Henri Bergson (14) - Instinct / Intuition

hey everyone nathan here absurd being it's been a while since i've said that uh i took a little bit of time off because actually i i filmed this video instinct and intuition uh and then i think i even edited it and but then i thought i had some nagging doubts that i i hadn't everything about intuition isn't covered in those three books that i've read time and free will matter of memory and uh creative evolution so i didn't post it and um i took some time off to read everything that bergson has has written and there's still one book left that i haven't read a collection of essays that i haven't read um i forget what it's called actually but but i've read everything else and i thought it was important before i do this video in particular just to make sure that i have this idea of intuition down correctly because i make some claims in here that that i really just wanted to make sure i was 100 right on um and i'm glad i did take the time out actually to read some of his other stuff there's a lot that he says about intuition actually and a collection of essays i think there are essays that he wrote between in the early 1900s anyway after creative evolution i think but i think up until about 1925ish so from 19 maybe 19 1908 or something around there till to 1920 20 something there's a collection of essays that's what the creative mind is and there there's quite a bit about intuition in there so it was it was definitely profitable to have to um to go back and make sure i covered them meant i'm i'm kind of radio silence for about how long has it been six weeks seven weeks i i'd hoped it would only be a couple of weeks but these things never never last the length that we did the duration that we think they're going to so anyway this video is about instinct and intuition and it will start with instinct so in the last video video 13 we looked at the intellect we saw that it was the intellect was practical it was all about manipulating things controlling things using things which meant that it was abstract it abstracted things out of the continuous um whole and abstracted static discrete entities out of the whole which allowed us to to manipulate them and use them for practical ends so the intellect was a departure from movement from change from the new from creativity in short it was a departure from life instinct is the exact opposite of this so instinct is an unthinking harmony with life person describes it somewhere like that like probably in creative evolution but yeah so it's a it's the exact opposite of the intellect it places us right back into life itself the movement of life what life that kind of impetus that we've talked about and we will talk about later that impetus that defines life that movement forward that um that is is captured in instinct and instinct he says simply carries out further the work by which life organizes matter it's just life doing its thing which is useful for us because we we want to understand life we want to that's what we're looking at at grasping here that what life is what what the universe is it's this dynamic continuous whole um and and in trying to understand it if we take instinct if we look at instinctual behaviors that gives us a window into life into life itself because it's it's a complete harmony with life instinct so he tells us to think of the bees of a hive forming a system so strictly organized that no individual can live apart from the others beyond a certain time how can we help recognizing that the hive is really and not metaphorically a single organism of which each bee is a cell united to the others by invisible bonds so a nice description there bees they're driven by instinct so they completely embody life that you know in a way they're like life made incarnate they're that that that that impulse that we're trying to understand that that dynamism that characterizes life brought to life in front of us in a way made incarnate embodied completely in these in these insects um yeah so they're the current of life in material form which means that we can understand life by looking at them in more detail by seeing how they work how they what their behaviors um make them do or what what what their behaviors are what what instinct makes them do and it's nice to compare this the hive or the bees in the hive to cells in a body because that's exactly what bergson's getting at the the bees are not individuals they seem to be separate individuals a collective the hive is just a grouping of these individuals but in actual fact the connection is tighter than that they're not individuals capable of living on their own they have to be a part of that whole the whole is primary the whole is more important than the individuals that make it up and the individuals are parts of parts of that whole [Music] in a way that they're so inextricably connected to that whole they can't live apart from it so they're not separate at all we have to think of them like cells in a body all the cells in in a in a body work together they all work they function towards for the whole which is the the individual the body that they're a part of um and their actions their behaviors the things that they do they make no sense on their own we have to consider them only within this greater totality which is the body and the same thing here the the actions of individual bees can't be understood on their own they only make sense when we take into account the hive itself and really that's what berkshire is saying about life the universe it is a hive and all of the the entities that it is bro it appears to be broken up into are actually parts of this whole connected in a way similar to the way that these bees are connected to each other they all function in harmony that there is there is a kind of a global harmony at the level of the whole and then that's really where all of bergson's philosophy is driving to this idea that the whole is um is is where we understand is where we can understand the parts as they really are as as as they function as parts of this whole we can abstract parts of them out and that's what we do that that's what the intellect does that's how we manipulate things that's how we use things um because before we can use them we have to apprehend them as discreet things as separate things things separate from the whole but that's just an abstracted picture if we want to understand everything which is what we're all what person is about here that's what metaphysics is for books and that understanding of the whole then we have to look at it in this way so berkshire also talks about instinct as a theme that cannot be expressed in an idea it cannot be encapsulated in a concept it must be felt or lived rather than