Bergson, "Creative Evolution" Breathing Behind the Intellect: An Attempt to Reclaim Intuition and Instinct Late Nineteenth Early Twentieth Century

Bergson, "Creative Evolution" Breathing Behind the Intellect: An Attempt to Reclaim Intuition and Instinct Late Nineteenth Early Twentieth Century

The recovery of intuition and instinct, as presented in the second half of this book, is an attempt to relativize the workings of the intellect, which is primarily analytical and fixed, and to re-figure the layers of cognition that underlie it. The intellect has made scientific understanding possible by breaking things down and organizing them under sameness, but in the process it has devalued the overall movement of reality and life that continues to be generated. Intuition is not an undifferentiated sense, but the ability to grasp the whole at once and understand it in line with the flow of change before it is divided, and instinct is also a knowledge that life has accumulated in its relationship with its environment through long periods of time. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the persistence of irreducible time and experience was reevaluated in philosophy, literature, and history, and the thickness of reality that could not be captured by quantificat
ion and legalization was called into question. The emphasis on a cognitive attitude similar to that of literature and history is based on the premise that the same moment is never repeated twice, and events are grasped in their flow. The recovery of intuition and instinct is not a retreat into irrationality, but an ideological attempt to incorporate into cognition a reality that cannot be recovered by the intellect and to expand human understanding itself.