeks knowledge of things in their full particularity. And its way of achieving such knowledge is by overcoming all separation between the knower and the known. The knowledge in which it results is complete, thorough, and absolute.

It is knowledge of this second kind that properly deserves to be called knowledge of the facts. The knowledge in which analysis results, involving as it does the abstractions of an intermediary veil of representation, is only ever knowledge of generalities and laws that can be extracted from the facts (cf.
Time and Free Will
, pp. 140–141). Similarly, whereas the properties of
things with which analysis is concerned are universals, the properties of things with which intuition is concerned are as particular and as concrete as the things themselves.
⁷
And whereas the concepts that analysis uses are context-independent meanings attaching to symbols, the concepts that intuition uses ‘[follow] reality in all its windings’ (‘Metaphysics’, p. 190).

One consequence of all of this is that not only are analysis and intuition two very different kinds of sense-making, they are ways of making two very different kinds of sense. (They may also be – we shall come back to this issue – ways of making sense of two very different kinds of things.) Indeed, to make one of these kinds of sense is to do so at the expense of the other. Analysis, with its fixed forms, draws attention away from what is changing and fluid, away from the teeming particularity of what can be intuited. It ‘substitutes the symbol for the reality’ (
Time and Free Will
, p. 128; cf.
Creative Evolution
, p. 357).
⁸
Nevertheless, it also uses the symbol to
represent
the reality. Although the sense that is made of things in analysis is different from, even inimical to, the sense that is made of things in intuition, the latter is so to speak what the former aspires to be and is always available to be retrieved from the former by a suitable act of immersion in the thing itself.
⁹

Put like that, Bergson’s view seems to be a damning indictment of analysis. It portrays analysis as a forlorn pursuit of something that can be attained only by intuition and, worse, whose attainment it positively thwarts. Indeed, there is much else in Bergson to suggest hostility towards analysis. He says that analysis takes the life out of things (
Creative Evolution
, pp. 204ff.). And he argues that analysis involves elements of falsification that can engender deep confusion: an example to which we shall return in §6(a) is the confusion attending the ancient paradoxes of motion.

In fact, however, Bergson has nothing against analysis. The practical benefits that can accrue from knowledge attained through the simplification, categorization, and organization of data are obvious enough. And Bergson never tires of reminding us of them. His opposition is not to
analysis
. It is to the misappropriation of analysis. It is opposition to the belief that analysis is equal to all cognitive tasks. I remarked earlier that analysis is characteristic of the natural sciences. This makes Bergson’s opposition, in effect, opposition to Quinean naturalism. He wants to free us from the idea that analysis is
the
way to make sense of things. (Cf.
Creative Evolution
, pp. 209–210, and ‘The Possible and the Real’, p. 95.)

But it is certainly
a
way to make sense of things. And it is a way to make sense of things which is in Bergson’s view indispensable to our social life, nay to our very way of being. Language itself would be impossible without the abstractions of analysis. Come to that,
intuition
would be impossible without the abstractions of analysis. For despite the opposition between intuition and analysis, intuition requires a degree of sophistication that is unattainable to any non-language-using animal. True, intuition, as a faculty, is a modification of the instinct that we share with other animals. But it is ‘instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely,’ and it has achieved this by ‘[utilizing] the mechanism of intelligence,’ – albeit utilizing that mechanism ‘to show how intellectual molds cease to be strictly applicable’ (
Creative Evolution
, pp. 194–195).
¹⁰
Bergson writes:

Though [intuition] … transcends intelligence, it is from intelligence that has come the push that has made it rise to the point it has reached. Without intelligence, it would have remained in the form of instinct, riveted to the special object of its practical interest, and turned outward by it into movements of locomotion. (
Creative Evolution
, p. 195)
¹¹

It is clear, then, that Bergson celebrates intelligence. What he deplores is the intelligence fetish. (Cf. ‘Introduction II’, pp. 66ff. and 79.)

