The Practice of Bergson’s Intuition

Henri Bergson makes clear that philosophy is upheld by transformations in perception, but we could do more to make those practices explicit. The handbooks of the religious traditions may show us how.

Two Apostles, Ole Kandelin, 1943: Photo by Europeana

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1. The Philosophical Priority of Askēsis

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My philosophical focus over the past several years has been to bring into the foreground the following idea:

Philosophical insight is delivered by philosophical practice—that what philosophy delivers in proposition and argument, or can be shown through phenomenological demonstration, is downstream of the practices that make all three possible. These practices I group under the word askēsis, or spiritual exercise. These are practices that transform the perceiver by transforming who he or she is as a person.

The point is that what we see and understand is linked to who we are as persons, and who we are as persons is, in part, a result of the practices that form us as people. This view of philosophy is centered on movements in thought that precipitate transformations in perception, secured by practice.

Among other things, this approach implies a specific way of reading and interpreting texts. I am looking in them for reference to these practices or movements that generate the discursive account we find within them. In the tradition of Pierre Hadot, who showed that ancient philosophy was as much a way of life as a system of ideas, I take philosophical exposition to be the expression or outcome of certain formative practices—often tacit, sometimes explicit—that shape not only the content but also the very mode of perception from which philosophical insights emerge.

In many philosophical texts, what we receive is the result of a sustained perceptual or cognitive discipline, a set of insights, arguments, or distinctions that presuppose a certain orientation or transformation of the thinker. But these practices are rarely thematized; they remain in the background, if mentioned at all, even when they are essential to the very possibility of what the text discloses.

The genres of philosophical writing are many, but they share the quality of hiding their work—not work in this sense of argument, but work in the sense of practice, something that takes place somewhere off the page. In my readings of Henri Bergson these past few weeks, I have found a particularly illuminating example of what I mean. Bergson is a useful case study because he both thematizes this kind of transformative movement in perception and exemplifies in so many ways precisely what Hadot meant by philosophy as a way of life. (Indeed, Bergson is one of Hadot’s central examples in his works, and he was a primary influence on Hadot throughout his life, dating as far back as his high school graduation thesis, continuing through to his late essays.)

Keith Ansell-Pearson has devoted a whole essay to this connection, noting how for Bergson philosophy is at once a “way of life,” “a new way of seeing the world,” and “a preparation for the art of living.” On these points, Ansell-Pearson writes:

Bergson provides a conception of philosophy as a way of life in this sense: he does not simply offer his readers the possibility of acquiring abstract knowledge, but instead his work aims to encourage the cultivation of a special mode of perception (intuition and intellectual sympathy) that will dramatically transform our vision of the world and in the process change our comportment and sense of being in the world.

Ansell-Pearson hones in on the Ignatian phrase “spiritual exercise” in his treatment of both Hadot’s and Bergson’s understanding of philosophy as a way of life, a phrase we can treat interchangeably with askēsis to arrive at the same understanding.

The idea is simple. In the same way that there are physical exercises for transforming the body, there are philosophical exercises that can transform our minds, and, so, our way of being in the world. Bergson’s intuition (and the related notion of sympathy) is, for Ansell-Pearson, the central spiritual exercise that Bergson’s philosophy commends us to practice. It is “a unique mode of extended perception,” as he calls it, one that moves us “beyond the human condition.” I want to draw out Bergson on these references to movements or practices in thought, both to show their centrality to his philosophy and to surface how they, unfortunately, often take the shape of vague allusions in his philosophical works. These references show how integral practice is to his metaphysics, even when left undeveloped.

To see how this relationship between practice and expression works in detail, we can follow Bergson into his own texts, where the distinction between analysis and intuition is explicitly drawn and where the practical movement underlying that distinction shapes his metaphysics.

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2. Analysis, Intuition, and Metaphysics

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The following passages come from the essays published in Bergson’s The Creative Mind, especially in “Introduction Part II” and the “Introduction to Metaphysics,” wherein he lays out the argument for his method of intuition, the method that for Bergson makes his metaphysics possible. In what follows, I describe the distinctions he makes between “analysis” (or “intelligence,” elsewhere) and “intuition” from one short section of the “Introduction to Metaphysics” to foreground how Bergson, ultimately, secures this distinction via a movement in perception that he passes over but is clear in saying is unique, and central, to this approach to metaphysics.