thought and this is precisely because it is life instinct is life and life is experience so we can this is and this is just something that i've said again and again throughout this series right um duration we can't enclose it in words and language we can't completely describe it because it always language always fixes concepts it always operates with concepts that the intellect comes into this that's how it that's how it analyzes but um duration life is precisely the opposite of that it's a continuation it's it's continuity it's change it's movement these things are dynamic and that that's precisely what fixed concepts static words can't capture but of course that doesn't mean that we just have to throw our hands up and say oh well we can't say anything about it it's it's an absolute mystery um you know and kind of gesture towards it as if like it's it's some kind of transcendent being um we can represent these concepts in thought we also we can represent life movement change uh in thought and in language but only incompletely only inadequately it's always it's always not it's never going to be a perfect fit the words that we use there's always going to be it's just just not quite a match for what we're trying to to to explain but that doesn't mean that we can't do it we just have to understand the way that we're using the words we have to understand the way we're using our concepts and i think i've talked about that before but yeah so instinct is the same idea because it is life life kind of um incarnate if you like another example bergson gives when it comes to into intuition sorry instinct is of wasps paralyzing their prey in order to lay their eggs in it i guess in the caterpillar and so what what happens is um some species of wasp they have to immobilize their prey in order to do that they have to sting the caterpillar it varies by different species but sometimes i think i remember bergson that the the highest number was 13. so a wasp has to sting 13 times in very specific spots in order to fully incapacitate its prey and then the question is how is this possible how is it possible for the wasp to do this because it's not it's not it doesn't know what it's doing right it doesn't know the anatomy of the caterpillar it doesn't realize that if it stings here it's going to immobilize this if it stings there it's going to do that so we have this this puzzle um to explain how a wasp is able to to act in this way through instinct alone um and obviously evolution is is part of the answer here um person's not denying evolution and we'll talk more about this later but um evolution is i think any any sensible theory here of life has to has to include evolution but the problem is that evolution it doesn't give us it gives us kind of the the formal explanation if you like um which must be true which that's the power of evolution as a theory if all of the conditions hold the you get evolution um out of it there's it's kind of inevitable and that's the power of it as a theory but here so we've got the wasp doing the performing the specific action not having any any knowledge of what it's doing if we're trying to explain this books and says it can't be understood from the outside so we can't understand the way that the what the wasps doing by imagining the way that we would look at the prey with the intellect with our knowledge of of the prey and what what each sting will do which means that then it can only be understood as a kind of sympathy between the be and its prey and that is we still we're not we're not refu we're not denying evolution we're not we're not looking at something different from evolution here but there is in evolution there is a sympathy between these two that that's the failure i think of of evolution as a science is that it it takes things as discrete parts already and then tries to to work with them so it works fine of course evolution as a theory is is untouchable but it's missing something it's missing that impetus it's missing that that that drive forward which is what life is it doesn't take into account it doesn't take that into account which means you get a kind of mechanical picture of the universe of evolution just randomly this this thing happened and it turned out to be beneficial so the the next the next generation also had that trait and and that and eventually it spread to the whole but but it all starts from a random mechanical change and uh and that i think is where i and i think bergson as well would um would uh deviate from from the party line of evolution evolution is 100 percent true there's there's no way it can be wrong as a theory as a as formal theory um it's airtight i think but the problem with it is like i say it can't explain this without just appeal to to kind of brute a brute force attack if you like it's just throw a whole bunch of of um behaviors together and see which ones survive and whichever one survived or just be a purely random purely just depending on which which behaviors happen to manifest to best fit the environment but it's already splitting up everything into parts it takes those parts as fundamental it starts from the abstract it doesn't start from the whole and that's what bergson's doing is trying to get beyond that it's beyond the point where we have the wasp and the caterpillar to look at the point where we have the wasp and the caterpillar as a system as a whole as a totality as two parts of a greater body the same way that you can't look a bit you can't think of the two two b's as separate they are they are and they only make sense within the hole within the hive and that's what bergson's angling at here when he says that we can only understand this behavior through a kind of sympathy between the b and its victim and it's this it is evolution this is not anything different from evolution but it's just like i say it's just it's reaching further back than evolution does it's going um evolution kind of starts too late it starts once you've already broken the whole into parts and and we want to understand the whole first and that will give us a better a deeper understanding of the parts which are only abstractions which aren't the real if you like so he encourages that encourages us to think that the knowledge the wasp has might owe nothing to outward perception but result from the mere presence together of the amephilla and the caterpillar considered no longer as two organisms but as two activities it would express in a concrete form the relation of the one to the other and that's a nice quote there we can best understand the wasp and the caterpillar not as two entities not as two separate independent entities but as two activities in one whole and that's the metaphysical truth here they are not broken