Intuition (Bergson)

Intuition is the philosophical method of French philosopher Henri Bergson.

In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson introduces two ways in which an object can be known: absolutely and relatively. Pertaining to each mode of knowledge is a method through which it can be gained. The latter’s method is what Bergson calls analysis, while the method of intuition belongs to the former.

Intuition is an experience of sorts, which connects us to the things themselves in themselves. Thus he calls his philosophy the true empiricism. In the following article, analysis and the relative will be explained as a preliminary to understanding intuition, and then intuition and the absolute will be expounded upon.

Analysis is always an analysis ad infinitum and one can never reach the absolute. It consists in dividing the object based on the chosen viewpoint and translating the divided fragments into symbols, wherein a spectre of the original can be reconstructed. These symbols always distort the part of the object they represent, as they’re generalized to include it and every other part they represent. Thus they ignore the object’s uniqueness.

This is natural, however, as language is the product of commonsense, which is never disinterested. Thus, for example, mobility is translated into a trajectory line and treated as a row of divisible, immobile points. Symbols are generally always spatial and immobile. This allows science to be predictive and our actions to assert themselves on fixed points.

Within philosophy, however, problems arise when the symbols are treated as the objects they represent and when, through composition, the original is expected to be found within the simulacrum. An example of this is the substance theory of rationalists and the bundle theory of empiricists. Empiricists, searching for the substance within the gaps of the composition, fill them in within even more symbols. Unwilling to continue filling in the gaps ad infinitum, they renounce that there is a substance and maintain the properties, or symbols, which are not to be confused with parts, are all that there are. The rationalists, on the other hand, are unwilling to relinquish substance. Thus they transform it into an unknowable container in which properties reside. Trying to obtain the unity of the object, they allow their substance to contain more and more properties, until eventually it can contain everything, including God and nature. Bergson likened this to a piece of gold for which one can never make up the change.

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