Bergson: intuition

Contrast:

 On 21 July 2023 I visited a local steading to conduct a biodiversity survey for the owner, recording some 104 species, mostly plants.

with,

That summer day the honey perfume of ragwort in the flower meadow pooled like a heat spot. Intoxicated insects crawled upon the brilliant yellow flower. The sound of busy creatures droned symphonically, immersively.  Grass rustled, branches in the orchard stirred gently. Overhead, the deep blue sky soared, hosting white banks of cloud.  The sun shone warmly. Here and there marsh orchids flashed pink.  Starry, creamy meadowsweet  scent forth billowing scent on the breeze, recalling the nearby burn.     

Two descriptions of the same day.

Bergson [see Learning and filtering] had still-arresting ideas to do with our experience of the flow of life.  All too brief investigation suggests he thought our experiences of life, time and change blend and merge symphonically.  He called our experience of time this way duration and contrasted it with the quantitative measurable way we describe a timeline of, say historical events. 

I am reminded of Huxley's experience of time after taking mescalin: 

"And along with indifference to space there went an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it," was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration [my emphaiss] or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse."

- The Doors of Perception (1954)

Bergson's division raises questions about analyzable the 'symphonic' former experience of life and time is. Language he thinks, separates these two representations of time.  It is not a tool that communicates well this symphonic experience of life. Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf all tried.  Stream of consciousness writers are not generally what Martin Amis might have described as 'welcoming'.  It was a movement that had its brief day and fortunately we moved on.  

Consciousness and memory involve a "prolongation" of the past into the present moment. They are blended, like melody, not discrete, like notes. We grasp the whole of some temporal sequence, "at a glance". Bergson called this process a "contraction" into a single "intuition".

Bergson thought the intellect was evolved for practical ends, not intellectual thought. It wants to analyze and break things down into discrete parts.  This was not useful for metaphysics. Instinct contrasts with intellect. Instinct (analogy: a bee) is life's harmonious organisation of matter.  But because instinct is within life and the truth of reality it does not have awareness of it.  Intellect has the awareness, but not the experience.  Intuition, for Bergson is the solution. This seems to be a half-way between intellect and experience, perhaps in that moment when experiencing magic eye pictures [Now you see it, now you don't], with your eyes half closed you can flip between two perceptions

"To think intuitively is to think in duration" (Bergson, The Creative Mind)

On his useful website, Nathan Hohipuha says "Bergsonian intuition has nothing to do with a “gut-feeling” or some kind of ‘sixth-sense’ we have for acquiring knowledge." 

Words evolve through misuse (Martin Amis argues) and over time.  

According to the OED, intuition, in the fifteenth century meant "looking at" or "looking into".

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it became the idea of mentally looking at; contemplation, consideration; perception, recognition;

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth  centuries, in Scholastic philosophy it meant "The spiritual perception or immediate knowledge, ascribed to angelic and spiritual beings, with whom vision and knowledge are identical."

From 1600 we get a definition closer that intended by Bergson: "The immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process; a particular act of such apprehension."

e.g

An intuition is any knowledge whatsoever, sensuous or intellectual, which is apprehended immediately. T. De Quincey, (1828)

After 1780 this is also found in a more generalised form: That peculiar property of genius which, for want of a better word, we call intuition.

H. T. Buckle, Miscellaneous Works (1872) vol. I. 40

But some writers said this apprehension of something is a mental process:

The Mind perceives, that White is not Black, That a Circle is not a Triangle, That Three are more than Two, and equal to One and Two. Such kind of Truths, the Mind perceives at the first Sight of the Ideas together, by bare intuition, without the intervention of any other Idea. 

J. Locke, Essay Humane Understanding iv. ii. 264

Others insisted differently:

All our intuition however takes place by means of the senses only.

J. Richardson, translation of I. Kant, Prolegomena to Metaph. 53

The early twentieth century was a time of rationalist, scientific, and logical philosophy. None of this vague, understand-at-a-glance intuition of reality sat well with leading philosophical light, Bertrand Russell and Bergson's philosophy faded away. The rise of analytic philosophy, logical positivism and scientific rationalism in the early 20th century contrasted sharply with Bergson's intuitive metaphysics.  Nevertheless he influenced figures such as William James; George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead and more recently,  Gilles Deleuze.

Ref: “Intuition, N., Various senses.”Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023,