first they're not broken apart first first they are parts of a whole they're parts of a system and when we come along we see them as two parts of it's two separate things but that's um it's not it's not incorrect it's true but it if that's where we start our explanations from we're never going to to fully understand the whole because we're like like i say we've already broken the hole into parts now when we try and understand how those parts fit together we get um an answer an explanation that doesn't quite fit it doesn't quite gel with um with the way things are and so i really like this it's a powerful idea i think the side this notion of comparing two separate things apparently separate as as as parts of a whole the same way that two cells are actually parts of a body and again if you think about it you know you try to understand the actions of a cell in my hand and the actions of a cell and and one of my fingers you can make a story you'll be able to make a story about how and why these different cells are doing what they're doing but if if you start from the premise that they're completely isolated that they're separate and independent you're not going to get the proper picture because in order to understand what the cell in my hand is doing and the cell in my finger is doing you have to see that they're both operating within a human body and when you have that bigger picture then you get then you can see that what they're doing can't be understood on its own can't be understood isolated one cells activity activities of one cell can't be understood isolated from the activities of another they only make sense when we when we tackle them together so that's brilliant it's also open to a little bit of mystical abuse i feel so i'll just this is something that i always push right this is i don't think there's any scope for mysticism or religion or supernatural the supernatural to come in here or deepak chopra's quantum woo you know well we're all entangled we're all connected at a deep level so telepathy must be real or my actions affect you you in some way blah blah blah that that kind of thing i think is is it's an extension of this idea that is is i think completely illegitimate um the fact that the cell in my hand and the cell in my finger are parts of a hole and that they work together doesn't mean that the cell in my finger can can um communicate directly with the cell in my hand in some magical way because they're actually parts of a whole right and so there's just there's no ground for any kind of supernatural or mystical inferences here there's nothing magical about two parts to two bees in a hive we don't have to impute any kind of mystical connection that they might share or any any way that they can you know transcend time and space in some way because they're actually connect they're entangled in some way or you know so i don't think we need to go there it's kind of the door opens it cracks open a little bit with this not with this way of understanding um the universe but i think we ought to keep that door that particular door closed um when we're doing philosophy anyway okay nice so that's instinct anyway let's turn to have a look at intuition right so intuition most of in fact everything i'm going to say about intuition is going to be taken from creative evolution and the creative mind and there's a reason for that which i'll come to at the very end of the video but he talks about this word intuition the creative mind one of the essays in there and he says that the use of it has led to a lot of confusion and it's almost certain that the word st that confusion continues to into today as well i think using the word unless you've like i said unless you've really read quite a bit of bergson if you just heard the idea intuition i think straight away you'd be off on on a tangent of um you know religious slash mystical slash supernatural kind of leanings which which really is is not what intuition is about so half of this video half of this this section i'm going to try and dispel that and the other half i'm going to basically explain what i think berkshire means by intuition so we'll start with a couple of quotes the first one is this one to think intuitively is to think in duration intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition intuition starts from movement posits it or rather perceives it as reality itself and sees an immobility only an abstract moment a snapshot taken by our mind of a mobility intelligence ordinarily concerns itself with things meaning by that with the static and makes of change an accident which is supposedly super added okay so that's nice that's the difference between in the intellect and intuition and intuition the important thing the important part of that is the very first part of that quote to think intuitively is to think in duration so intuition is is essentially thinking in along the lines of duration thinking in terms of duration and he also talks about he also talks about intuition as installing ourselves in the phenomenon we wish to understand so whether it be change movement life an individual a body whatever it is we're trying to understand intuition involves installing ourselves in that thing and placing ourselves in it through an act of the imagination and that's what he the quote that i've got here philosophizing consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition and that's from introduction to metaphysics so we want to we want to get ourselves into the thing and that sounds like opening the door to you know a meditative insight or something i'm going to close that door very firmly in this next section when we look at what intuition is not so three things intuition isn't first it's not a feeling and it's certainly not a gut feeling which is how we might tend to to think of intuition these days you know i had an intuition that something just wasn't right uh so it's like a gut feeling like uh you know a hunch that kind of thing um not at all what person's talking about these kinds of things i think those kinds of intuit and intuitive insights they're i mean there's this scope there also to to think of them as to put kind of a metaphysical uh sorry a mystical um slant to those as well but in fact i think that kind of intuition is perfectly explicable by unconscious cues body language or your past experience or your unconscious kind of ruminating on something um you know if you meet someone and you just get this feeling that that they're dishonest and later your turns out to be true we tend to you know we tend to jump to or there was some kind of magical something happening probably not probably you know there were subtle body body language cues that you picked up that you that you weren't