An Introduction to Metaphysics

Overview

About sixty pages, first published in 1903 in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, and generally regarded as the single most compact and accessible statement of the methodological distinction that runs through all of Bergson’s major philosophical work. Where Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory apply his method to specific problems, the freedom of the will and the relation of mind to body respectively, and Creative Evolution applies it to the history of life as a whole, this essay pulls back to state the method itself, cleanly and directly, before any particular application, making it, despite coming chronologically between the first two of those longer books, a genuinely useful entry point to Bergson’s philosophy as a whole.

The essay’s title announces its ambition plainly: Bergson wants to say what metaphysics, properly understood, actually is and how it differs in kind, not merely in degree of generality, from the natural sciences, and his answer turns entirely on the distinction between two fundamentally different ways of knowing that the essay develops with unusual clarity and economy.

The argument

Two ways of knowing a thing. Bergson opens by distinguishing two radically different ways a mind can relate to any object of knowledge. The first, which he calls analysis, approaches the object from outside, moving around it and taking up one perspective after another, translating what it finds into symbols, concepts, comparisons with other already-known things, an ever-multiplying series of external viewpoints that never actually reaches the object itself but only ever produces an increasingly detailed, increasingly accurate, but permanently relative and approximate representation of it, built up from elements that are not themselves the thing.

The second way, intuition, dispenses with symbols and external viewpoints entirely and enters directly into the object, coinciding with what makes it uniquely and irreducibly itself. Where analysis is inherently relative, always approaching from some particular external standpoint and therefore always partial, intuition, when it is genuinely achieved, grasps its object absolutely, from within, in a single, undivided act rather than through an accumulating series of external approximations.

The self as the one thing we already know by intuition. Bergson’s method throughout the essay is to ground this abstract distinction in one concrete, universally available example: each person’s own inner life, their self as it actually flows through duration. Unlike any external object, which we can only ever know through the mediating apparatus of sensation, concept and comparison, each of us has direct, intuitive access to our own inner duration, the continuous, flowing, interpenetrating stream of feeling, memory and consciousness that constitutes a genuinely lived inner life, known from within in a way that no external description, however detailed, could ever fully capture or substitute for.

Bergson is careful to distinguish this genuine inner duration from the far more common practice of representing even our own inner life to ourselves in spatial, analytic terms, as a sequence of discrete states, moods, or faculties laid out and compared the way external objects are compared, which is itself already a kind of self-directed analysis rather than genuine self-intuition, and which, Bergson argues, is precisely what most psychology, including much of the psychology practiced in his own time, actually does, treating inner states as though they were measurable, separable quantities rather than a genuinely continuous, indivisible flow.

Why empiricism and rationalism both fail. Bergson extends this diagnosis into a critique of the two dominant traditions in modern philosophy up to his own time. Empiricism, building knowledge of the self and the world up from discrete sensations and their associations, and rationalism, building knowledge from fixed rational categories and their logical relations, share, on Bergson’s account, exactly the same underlying error despite their apparent opposition: both attempt to reconstruct a genuinely continuous, flowing reality, above all the reality of the self, out of fixed, static, pre-given units, whether those units are sensations or concepts. Both approaches, however sophisticated their construction, remain forms of analysis, approaching the flowing reality of duration from outside and attempting to rebuild it piece by piece from elements that are not themselves duration, which Bergson compares to trying to build a moving river out of stationary stones: however many stones you assemble, and however cleverly you arrange them, you will never thereby produce the actual flow of water.

Metaphysics as the discipline that dispenses with symbols. Bergson’s positive proposal follows directly from this diagnosis: genuine metaphysics, as distinct from natural science, which properly and usefully operates through analysis, symbol and external measurement for practical purposes, is the discipline that attempts to know its object, above all the self and, by extension, duration and life more broadly, through intuition rather than analysis, entering directly into the flowing reality rather than reconstructing an external approximation of it from fixed conceptual pieces. This does not mean metaphysics abandons language or conceptual thought altogether, since some use of symbols is unavoidable in actually communicating what intuition grasps to another person, but it means genuine metaphysical insight itself, prior to and distinct from its subsequent communication, must be reached through this different, non-analytic mode of direct entry into the object rather than through the accumulation of external, symbolic approximations alone.

How to read it

Read it as the cleanest, most direct statement of the analysis-intuition distinction anywhere in Bergson’s work, and use it as the key that unlocks his longer, more application-heavy books. Reading Time and Free Will or Creative Evolution without first grasping this essay’s central distinction leaves a reader working out the method piecemeal from its applications rather than understanding it directly.

Test the central claim against your own experience, as Bergson intends. Try to describe your own present state of mind, right now, in language, to someone else, and notice both how much genuine communication the description achieves and how much, inevitably, gets left out or falsified by having to translate a continuous, flowing inner state into discrete, shareable words and concepts. This exercise is essentially what the essay is asking you to perform.

Do not read Bergson’s critique of analysis as a rejection of science or of conceptual thought generally. He is explicit that analysis, symbol and spatial representation are entirely appropriate, indeed indispensable, for practical action and for the natural sciences, which properly deal with the kind of solid, spatial, repeatable phenomena analysis is suited to; his claim is narrower and more specific, that this same method structurally cannot reach the flowing reality of duration and inner life, which requires the different method of intuition instead.

Notice how much weight the entire essay places on a single example, the intuitively known self, and consider how far that example can be legitimately generalized. Bergson himself extends the method, in his later books, to life as a whole and even to the universe generally; deciding whether that extension is warranted, or whether the self genuinely is a uniquely privileged case that does not generalize as far as Bergson wants, is one of the central questions any reader of his broader philosophy eventually has to face.

Read this essay alongside William James’s pragmatism, which Bergson greatly admired and which shares a related suspicion of static, purely intellectual concepts as adequate to the flux of actual experience, though James and Bergson develop that shared suspicion in importantly different directions.

Questions it raises

• Is the distinction between analysis and intuition a genuine difference in kind between two ways of knowing, or is intuition simply a name for a particularly rapid or confident form of analysis that has not stopped to examine its own workings?
• If genuine metaphysical intuition dispenses with symbols, how can what it grasps ever actually be communicated to another person, given that communication itself seems to require exactly the symbolic apparatus intuition is meant to bypass?
• Does the self really offer intuitive, absolute knowledge from within, or is even our sense of our own continuous inner life already shaped and structured by the concepts and language we use to think about ourselves?
• Bergson argues empiricism and rationalism share the same underlying error of building duration out of static units. Is this a fair characterization of both traditions, or does it flatten real differences between them?
• Can the intuitive knowledge Bergson describes for the self be extended to other minds, to life generally, or to the universe as a whole, as his later work assumes, or is the self a genuinely unique case that resists this generalization?
• What would a philosophy or a science actually look like if it took Bergson’s distinction seriously and tried to develop intuitive, rather than merely analytic, methods for approaching its subject matter?