The Creative Mind

An Introduction to Metaphysics

Henri Bergson

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486454399
• eBook ISBN: 9780486119243
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

The final published book by Nobel Prize-winning author and philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), La pensée et le mouvant (translated here as The Creative Mind), is a masterly autobiography of his philosophical method. Through essays and lectures written between 1903 and 1923, Bergson retraces how and why he became a philosopher, and crafts a fascinating critique of philosophy itself. Until it leaves its false paths, he demonstrates, philosophy will remain only a wordy dialectic that surmounts false problems.
With masterful skill and intensity, Bergson shows that metaphysics and science must be rooted in experience for philosophy to become a genuine search for truth. And in the quest for unanswered questions, the spiritual dimension of human life and the importance of intuition must be emphasized. A source of inspiration for physicists as well as philosophers, Bergson's introduction to metaphysics reveals a philosophy that is always on the move, blending man's spiritual drive with his mastery of the material world.

INTRODUCTION

II

Stating of the Problems

Duration and intuition.—Nature of intuitive knowledge.—In what sense it is clear.—Two kinds of clarity.—The Intelligence.—Value of intellectual knowledge.—Abstractions and metaphors.—Metaphysics and science.—Under what condition they can be mutually helpful.—On mysticism.—On the independence of the mind.—Must we accept the “terms” of the problems?—The philosophy of the body politic.—General ideas.—True and false problems. —Kantian criticism and the theories of knowledge.—The “intellectualist” illusion.—Methods of teaching.—Homo loquax.—The philosopher, the scholar and the “intelligent man.”

These conclusions on the subject of duration were, as it seemed to me, decisive. Step by step they led me to raise intuition to the level of a philosophical method. “Intuition,” however, is a word whose use caused me some degree of hesitation. Of all the terms which designate a mode of knowing, it is still the most appropriate; and yet it leads to a certain confusion. Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have already called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intuition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that I was using the same method. But of course, their intuition was an immediate search for the eternal! Whereas, on the contrary, for me it was a question, above all, of finding true duration. Numerous are the philosophers who have felt how powerless conceptual thought is to reach the core of the mind. Numerous, consequently, are those who have spoken of a supra-intellectual faculty of intuition. But as they believed that the intelligence worked within time, they have concluded that to go beyond the intelligence consisted in getting outside of time. They did not see that intellectualized time is space, that the intelligence works upon the phantom of duration, not on duration itself, that the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding, that the relativity of our knowledge of the mind is a direct result of this fact, and that hence, to pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the absolute, is not a question of getting outside of time (we are already there); on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence. An intuition, which claims to project itself with one bound into the eternal, limits itself to the intellectual. For the concepts which the intelligence furnishes, the intuition simply substitutes one single concept which includes them all and which consequently is always the same, by whatever name it is called: Substance, Ego, Idea, Will. Philosophy, thus understood, necessarily pantheistic, will have no difficulty in explaining everything deductively, since it will have been given beforehand, in a principle which is the concept of concepts, all the real and all the possible. But this explanation will be vague and hypothetical, this unity will be artificial, and this philosophy would apply equally well to a very different world from our own. How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one? Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.

The intuition we refer to then bears above all upon internal duration. It grasps a succession which is not juxtaposition, a growth from within, the uninterrupted prolongation of the past into a present which is already blending into the future. It is the direct vision of the mind by the mind,—nothing intervening, no refraction through the prism, one of whose facets is space and another, language. Instead of states contiguous to states, which become words in juxtaposition to words, we have here the indivisible and therefore substantial continuity of the flow of the inner life. Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate consciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguishable from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.—Next, it is consciousness extended, pressing upon the edge of an unconscious which gives way and which resists, which surrenders and which regains itself: through the rapid alternating of obscurity and light, it makes us see that the unconscious is there; contrary to strict logic, it affirms that the psychological can be consciousness as much as it likes, there is nevertheless a psychological unconsciousness.—Does it not go even further? Is it merely the intuition of ourselves? Between our consciousness and other consciousnesses the separation is less clear-cut than between our body and other bodies, for it is space which makes these divisions sharp. Unreflecting sympathy and antipathy, which so often have that power of divination, give evidence of a possible interpenetration of human consciousnesses. It would appear then that phenomena of psychological endosmosis exist. It may be that intuition opens the way for us into consciousness in general.—But is it only with consciousnesses 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, and consequently a metaphysics of life, which might in a sense prolong the science of the living? Science will certainly throw more and more light on the physico-chemical nature of organized matter, but the underlying cause of this organization, which we can easily see does not come within the realm either of pure mechanism or of finality (in the proper sense) and is neither pure unity not distinct multiplicity, and which in fact our understanding will characterize by simple negations, this cause, shall we not get down to it by recapturing through consciousness the vital impetus within us?—Let us go still further. Above and beyond the organizing process, unorganized matter appears as though decomposable into systems over which time slips without penetrating, systems which belong to the realm of science and to which the understanding can be applied. But 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 with 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. It is my belief, in fact, that the idea of differential, or rather of fluxion, was suggested to science by a vision of this kind. Metaphysical in its origins, it became scientific as it grew more rigorous, that is, expressible in static terms. In short, 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,—I should say in divinity were I not aware of all the human element still in our consciousness, however purified and spiritualized. This human element is precisely what makes it possible for the intuitional effort to be accomplished at different levels on different points, and to give in various philosophies results which do not coincide with one another even though they are in no way incompatible.