But is there perhaps more to Bergson’s celebration of intelligence than even these remarks suggest? Should there not be more? Recall that, on Bergson’s account, intuition yields no knowledge in which there is any separation between knower and known. It seems to follow that the only object of intuitive knowledge is the self. And this is surely to the further advantage of intelligence. For surely there are objects of intellectual knowledge other than the self.

This train of thought is too quick. For one thing, the role of symbols in analysis – specifically, the way in which they take the place of what they symbolize, to the extent that they themselves become the focal point of analysis – means that nothing has claim to the title of being an ‘object’ of intellectual knowledge except in a rather oblique sense,
¹²
a sense in which, for all that has been said so far, it may have equal claim to the title of being an object of intuitive knowledge. But also, more important, even if that oblique sense is waived, Bergson is keen to resist the inference from there
being no separation, in intuitive knowledge, between knower and known to there being no object of intuitive knowledge except the self. On his developed vision, there is sometimes no separation between the self and other selves. ‘Unreflecting sympathy and antipathy,’ he writes, ‘… give evidence of a possible interpenetration of human consciousness’ (‘Introduction II’, p. 32). He envisions intuitive knowledge of other people’s consciousness, perhaps even of ‘consciousness in general’ (ibid.). More than that, he envisions intuitive knowledge of ‘the vital’ (ibid., p. 33). Indeed, in the full splendour of his developed vision there is intuitive knowledge that extends further still, to ‘the material universe in its entirety’ (ibid). It is to this complex of ideas and their rationale that we must now turn.
¹³

3. Space versus Duration. The Actual versus the Virtual. The Real versus the Possible

It may not be obvious, but underlying everything that we have witnessed so far is a very distinctive conception of space and time. Indeed, to a first gross approximation, we can say that intellectual knowledge is knowledge of the spatial and intuitive knowledge knowledge of the temporal.

Let us begin with intellectual knowledge. Given any process of analysis, and given the system of classification it uses, there has to be some other way of distinguishing between the items being classified. For precisely what a system of classification does is to register certain differences between things by abstracting from all other differences between them. It leaves open the possibility, even if that possibility is not in fact realized, that two items are to be classified in exactly the same way; in other words, that, among the features with which the analysis is concerned, two items have exactly the same features.
¹⁴
Two such items may of course be distinguished in accord with some other system of classification. But then the same considerations apply to that. There has to be some way, Bergson thinks, in which the items are
ultimately
distinguished. But what way? The distinction between them cannot be ‘brute’. The only way in which the items can be ultimately distinguished, Bergson argues, is by their respective positions and extensions in some space. This may be a space in the metaphorical sense that is familiar to mathematicians, an abstract structure in whose terms we can define relations of ‘distance’, ‘congruence’, and the like. Or it may be literal, physical space. The essential differences between things, within such a space, are all differences of degree: any item is more or less ‘extended’, any two items are more
or less ‘far apart’, and so forth. The space itself is completely homogeneous. The items occupying it constitute what Bergson describes as a discrete quantitative multiplicity. (See
Time and Free Will
, pp. 75–85 and 120–123.)

Now time itself can be construed as such a space. Indeed, for nearly all practical purposes, that is precisely how it is construed. Intelligence recognizes no difference, as far as these considerations go, between time and (physical) space.
¹⁵
But whatever practical advantages there may be in construing time in this way, it is false to the reality of time
as consciously experienced
. This is what Bergson calls
duration
. Things in duration constitute multiplicities of a completely different sort. Such multiplicities are heterogeneous: they are characterized by differences of kind rather than differences of degree. And they have parts that are not discrete but permeate one another. The past of duration does not terminate with the present, but continues into the present. In fact that continuation of the past into the present is what duration
is
. Duration is therefore in a never-ending state of growth.
¹⁶
In Bergson’s own formulation, duration ‘is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’ (
Creative Evolution
, p. 7). It has the ‘indivisible and indestructible continuity of a
melody
where the past enters into the present and forms with it an undivided whole which remains undivided and even indivisible in spite of what is added at every instant, or rather, thanks to what is added’ (‘Introduction II’, p. 71, emphasis added). The reality of duration is inaccessible to intelligence, but not to intuition (
Creative Evolution
, pp. 371ff., and ‘Introduction II’, pp. 34–35). For intuition, which is itself an enduring faculty, yields knowledge by assimilation. What allows such knowledge to be more than merely self-knowledge is the fact that intuition’s own duration is the duration of the entire universe. The universe is in fact essentially spiritual in character. Its ‘inner life’ encompasses the inner lives of individuals.
¹⁷
Here is a fuller extract from the paragraph from which I quoted at the end of the previous section:

