227
Capturing the essence of a city,
person, or object may only be possible
through direct knowledge gained from
intuition, not analysis. Bergson says we
underestimate the value of our intuition.See also: John Duns Scotus 333 ■ Immanuel Kant 164–71 ■ William James 206–09 ■ Alfred North Whitehead 336 ■
Gilles Deleuze 338
THE MODERN WORLD
Henri Bergson Henri Bergson was one of the most
influential French philosophers
of his time. Born in France in 1859,
he was the son of an English
mother and a Polish father. His
early intellectual interests lay in
mathematics, at which he excelled.
Despite this, he took up philosophy
as a career, initially teaching in
schools. When his book Matter
and Memory was published in
1896, he was elected to the
Collège de France and became
a university lecturer. He also had
a successful political career, and
represented the French government
during the establishment of theLeague of Nations in 1913. His
work was widely translated
and influenced many other
philosophers and psychologists,
including William James. He
was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1928, and died
in 1941 at the age of 81.Key works1896 Matter and Memory
1903 An Introduction to
Metaphysics
1910 Creative Evolution
1932 The Two Sources of
Morality and ReligionH
enri Bergson’s 1910 book
Creative Evolution explored
his vitalism, or theory of
life. In it, Bergson wanted to discover
whether it is possible to really know
something—not just to know about
it, but to know it as it actually is.
Ever since the philosopher
Immanuel Kant published The
Critique of Pure Reason in 1781,
many philosophers have claimed
that it is impossible for us to know
things as they actually are. This is
because Kant showed that we can
know how things are relative to we
ourselves, given the kinds of minds
we have; but we can never step
outside of ourselves to achieve an
absolute view of the world’s actual
“things-in-themselves.”
Two forms of knowledge
Bergson, however, does not agree
with Kant. He says that there are
two different kinds of knowledge:
relative knowledge, which involves
knowing something from our own
unique particular perspective;
and absolute knowledge, which is
knowing things as they actually
are. Bergson believes that these are
reached by different methods, the
first through analysis or intellect,
and the second through intuition.
Kant’s mistake, Bergson believes,
is that he does not recognize the
full importance of our faculty of
intuition, which allows us to grasp
an object’s uniqueness through
direct connection. Our intuition is
linked to what Bergson called our
élan vital, a life-force (vitalism) that
interprets the flux of experience in
terms of time rather than space.
Suppose you want to get to know
a city, he says. You could compile a
record of it by taking photographs
of every part, from every possible
perspective, before reconstructing
these images to give some idea of
the city as a whole. But you would
be grasping it at one remove, not as
a living city. If, on the other hand,
you were simply to stroll around the
streets, paying attention in the right
way, you might acquire knowledge
of the city itself—a direct knowledge
of the city as it actually is. This
direct knowledge, for Bergson, is
knowledge of the essence of the city.But how do we practice intuition?
Essentially, it is a matter of seeing
the world in terms of our sense of
unfolding time. While walking
through the city, we have a sense
of our own inner time, and we also
have an inner sense of the various
unfolding times of the city through
which we are walking. As these
times overlap, Bergson believes that
we can make a direct connection
with the essence of life itself. ■