Let no one ask me for a simple and geometrical definition of intuition. It is only too easy to show that the word is taken in meanings which cannot be deduced mathematically from one another. An eminent Danish philosopher has pointed out four of them. I should be inclined to say that there are more!⁴ Of what is not abstract and conventional but real and concrete, and all the more so of what is not reconstitutable with known components, in other words, of that thing which has not been cut out of the whole of reality either by the understanding or by common sense or by language, one cannot give any idea unless one takes views of it that are multiple, complementary and not at all equivalent. God forbid that I should compare the small with the great, my effort with that of the masters! But the variety of the functions and aspects of intuition, as I describe it, is nothing beside the multiplicity of meanings the words “essence” and “existence” have in Spinoza, or the terms “form,” “power,” “act”... etc., in Aristotle. Glance over the list of meanings of the word eidos in the Index Aristotelicus: you will see how much they differ. If one considers two sufficiently divergent meanings, they will almost seem to be mutually exclusive. They are not exclusive because the chain of intermediary meanings links them up. By making the necessary effort to embrace the whole, one perceives that one is in the real and not in the presence of a mathematical essence which could be summed up in a simple formula.

There is, however, a fundamental meaning: to think intuitively is to think in duration. Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition. Intuition starts from movement, posits it, or rather perceives it as reality itself, and sees in immobility only an abstract moment, a snapshot taken by our mind, of a mobility. Intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things, meaning by that, with the static, and makes of change an accident which is supposedly superadded. For intuition the essential is change: as for the thing, as intelligence understands it, it is a cutting which has been made out of the becoming and set up by our mind as a substitute for the whole. Thought ordinarily pictures to itself the new as a new arrangement of pre-existing elements; nothing is ever lost for it, nothing is ever created. Intuition, bound up to a duration which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty; it sees, it knows that the mind draws from itself more than it has, that spirituality consists in just that, and that reality, impregnated with spirit, is creation. The habitual labor of thought is easy and can be prolonged at will. Intuition is arduous and cannot last. Whether it be intellection or intuition, thought, of course, always utilizes language; and intuition, like all thought, finally becomes lodged in concepts such as duration, qualitative or heterogeneous multiplicity, unconsciousness,—even differentiation, if one considers the notion such as it was to begin with. But the concept which is of intellectual origin is immediately clear, at least for a mind which can put forth sufficient effort, while the idea which has sprung from an intuition ordinarily begins by being obscure, whatever our power of thought may be. The fact is that there are two kinds of clarity.

A new idea may be clear because it presents to us, simply arranged in a new order, elementary ideas which we already possessed. Our intelligence, finding only the old in the new, feels itself on familiar ground; it is at ease; it “understands.” Such is the clarity we desire, are looking for, and for which we are always most grateful to whoever presents it to us. There is another kind that we submit to, and which, moreover, imposes itself only with time. It is the clarity of the radically new and absolutely simple idea, which catches as it were an intuition. As we cannot reconstruct it with pre-existing elements, since it has no elements, and as on the other hand, to understand without effort consists in recomposing the new from what is old, our first impulse is to say it is incomprehensible. But let us accept it provisionally, let us go with it through the various departments of our knowledge: we shall see that, itself obscure, it dissipates obscurities. By it the problems we considered insoluble will resolve themselves, or rather, be dissolved, either to disappear definitively, or to present themselves in some other way. From what it has done for these problems, it will in its turn, benefit. Each one of them, intellectual by nature, will communicate to it something of its intellectuality. Thus intellectualized, this idea can be aimed anew at problems which will have been of use to it after having made use of it; better still, it will clear up the obscurity which surrounded them, and will, as a result, become itself still clearer. One must therefore distinguish between the ideas which keep their light for themselves, making it penetrate immediately into their slightest recesses, and those whose radiation is exterior, illuminating a whole region of thought. These can begin by being inwardly obscure; but the light they project about them comes back in reflection, with deeper and deeper penetration; and they then have the double power of illuminating what they play upon and of being illuminated themselves.