[Intuition] … bears above all upon duration…. It is the direct vision of the mind by the mind…. [But] is it merely the intuition of ourselves? … Unreflecting sympathy and antipathy … give evidence of a possible interpenetration of human consciousness…. It may be that intuition opens the way for us into consciousness in general. – But is it only with consciousness that we are in sympathy? If every living being is born, develops, and dies, if life is an evolution and if duration is in this case a reality, is there not also an intuition of the vital …? – Let us go still further…. The
material universe in its entirety
keeps
our consciousness
waiting
; it waits itself. Either it endures, or it is bound up in our own duration. Whether it is connected to the mind by its origins or by its function, in either case it has to do with intuition through all the real change and movement that it contains…. Pure change, real duration, is a thing spiritual or impregnated with spirituality. Intuition is what attains the spirit, duration, pure change. Its real domain being the spirit, it would seek to grasp in things, even material things, their participation in spirituality. (‘Introduction II’, pp. 32–33, emphasis in original; cf. ‘Metaphysics’, pp. 187–188)

It would be easy to read into Bergson a kind of Cartesian dualism: there is matter, which is ultimately no different from space, and which therefore, at the most fundamental level, is to be understood in mathematical terms; and there are minds, or spirits, or consciousnesses, which, at the most fundamental level, are to be understood in terms of their duration, where this in turn can be grasped only by participation in it.
¹⁸
But the passage above belies any such reading.
Everything
participates in duration. Everything – including, as Bergson indicates at the end of the passage, every material thing – participates in spirituality.

That said, Bergson does see in Cartesian dualism an inchoate attempt to reckon with the main components of his vision (
Creative Evolution
, pp. 375–377).
¹⁹
It may be incorrect to read a Cartesian dualism into that vision. But is there perhaps a dualism of some related kind there?
²⁰

In fact, we do well not to think of the vision as dualistic at all, any more than we would think of a vision as dualistic just because it involved an appeal to, say, form and content. There is only nature. But, to quote Deleuze, ‘duration
is like naturing nature, and matter a natured nature’ (Deleuze (
1988b
), p. 93). The past of duration exists
virtually
. It consists of tendencies. Duration is the never-ending
actualization
of these tendencies – in matter. Or rather, it is their never-ending actualization of themselves in matter. This never-ending process is nature’s continuous creation of itself, ‘the uninterrupted upsurge of novelty’ (‘Introduction I’, p. 18). One way to think of this is topologically. Processes of bending, blending, stretching, breaking, twisting, piercing, and suchlike actualize various topologically characterizable tendencies in things. A spherical Plasticine ball, say, may become ovoid as a result of squashing or even toroid as a result of puncturing. And the actualization of these tendencies in turn generates new tendencies. A previously spherical, now ovoid Plasticine ball may bump down an inclined plane where previously it would have rolled smoothly down it. The past of duration is thus continually growing, which means that the virtual is never completely actualized. Intuition is a way of knowing nature as it is in itself, that is as it is in its enduring self. Analysis is a way of knowing nature as if it had eventually come to an end; as if there
had
been a complete actualization of its previously ever-expanding past of virtual tendencies. (See e.g. ‘Metaphysics’, pp. 162ff., and
Creative Evolution
, pp. 12–14 and 384–385.)
²¹