The Runaway of Knowledge and the Silence of Intuition The Disconnection and Recovery of Intelligence and Intuition 1900-2025

The Runaway of Knowledge and the Silence of Intuition The Disconnection and Recovery of Intelligence and Intuition 1900-2025

Bergson was deeply concerned that the human intellect has lost its connection to "intuition" in the process of development. The intellect is the ability to analyze, isolate, and fixate on the material world. While this has led to dramatic advances in science and technology, it has also led to a severely weakened understanding of "dynamic things" such as time, life, emotion, and art as living flows. For Bergson, this disconnect was not merely a functional bias, but a crisis of human existence itself.

Intuition is essentially a circuit that connects us to the depths of life, a sensitivity that allows us to "live and understand" time and the continuity of life. However, with the development of intellect, intuition was eliminated as "irrational" and became an object of control by reason. As a result, the intellect, while pursuing efficiency and logic, lost sight of its purpose and became increasingly prone to diverging from its own inner self. This "silence of intuition" lies behind the division, numbness, and excessive rationalism that pervade modern society.

Bergson explains that in order to recover from this, we should not deny the intellect, but rather reconnect it to consciousness as its "source. Intuition is not the opposite of the intellect, but its starting point, the origin from which the intellect works according to the rhythm of life. For example, art, religion, deep empathy, or the wonder of a child's encounter with the world - these are all manifestations of intuition, in which the wholeness of the world is preserved.

If the intellect is the force that subdivides and externalizes the world, intuition is the force that integrates and grasps the world from within. The circulation of both supported the original "living intellect. Bergson says that now is the time to overcome this rupture and restore the intellect to the flow of intuition once again. This is the only way to regenerate a human future that has become too technologically biased.