Even then they must be given time. The philosopher has not always this patience. How much simpler it is to confine oneself to notions stored up in the language! These ideas were formed by the intelligence as its needs appeared. They correspond to a cutting out of reality according to the lines that must be followed in order to act conveniently upon it. Most frequently they distribute objects and facts according to the way they can be turned to account, throwing pell-mell into the same intellectual compartment everything which concerns the same need. When we react identically to different perceptions, we say that we are faced with objects “of the same kind.” When we react in two directly opposed ways, we are dividing the objects into two “opposite kinds.” What will be clear, then, by definition, is that which can be resolved into generalities thus obtained; obscure, that which can not be so reduced. Thus is explained the striking inferiority of the intuitive point of view in philosophical controversy. Listen to the discussion between any two philosophers one of whom upholds determinism, and the other liberty: it is always the determinist who seems to be in the right. He may be a beginner and his adversary a seasoned philosopher. He can plead his cause nonchalantly, while the other sweats blood for his. It will always be said of him that he is simple, clear and right. He is easily and naturally so, having only to collect thought ready to hand and phrases ready-made: science, language, common sense, the whole of intelligence is at his disposal. Criticism of an intuitive philosophy is so easy and so certain to be well received that it will always tempt the beginner. Regret may come later,—unless, of course, there is a native lack of comprehension and, out of spite, personal resentment toward everything that is not reducible to the letter, toward all that is properly spirit. That can happen, for philosophy too has its Scribes and its Pharisees.

To metaphysics, then, we assign a limited object, principally spirit, and a special method, mainly intuition. In doing this we make a clear distinction between metaphysics and science. But at the same time we attribute an equal value to both. I believe that they can both touch the bottom of reality. I reject the arguments advanced by philosophers, and accepted by scholars, on the relativity of knowledge and the impossibility of attaining the absolute.

Positive science, as a matter of fact, goes to sensible observation to obtain materials whose elaboration it entrusts to the faculty of abstracting and generalizing, to judgment and reasoning, to the intelligence. Having started from pure mathematics, it continued through mechanics, then through physics and chemistry; it arrived somewhat late in the day at biology. Its original domain, which has continued to be its preferred domain, is that of inert matter. It is less at its ease in the organized world, where it treads its way with an assured step only if it relies upon physics and chemistry; it clings to the physico-chemical in vital phenomena rather than to what is really vital in the living. But great is its embarrassment when it reaches the mind. That does not mean that it cannot obtain some knowledge of it; but this knowledge becomes all the more vague the farther it gets away from the common border-line between mind and matter. One will never advance on this new terrain as on the old, relying solely on the power of logic. One must ceaselessly appeal from the “esprit géométrique” to the “esprit de finesse”: still, there is always something metaphorical in the formulas, however abstract, at which one arrives; as though the intelligence was obliged to transpose the psychic into the physical in order to understand and explain it. On the contrary, as soon as it comes back to inert matter, the science which arises from pure intelligence finds itself at home. This is in no way surprising. Our intelligence is the prolongation of our senses. Before we speculate we must live, and life demands that we make use of matter, either with our organs, which are natural tools, or with tools, properly so-called, which are artificial organs. Long before there was a philosophy and a science, the role of the intelligence was already that of manufacturing instruments and guiding the action of our body on surrounding bodies. Science has pushed this labor of the intelligence much further, but has not changed its direction. It aims above all at making us masters of matter. Even when science is speculating, it is still devoting its attention to acting, the value of scientific theories being gauged constantly by the solidity of the grip they give us upon reality. But is that not precisely what should inspire us with complete confidence in positive science and also in the intelligence, its instrument? If the intellect has been made in order to utilize matter, its structure has no doubt been modelled upon that of matter. At least that is the simplest and most probable hypothesis. We should keep to it as long as it is not demonstrated to us that the intelligence deforms, transforms, constructs its object, or only brushes the surface, or grasps the mere semblance of it. Now nothing has ever been invoked by way of that demonstration, but the insoluble difficulties into which philosophy falls, the self-contradiction into which the intellect can fall when it speculates upon things as a whole—difficulties and contradictions we naturally come up against if the intellect is especially destined for the study of a part, and if we nevertheless mean to use it in knowing the whole. But it is not enough to say that. It is impossible to consider the mechanism of our intellect and the progress of our science without arriving at the conclusion that between intellect and matter there is, in fact, symmetry, concord and agreement. On one hand, matter resolves itself more and more, in the eyes of the scholar, into mathematical relations, and on the other hand, the essential faculties of our intellect function with an absolute precision only when they are applied to geometry.

