Bergsonian Intuition

Abstract

In this paper I explore a “variation” on the “theme” of intuition in the evolution of modern metaphysics. My aim is not to criticize A. W. Moore’s account of intuition as one of two ways by which Bergson makes sense of things (the other way is analysis). Instead I will suggest the significance in extending Bergson’s metaphysics to mystical life as “the ‘very life of things’ into which intuition installs itself.” When the metaphysical drama, in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics , reaches chapter 16, “Bergson: Metaphysics as Pure Creativity,” Moore expresses astonishment that Bergson could have thought philosophers have ever agreed on aligning “analysis” in science with the im possibility of non-perspectival sense-making and “intuition” in metaphysics with the possibility of absolute (non-perspectival) knowledge. Using a method of intuition, not of analysis, as non-perspectival sense-making is the opposite of what Moore himself finds in other philosophical contributions to modern metaphysics as “a most general attempt to make sense of things.” He takes an influential example: Bernard Williams associates analysis, not intuition, with the possibility of non-perspectival sense-making and absolute knowledge. My response defends Bergsonian intuition in giving it a positive—and, why not, non-perspectival?—role in metaphysics as mystical; that is, as unique and inexpressible life. Moore describes intuition in Bergson as both the faculty and the method for the evolution of new concepts and new ways of making sense of things. I will stress that Bergsonian intuition is “an effort to place oneself into a movement, such as that of philosophy itself,” expressing “what is ‘living in philosophers ’ rather than what is ‘fixed and dead in theses .’” This mystical life pushes out the limits set up by Kant for metaphysics (and science) by allowing intuition (with analysis) to reach for absolute, non-perspectival knowledge.