My point is to show that this aspect of his account is noted but then moved beyond rather quickly, without much mention of what it is, or how to reproduce it. A view of philosophy that foregrounds practice, I would argue, would spend more time on this procedure, treating it not as a passing gesture but as the very condition for the possibility of philosophical insight, a condition we find more precisely described in religious handbooks, as we’ll see. In Bergson’s case, the practice is signaled, even emphasized, but remains largely unexamined—its methodological priority affirmed, its practical enactment left undeveloped. I don’t fault Bergson for any of this; he did not set out to write a handbook of philosophical techniques. He, like so many other philosophers, is reporting what he sees from a point of view, a point of view replete with the vision of a unique man, one with a canny sense of depth and sensitivity.

Let us look, then, at the passages in question, where Bergson develops his difference between practical knowledge, achieved through concepts and actions, and the possibility of metaphysics, which requires a different kind of engagement with reality altogether—one that is at once disinterested and sympathetic (in the Plotinian sense of a “cosmic sympathy” with the whole of life as a continuous movement). Along these lines, Bergson suggests that “the usual sense of the word ‘think,’” means to fit the right concepts appropriate to our practical needs. He says, “nothing is more legitimate than this method of proceeding, as long as it’s only a question of practical knowledge of reality.” This process, Bergson continues, “is the ordinary role of ready-made concepts, those stations with which we mark out the passage of becoming.” I’ll quote Bergson at greater length to sharpen this distinction:

Our intelligence, when it follows its natural inclinations, proceeds by solid perceptions on the one hand, and by stable conceptions on the other. It starts from the immobile and conceives and expresses movement only in terms of immobility. It places itself in ready-made concepts and tries to catch in them, as in a net, something of the passing reality. It does not do so in order to obtain an internal and metaphysical knowledge of the real. It is simply to make use of them, each concept (like each sensation) being a practical question which our activity asks of reality and to which reality will answer, as is proper in things, by a yes or a no. But in doing so it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape. (Italics in the original)

The method of analysis appears at this level of conceptual parceling. It shows itself through a carving out of the world into clear and distinct categories and ideas, on the one hand, and their corresponding objects and events, on the other. The unexamined mind may take these parcelings to be artifacts of reality in itself, but a more conscientious one would observe that these artifacts are, in fact, effects wrought into existence by our own epistemic proceduralism. These are practical distinctions, not ontological ones—habits of thinking and perceiving rather than veridical perceptions—and we miss reality in its truer character when we comport with Being in this way. The method of intuition, Bergson says, shows us something different: “What I find beneath these clear-cut crystals and this superficial congelation is a continuity of flow comparable to no other flowing I have ever seen,” is how he puts it.

This flow is what Bergson names duration, the object of metaphysical intuition.

In other words, Bergson is saying that our knowledge of things is mostly a practical knowledge that elides a deeper knowledge that he argues is secured by his method of intuition. This method, Bergson says, is what allows us to enter into the project of metaphysics. To stay at the level of conceptual practicality is “to forget” the possibility of metaphysics, which requires a different approach, one that can “penetrate to the innermost nature of things.” This work, in his words:

Can only be an effort to re-ascend the slope natural to the work of thought, to place oneself immediately, through a dilation of the mind, in the thing one is studying, in short to go from reality to concepts and not from concepts to reality.

This idea, which the rest of Bergson’s writing in this essay rests upon, is argued for by making a distinction between a practical and a metaphysical claim. But the claim itself rests on a movement, on “a dilation of the mind,” as he calls it.

This dilation, in turn, enables a demonstration from the point of view that one enters into as a result of the movement itself. For Bergson, this shift in perception discloses the reality of duration—the flow below those clear-cut crystals—that subtends our conceptual parsing of reality into practically useful regions of separable and analyzable objects, events, and causes. One would think, then, that what would follow from here would be a practical instruction for enacting such a dilation. Instead, what we read is a treatise on the limits of analytic procedure when it tries to understand duration in the terms of its “ready-made concepts” versus the intuitive method that can disclose something deeper, and, I would add, more elusive-but-true about reality.

But no such commentary arrives—here or in how Bergson is often taught.

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3. Bergson as a Case Study in Implicit Practice

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Indeed, when we teach Bergson, we teach his ideas, arguments, and texts; we place him in a field of contrasts, emphasizing how his philosophy differs from a Plato a Schopenhauer or a Whitehead. We may even teach how his ideas were appropriated by Deleuze, or how he fits into larger traditions of French philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. What we don’t do is teach the technique of intuition, or the other practices that might need to be in place to enact such a maneuver, and we certainly don’t teach a curriculum centered on something called “Dilation of the Mind 101,” even though it is this movement of thought from which Bergson’s philosophy springs.

It’s clear in Bergson that these are existential operations one can put into play in one’s own life—an act he suggests is necessary in order to do metaphysics. But that’s not what we get, even though Bergson’s own philosophy is a testimony to the effectiveness of these techniques. Indeed, his whole philosophy could be summed up as a phenomenological description of the world from the point of view of these maneuvers. Without them, we would have no philosophy we call “Bergsonian” or “Bergsonism.” No event that precipitates the philosophy.

We point to these practices, as Ansell-Pearson does, but we don’t center them, let alone teach them. I don’t point this out to discredit Bergson’s reasoning. And my aim here is not to litigate the integrity of his claims—to ask, for example, if concepts as such really are reducible to practical knowledge alone, or to press him on the reality of form in his image of duration, two places where I might question him on more technical grounds. What I am trying to do instead is examine and make explicit the preconditions for the insights that Bergson argues are central to his philosophy, and to foreground a tendency all too pervasive in philosophical writing; namely, that the key procedure, or movement, is mentioned only in brief terms, even when it is the movement, the procedure, the protocol—and the practices that might secure them—that are in many ways the most important part of the discussion.

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To be sure, there can be something crass about reducing these methods to simple and sober protocols, and there is some sense in which these practices should be guarded and transmitted only in specific circumstances, teacher-to-student, but it would be saying too much to suggest that they have no place in our curricula, or that we have no means or methods by which to transmit them. Unfortunately, Bergson goes on to gesture at the repeated use of these movements, or “acts,” as he calls them, without naming them or describing how we might learn to be transformed by them. As he says:

Without taking up the study of these different points here, let us confine ourselves to showing how the intuition we are discussing is not a single act but an indefinite series of acts, all doubtless of the same genus but each one of a very particular species, and how this variety of acts corresponds to the degrees of being.

I must respond to this statement and say: Henri, please do take up the study and articulation of these different acts here! Which of these “acts” do you practice? How many of them are there? How does one incur this “dilation of the mind” so central to your method of intuition and so to your metaphysics and the “degrees of being” they disclose? If, as I have argued elsewhere, degrees of disclosure follow from degrees of attentional transformation, then what Bergson names as a dilation of the mind must be preceded by—or at least made possible through—some form of askēsis. That is, there must be practices that prepare perception for the kind of intuitive entry into Being that Bergson’s metaphysics requires. The difficulty is that while Bergson acknowledges the necessity of these “acts,” he leaves them unnamed and unexplained, even as they anchor the possibility of his method.

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4. Recovering Practice

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What we do receive is an additional series of descriptions that point further to yet more movements in thought. For example, Bergson tells us that “to philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought” (italics in the original). This claim follows from his distinction between the analytic or intellectual thinking of practical knowledge and the intuitive knowledge of metaphysics that we explored earlier. For Bergson, it is this intuitive method that enacts the “reversal” of the normal direction of analytical thinking. We can observe here, with some amusement, that intuition is a counter-intuitive movement in thought’s normal patterning.

Before turning to the question of where we might find the practical means for enacting Bergson’s reversal, it is worth seeing how he positions this method against one of the most influential accounts of philosophical inquiry in the modern era. Bergson sets up Immanuel Kant as his foil not simply to disagree on abstract grounds, but because Kant represents a form of philosophical method that, while immensely rigorous, remains bound to the very symbolic and conceptual frameworks that Bergson believes must be transcended. If Kant’s system cannot accommodate metaphysical intuition, then philosophy as practiced in this mode will never produce the kind of perceptual transformation that Bergson regards as essential, which means we must look elsewhere for a method capable of delivering it.

The insufficiency of Kant’s transcendental philosophy to grasp metaphysical intuitions (or what Kant called “intellectual intuitions”), stuck as it is in what Bergson calls metaphysical symbolism, means that for philosophy to proceed in the way Bergson suggests, it will need a method that moves beyond the categorical and conceptual architecture that normally structures the field of knowledge and experience. This method, as we’ve seen, is the method of intuition, that program which we can now say reverses the normal structure of thinking, a reversal that amounts to the disruption of thought at the level of symbols and concepts, moving from world to concepts instead of concepts to world, as Kant enjoins us to do.