Doubtless, it might have been possible for mathematical science not to take originally the form the Greeks gave it. No doubt it must also, whatever form it adopts, keep to a strict use of artificial signs. But prior to this formulated mathematics, which is in large measure made up of convention, there is another, virtual or implicit, which is natural to the human mind. If the necessity of working with certain symbols makes the approach to mathematics difficult for many of us, the mind, in compensation, as soon as it has surmounted the obstacle, moves in this domain with a facility it has nowhere else, evidence being in this case immediate and theoretically instantaneous, the effort to understand existing most often in fact but not in right. In any other order of study, on the contrary, there must be, for understanding, a maturation process of thought which in some way adheres to the result, essentially fills up duration, and cannot even theoretically be conceived as instantaneous. In short, we might believe in a divergence between matter and intellect if we were to consider in matter only the superficial impressions made upon our senses, and if we were to leave to our intellect the vague and hazy form it takes in its daily operations. But when we bring the intellect back to its precise contours and when we delve deeply enough into our sense-impressions so that matter begins to surrender to us its inner structure, we find that the articulations of the intellect apply exactly to those of matter. I therefore do not see why the science of matter should not reach an absolute. It instinctively assumes this scope, and all natural belief should be held as true, all appearance taken for reality, as long as its illusory character has not been established. Upon those who declare our science to be relative, upon those who claim that our knowledge deforms or constructs its object, now falls the burden of proof. And they cannot fulfill this obligation, for there is no room for the doctrine of the relativity of science when science and metaphysics are on their true ground, that to which we restore them.⁵

We recognize, furthermore, that the limits within which the intellect works have a certain elasticity, its contours a certain haziness, and that its indecision is exactly what permits it to be applied in some degree to the things of the mind. Matter and mind have this in common, that certain superficial agitations of matter are expressed in our minds, superficially, in the form of sensations; and on the other hand, the mind, in order to act upon the body, must descend little by little toward matter and become spatialized. It follows that the intelligence, although turned toward external things, can still be exerted on things internal, provided that it does not claim to plunge too deeply.

But the temptation is great to carry to the very depth of the mind the application of those procedures which are successful as long as one remains near the surface. If one gives in to it, one will obtain purely and simply a physics of the mind traced upon that of bodies. Together these two physics will constitute a complete system of reality, what is sometimes called a metaphysics. How can one help but see that metaphysics thus understood fails to recognize the strictly spiritual in the mind, being only the extension to mind of what belongs to matter? And how can we help but see that in order to make this extension possible, we have had to take intellectual forms in a state of imprecision which still leaves them applicable to the superficial phenomena of the soul, and thereby condemns them to keeping less closely to the facts of the external world? Is it surprising that such a metaphysics, embracing both matter and mind at the same time, should give the effect of knowledge which is almost empty and in any case vague,—almost empty on the side of mind, since it has been able effectively to retain only superficial aspects of the soul, systematically vague on the side of matter, because the intelligence of the metaphysician must have sufficiently loosened its mechanism, and given it sufficient play to enable it to work equally well at the surface of matter or the surface of mind?

Quite different is the metaphysics that we place side by side with science. Granting to science the power of explaining matter by the mere force of intelligence, it reserves mind for itself. In this realm, proper to itself, it seeks to develop new functions of thought. Everyone can have noticed that it is more difficult to make progress in the knowledge of oneself than in the knowledge of the external world. Outside oneself, the effort to learn is natural; one makes it with increasing facility; one applies rules. Within, attention must remain tense and progress become more and more painful; it is as though one were going against the natural bent. Is there not something surprising in this? We are internal to ourselves, and our personality is what we should know...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• I - Growth of Truth. Retrograde Movement of the True
• II - Stating of the Problems
• III - The Possible and the Real
• IV - Philosophical Intuition
• V - The Perception of Change
• VI - Introduction to Metaphysics
• VII - The Philosophy of Claude Bernard
• VIII - On the Pragmatism of William James. Truth and Reality
• IX - The Life and Work of Ravaisson
• Notes
• A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST