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 is an attempt to once again foreground the layers of perception that have been covered up by the intellect. In order to grasp the world, the intellect decomposes, fixes, and organizes objects into identities. In the process, however, it has truncated the whole picture of reality that continues to be generated and of life in flux. The goal of the second half of this book is not to deny this function of the intellect, but to reevaluate and recapture the intuition and instinct behind it without constriction.

Intuition is not a vague and undifferentiated sense. It is the ability to grasp things as a whole before dividing them into parts, a way of perception that surrenders itself to the flow of change itself. Instinct, too, is not a reflexive impulse, but a knowing that operates in relation to its environment, cultivated over a long period of time by life. These existed before intelligence and have been the basis on which intelligence was formed.

Modern science has made great achievements by emphasizing intelligence that allows for analysis and reproduction. At the same time, however, intuition and instinct have been dismissed as subjective and uncertain. From the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, reflection on this bias began to gain strength in the fields of philosophy, literature, and history. The thickness of experience and the overlap of time, which cannot be captured by quantification and legalization, came to be called into question again.

This is the reason for the emphasis on a cognitive attitude similar to that of literature and history. Literature does not deconstruct events, but portrays people and situations in the course of time. History also assumes that no two moments are the same, and reads how the past affects the present. These activities have in common that they attempt to capture the persistence and generation of life through intuitive grasping.

The recovery of intuition and instinct is not a retreat into irrationality. Rather, it is an expansion of human understanding by incorporating into perception aspects of reality that cannot be captured by the intellect alone. When we relax our analytical hand and listen carefully to the flow, life appears not as a fixed object, but as a movement that continues to change even at this very moment. To touch that movement, intuition and instinct are once again needed.