Bergson says that one can move from the mobility of reality—its flowing and generative character—to the immobility of our pragmatic, ready-made concepts, but we cannot do the reverse. “Dogmatism,” in Bergson’s view, is what happens when we start our thinking from the second of these positions, attempting to arrest the mobile complexity of the real with the static, immobility of the concept. If this is right, then Kant’s critical philosophy—dependent as it is on just this kind of categorical closure—ends up, in the final analysis, as yet another kind of dogmatism in this technical sense (a choice irony considering that awakening us from our “dogmatic slumber” is precisely the effect that Kant’s philosophy was supposed to have on our thinking).

And so Bergson says, “metaphysics . . . must transcend concepts and arrive at intuitions” and that “the principle justification for metaphysics is a break with symbols.” Elsewhere, Bergson will note, as a result of this break, “metaphysical experience will be bound up with that of the mystics.” We see here, then, further outlines of what the practice of intuition looks like, as this reversal of thought in the undoing of symbolic conceptuality. But here, again, we are left wanting. Bergson even goes on to say that “this reversal has never been practiced in a methodical manner.”

I’m not convinced this is accurate.

Thus much as he glosses over the “acts” of intuition, he glosses over the means by which thought might be reversed even though this is what his philosophy depends upon. Hadot for his part spends more effort elucidating what this turning motion might mean for philosophy, a theme I tried to explore, following Hadot, in terms of the Greek epistrophe, periogoge, and metanoia and the Latin conversio—all different attempts to “turn” the philosopher’s thinking towards a different existential orientation. To be fair, these texts are also short on practical advice, but they do soften the claim that these movements “have never been practiced in a methodical way.”

Similarly, Ansell-Pearson ends his essay with a commentary on Bergson’s late work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, wherein we find some hesitation from Bergson about the role of philosophy when engaging in these matters of practice, philosophy, and contemplation. The risk, as Ansell-Pearson tells it, is that for Bergson:

There is too much contemplation in philosophy, to the point where the philosopher becomes utterly self-absorbed in pursuing the task of living a life of wisdom. . . . Ultimately, then, for Bergson it is necessary to turn to dynamic religion and to the religious mystic as a way of breaking out of the limits of philosophy and the self-absorption of the philosopher.

I agree with Ansell-Pearson and Bergson here on the limits and risks of philosophy, and I would only add that the kinds of instruction I am seeking from Bergson’s texts—and from philosophical texts in general—have more in common with the handbooks of religious and spiritual instruction. The via negativa and apophatic traditions, in particular, do more than describe the goal of moving beyond symbolic thought; they provide sequences of exercises, meditative progressions, and disciplined acts of detachment aimed at accomplishing exactly this. These are methodical programs for emptying the mind of its conceptual limitations, a movement that mirrors Bergson’s own call to “break with symbols” and to bind metaphysical experience with that of the mystics, especially in relation to the task of moving beyond, or negating, the symbolic affordances of our thinking through specific practices.

Philosophy could in this way benefit from the handbooks of religious and spiritual traditions, which have preserved with far greater concreteness the kinds of transformative exercises that Bergson’s method presupposes. Recognizing this does not mean philosophy must become theology, but it does mean acknowledging that the practical means for such transformation may already exist outside its current canon. The only question is of the coordination between them. These are the ideas a philosophy centered on askēsis must confront. They are not meant to subordinate expression to practice, but to show that philosophical insight—whether expressed in concept, argument, or demonstration—depends upon a prior transformation in the perceiver. The written articulation of ideas is indispensable, but it is also, in many cases, the outcome of a disciplined reorientation that remains implicit.

A philosophy of askēsis isn’t in competition with the philosophy of expression. Indeed, expression is one of its modes, when properly trained. And, to be sure, we could even run run this statement in reverse, noting how expression may also transform perception as its own kind of practice. However, its purpose is still to make visible the formative work that underwrites expressiveness. This, I believe, is central to philosophy’s task: It is not enough to state what is true, but to prepare the soul to see it, and to leave us, the readers, with some sense as to the method of achievement by which we might follow in the philosopher’s footsteps, something we find in the handbooks and texts of religious and spiritual instruction, but less so in the works of philosophy, even though at their most superlative they depend on these very same exercises of transformation, as we see so clearly in Bergson’s texts.