Introduction à la métaphysique

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Let us work. The Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, in its January issue, published by Mr. Henri Bergson: Introduction to Metaphysics, an article of which it does not suffice to say, what I almost never say, that it is very admirable, but of which one may say, I believe, that it is capital.

I do not hold myself back from reproducing in these cahiers the last third of this article; I only regret not being in a position to reproduce the article in its entirety; I regret further not being in a position to reproduce all of Mr. Bergson’s articles.

It is indispensable that the works of this true philosopher reach a wider public; the public, daily more numerous, that crowds into the College de France for the Friday lectures is a public of honest folk, rather than a public of professionals; I have for professionals, of whom I was one, the greatest respect; but it is indispensable that the great acts of action, that the great works of philosophy and art, that the great results of science and philosophy reach men of all trades and all cultures. This is mutually indispensable, both for these men and for these works.

Let us know how to limit ourselves, for today:

Introduction to Metaphysics

Henri Bergson

Conclusion

It is altogether different if one installs oneself from the outset, by an effort of intuition, in the concrete flow of duration. Certainly, we shall then find no logical reason for positing multiple and diverse durations. Strictly speaking, there could exist no other duration than our own, just as there could be no other color in the world than orange, for example. But just as a consciousness based on color, which would sympathize inwardly with orange instead of perceiving it outwardly, would feel itself caught between red and yellow, and would perhaps even sense, below this latter color, an entire spectrum in which the continuity from red to yellow naturally extends, so the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the void as pure analysis would do, puts us in contact with a whole continuity of durations that we must try to follow either downward or upward: in both directions we can dilate ourselves indefinitely by an ever more violent effort; in both directions we transcend ourselves. In the first case, we move toward a duration ever more scattered, whose pulsations, faster than our own, divide our simple sensation, diluting its quality into quantity: at the limit would be the pure homogeneous, the pure repetition by which we shall define materiality. Moving in the other direction, we go toward a duration that tenses, contracts, intensifies itself more and more: at the limit would be eternity. Not conceptual eternity, which is an eternity of death, but a living eternity. A living and therefore still moving eternity, in which our own duration would find itself again as vibrations find themselves in light, and which would be the concretion of all duration just as materiality is its dispersion. Between these two extreme limits intuition moves, and this movement is metaphysics itself.

There can be no question of traversing here the various stages of this movement. But after having presented a general view of the method and having made a first application of it, it will perhaps not be useless to formulate, in terms as precise as we can, the principles on which it rests. Most of the propositions we are about to state have received, in the present work, a beginning of proof. We hope to demonstrate them more completely when we take up other problems.

I. There is a reality external and yet immediately given to our mind. Common sense is right on this point against the idealism and realism of the philosophers.

II. This reality is mobility. There do not exist things made, but only things in the making, not states that are maintained, but only states that are changing. Rest is never anything but apparent, or rather relative. The consciousness that we have of our own person, in its continual flow, introduces us into the interior of a reality on the model of which we must represent the others to ourselves. All reality is therefore tendency, if one agrees to call tendency a change of direction in the nascent state.

III. Our mind, which seeks solid points of support, has as its principal function, in the ordinary course of life, to represent to itself states and things. It takes from time to time quasi-instantaneous views of the undivided mobility of the real. It thus obtains sensations and ideas. By this means, it substitutes the discontinuous for the continuous, stability for mobility, fixed points that mark a direction of change and tendency for the tendency in the process of changing. This substitution is necessary for common sense, for language, for practical life, and even, to a certain degree that we shall try to determine, for positive science. Our intelligence, when it follows its natural bent, 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 as a function of immobility. It installs itself in ready-made concepts, and strives to catch in them, as in a net, something of the reality that passes. This is not, doubtless, to obtain an interior and metaphysical knowledge of the real. It is simply to make use of it, each concept (like each sensation, for that matter) being a practical question that our activity puts to reality and to which reality will respond, as is proper in matters of business, with a yes or a no. But by this means, it lets escape from the real what is its very essence.

IV. The difficulties inherent in metaphysics, the antinomies it raises, the contradictions into which it falls, the division into antagonistic schools and the irreducible oppositions between systems, come in large part from the fact that we apply to the disinterested knowledge of the real the procedures that we habitually use for a purpose of practical utility. They come from the fact that we install ourselves in the immobile to lie in wait for the moving as it passes, instead of placing ourselves back in the moving to traverse with it the immobile positions. They come from the fact that we claim to reconstitute reality, which is tendency and consequently mobility, with the percepts and concepts whose function is to immobilize it. With stops, however numerous, one will never make mobility; whereas if one takes mobility as given, one can, by way of diminution, extract from it by thought as many stops as one likes. In other words, one understands that fixed concepts can be extracted by our thought from mobile reality; but there is no means of reconstituting, with the fixity of concepts, the mobility of the real. Dogmatism, insofar as it is a builder of systems, has however always attempted this reconstitution.

V. It was bound to fail in it. It is this impotence, and this impotence alone, that the skeptical, idealist, and critical doctrines establish, all those in short that contest the power of our intelligence to reach the absolute. But from the fact that we fail to reconstitute living reality with rigid and ready-made concepts, it does not follow that we cannot grasp it in some other way. The demonstrations that have been given of the relativity of our knowledge are therefore tainted with an original vice: they suppose, like the dogmatism they attack, that all knowledge must necessarily start from concepts with fixed outlines in order to clasp with them the reality that flows.

VI. But the truth is that our intelligence can follow the inverse course. It can install itself in mobile reality, adopt its ceaselessly changing direction, in a word grasp it by means of that intellectual sympathy which we call intuition. This is extremely difficult. The mind must do violence to itself, must reverse the direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks, must perpetually turn over or rather recast all its categories. But it will thus arrive at fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its windings and of adopting the very movement of the interior life of things. Only thus will a progressive philosophy be constituted, freed from the disputes fought between the schools, capable of naturally resolving problems because it will have delivered itself from the artificial terms in function of which the problems are posed. To philosophize consists in inverting the habitual direction of the work of thought.

VII. This inversion has never been practiced in a methodical manner; but a thorough history of human thought would show that we owe to it what has been greatest in the sciences, just as well as what is viable in metaphysics. The most powerful of the methods of investigation at the disposal of the human mind, infinitesimal analysis, was born of this very inversion. Modern mathematics is precisely an effort to substitute for the already made the being made, to follow the generation of magnitudes, to grasp movement, no longer from the outside and in its displayed result, but from the inside and in its tendency to change, in short to adopt the mobile continuity of the outline of things. It is true that it confines itself to the outline, being only the science of magnitudes. It is also true that it could only arrive at its marvelous applications by the invention of certain symbols, and that if the intuition we have just spoken of is at the origin of the invention, it is the symbol alone that intervenes in the application. But metaphysics, which aims at no application, can and most often should abstain from converting intuition into symbol. Freed from the obligation of arriving at practically usable results, it will indefinitely enlarge the domain of its investigations. What it will have lost, compared to science, in utility and rigor, it will regain in scope and extension. If mathematics is only the science of magnitudes, if mathematical procedures apply only to quantities, one must not forget that quantity is always quality in the nascent state: it is, one might say, the limiting case. It is therefore natural that metaphysics should adopt, to extend it to all qualities, that is to say to reality in general, the generative idea of our mathematics. It will by no means proceed thereby toward universal mathematics, that chimera of modern philosophy. Quite the contrary: the more progress it makes, the more it will encounter objects untranslatable into symbols. But it will at least have begun by making contact with the continuity and mobility of the real where this contact is most marvelously usable. It will have contemplated itself in a mirror that sends it back an image certainly very narrowed, but also very luminous, of itself. It will have seen with superior clarity what mathematical procedures borrow from concrete reality, and it will continue in the direction of concrete reality, not in that of mathematical procedures. Let us say therefore, having attenuated in advance what the formula would have that is at once too modest and too ambitious, that the object of metaphysics is to perform qualitative differentiations and integrations.

VIII. What has caused this object to be lost from view, and what has deceived science itself regarding the origin of the procedures it employs, is that intuition, once taken, must find a mode of expression and application that conforms to the habits of our thought and furnishes us, in well-defined concepts, with the solid points of support of which we have so great a need. Therein lies the condition of what we call rigor, precision, and also the indefinite extension of a general method to particular cases. Now, this extension and this work of logical perfecting can be pursued for centuries, while the generative act of the method lasts only an instant. That is why we so often take the logical apparatus of science for science itself, forgetting the metaphysical intuition from which all the rest has come.

From the forgetting of this intuition proceeds everything that has been said by philosophers, and by scientists themselves, about the “relativity” of scientific knowledge. Relative is the symbolic knowledge through pre-existing concepts that goes from the fixed to the moving, but not the intuitive knowledge that installs itself in the moving and adopts the very life of things. This intuition reaches the absolute.

Science and metaphysics therefore come together in intuition. A truly intuitive philosophy would achieve the long-desired union of metaphysics and science. At the same time that it constituted metaphysics as a positive science — I mean progressive and indefinitely perfectible — it would lead the positive sciences properly so called to become aware of their true scope, often very superior to what they imagine. It would put more science in metaphysics and more metaphysics in science. It would result in restoring continuity between the intuitions that the various positive sciences have obtained from time to time in the course of their history, and that they obtained only by strokes of genius.

IX. That there are not two different ways of knowing things to the bottom, that the various sciences have their root in metaphysics, is what the ancient philosophers generally thought. Therein did not lie their error. It consisted in always being inspired by the belief, so natural to the human mind, that a variation can only express and develop invariabilities. From which it resulted that Action was a weakened Contemplation, duration a deceptive and mobile image of immobile eternity, the Soul a fall from the Idea. All this philosophy, which begins with Plato and leads to Plotinus, is the development of a principle that we would formulate thus: “There is more in the immutable than in the moving, and one passes from the stable to the unstable by a simple diminution.” Now, it is the contrary that is the truth.

Modern science dates from the day when mobility was erected into an independent reality. It dates from the day when Galileo, rolling a ball down an inclined plane, took the firm resolution to study this movement from top to bottom for itself, in itself, instead of seeking its principle in the concepts of high and low, two immobilities by which Aristotle believed he could sufficiently explain its mobility. And this is not an isolated fact in the history of science. We believe that several of the great discoveries, at least of those that have transformed the positive sciences or created new ones, have been so many soundings into pure duration. The more living the reality touched, the deeper the sounding had gone.

But the sounding cast to the bottom of the sea brings up a fluid mass that the sun quickly dries into solid and discontinuous grains of sand. And the intuition of duration, when one exposes it to the rays of the understanding, also quickly sets into fixed, distinct, immobile concepts. In the living mobility of things the understanding undertakes to mark real or virtual stations; it notes departures and arrivals: that is all that matters to human thought as simply human. It is more than human to grasp what happens in the interval. But philosophy can only be an effort to transcend the human condition.

One of the principal devices of the Kantian critique consisted in taking the metaphysician and the scientist at their word, in pushing metaphysics and science to the extreme limit of symbolism where they could go, and where they in fact tend of themselves as soon as the understanding claims a full independence fraught with peril. Once the links between science and metaphysics and intellectual intuition are misunderstood, Kant has no difficulty in showing that our science is entirely relative and our metaphysics entirely artificial. As he has exaggerated the independence of the understanding in both cases, as he has lightened metaphysics and science of the intellectual intuition that ballasted them from within, science presents to him no more, with its relations, than a film of form, and metaphysics, with its things, no more than a film of matter. Is it surprising that the first then shows him only frames fitted inside frames, and the second phantoms chasing phantoms?

He struck such rude blows to our science and our metaphysics that they have not yet entirely recovered from their daze. Our mind would willingly resign itself to seeing in science a wholly relative knowledge, and in metaphysics an empty speculation. It seems to us, even today, that the Kantian critique applies to all metaphysics and all science. In reality, it applies above all to the philosophy of the ancients, as also to the form — still ancient — that the moderns have most often left to their thought. It holds against a metaphysics that claims to give us a unique and completed system of things, against a science that would be a unique system of relations, finally against a science and a metaphysics that would present themselves with the architectural simplicity of the Platonic theory of ideas or of a Greek temple.

If metaphysics claims to be constituted with concepts that we possessed before it, if it consists in an ingenious arrangement of pre-existing ideas that we use like building materials for an edifice, finally if it is anything other than the constant dilation of our mind, the ever-renewed effort to transcend our actual ideas and perhaps also our simple logic, it is all too obvious that it becomes artificial like all works of pure understanding. And if science is entirely a work of analysis or conceptual representation, if experience should serve only to verify “clear ideas,” if, instead of starting from multiple, diverse intuitions that insert themselves into the proper movement of each reality but do not always fit into one another, it claims to be an immense mathematics, a single system of relations that imprisons the totality of the real in a net mounted in advance, it becomes a knowledge purely relative to the human understanding.

Let us say it in conclusion: this faculty has nothing mysterious about it. There is no one among us who has not had occasion to exercise it to a certain degree. Anyone who has tried literary composition, for example, knows well that when the subject has been studied at length, all the documents collected, all the notes taken, something more is needed, in order to approach the work of composition itself, an effort, often very painful, to place oneself all at once at the very heart of the subject and to seek as deep as possible an impulse to which one will then only have to surrender. This impulse, once received, launches the mind on a path where it finds again both the information it had gathered and a thousand other details besides: it develops, it analyzes itself in terms whose enumeration would go on without end; the more one goes, the more one discovers; one will never manage to say everything: and yet, if one turns abruptly back toward the impulse that one feels behind one, to seize it, it eludes one; for it was not a thing, but a direction of movement, and, though indefinitely extensible, it is simplicity itself. Metaphysical intuition appears to be something of the same kind. What corresponds here to the notes and documents of literary composition is the whole of the observations and experiments collected by positive science. For one does not obtain from reality an intuition, that is to say an intellectual sympathy with what is most interior in it, if one has not won its confidence through a long companionship with its superficial manifestations. And it is not simply a matter of assimilating the notable facts: one must accumulate and fuse together so enormous a mass of them that one may be assured, in this fusion, of neutralizing one against the other all the preconceived and premature ideas that observers may have deposited, without knowing it, at the bottom of their observations. Only thus does the raw materiality of known facts emerge. But metaphysical intuition, although one cannot arrive at it except by dint of material knowledge, is quite other than the summary or synthesis of that knowledge. It is distinguished from it, we repeat, as the motive impulse is distinguished from the path traveled by the moving body, as the tension of the spring is distinguished from the visible movements of the pendulum. In this sense, metaphysics has nothing in common with a generalization of experience, and nevertheless it could be defined as integral experience.

Henri Bergson