consciously aware of maybe he this person reminds you of someone that you you you've known who was dishonest or whatever it is there's i think that there's perfectly prosaic explanations on offer for that kind of thing anyway that's not what berson's intuition is and i found this quote which was quite nice to capture this to say nothing of the kind of person who would insist that my intuition was instinct or feeling not one line of what i have written could lend itself to such an interpretation and in everything i have written there is assurance to the contrary my intuition is reflection but because i called attention to the mobility at the base of things it has been claimed that i encouraged a sort of relaxing of the mind and that's that that's a really important quote because um so first we have it's not feeling he's not talking about some kind of feeling you had a hunch that you had that you got and he also says gives us a positive spin my intuition is reflection and we'll come back to that later so it's not a feeling intuition is also not a meditative insight or anything like that it's not it's not something that kind of hits you from out of nowhere when you are in an altered state of mind that's not what intuition is so like closing your eyes and drifting into a meditative state that's not intuition trying to become one with the universe to to um to somehow in some mystical way harmonize with the thing that you're thinking of whether it be another person or or the nature of the universe or whatever none of these things are what person's intuition is so that kind of cuts off that buddhist path which which you might have thought was kind of open here with intuition it's there's it's nothing to do with altered states of consciousness or um flashes of inspiration and the third thing it isn't is it's not a divine revelation and not necessarily divine not just divine in the sense that it doesn't come from from a god but it doesn't come from it it's not something implanted in you from outside it's not an external thing it's not something which is kind of you're you're not picking up something from outside you you're not tapping into the energies of the universe or anything like that nothing like that so intuition is not a feeling it's not a meditative insight and it's not any kind of revelation you're not tapping into any kind of the currents of the universe or whatever else you might think you're doing with intuition or you might think you're doing when you're meditating or something for example so that's what intuition isn't what is intuition i've the way i've kind of organized this i've just grouped i've made kind of six seven seven categories that we'll go through which or seven features characteristics of intuition which i hope will clarify once we get into them so first intuition is unclear it's nebulous it's hazy and he describes intuition as a vague nebulosity around our conceptual thought so it's not something that's going to be precise and that's just that's inevitable because of what dealing with the nature of what we're dealing with we're trying to understand life itself we're trying to understand the whole um and and this it cannot be understood through analysis analysis works with parts not the whole it doesn't work like breaks down at the level of the whole right but intuition gets us to that hole it lets us understand the whole so when we are if we're going to understand the whole we're not going to have we're not going to be able to make use of the precise tools that the intellect has at its disposal we're not going to be able to to quantify to measure to to to take advantage of concepts that perfectly encapsulate what they're talking about because those things work only at the level of abstract abstraction when we're talking about the parts not when we're talking about the whole so it will never be clear we'll never have distinct boundaries but this is not a negative thing it's just the nature of the object we've chosen to investigate right it's just just what it is to to to look at the whole to look at life to look at change to look at duration to understand these these these things we we can't make use of those tools of precision which the intellect has so it's necessarily unclear second thing it is it's simple and intuition is always going to be simple it grasps its object immediately and completely um and we can contrast this with analysis which never ends right it's it's um an infinite movement because whenever you try and break something down you'll always be able to break it down into smaller parts no matter what it is if you're trying to analyze the movement of of your arm and that's the example bergson gives that that i'm thinking of here you've got the movement of your arm understood from the inside it's it's nothing could be simpler right the arm moves from here from this point to that point it's it's as it's as simple as anything could be understood from the inside but if you want to analyze it if you want to break it down then we run into a basically unsolvable irresolvable complexities complexity so you've got your arm starting from here in order to get to here it has to pass through all of the points in the middle but there are an infinite number of points in between right we can break the the route that it has to travel my arm has to travel from point a to point b up into infinite parts the trajectory so how is the arm able to to cross that it doesn't make sense if you look at it through um the tools through the intellect if you try and analyze it it becomes it becomes um an infinite task because like i said there are an infinite infinite number of points that zeno's paradox but understood as as a movement from from within i moved from a to b nothing could be simpler it's as simple as that but when i try and break it down when i try and analyze it when i try and understand it according to the intellect then that and that is the same when i try and understand it from the outside looking in on it as as a third from a third person perspective then it becomes well it's kind of a mystery there are an infinite number of things going on even right i mean i can even break down the things that have to happen in order for my arm to move my um the signals that have to be sent from my brain to my arm and and the way that my arm has to coordinate as it moves and all the muscles have to tense and and um and work in harmony and and we can continue to break drill down deeper and deeper on in any one of these things and um and we find that we're kind of opening pandora's box because they they each each thing each um each facet of that movement can be analyzed into and it can be analyzed in infinitely we can just keep analyzing we can just keep breaking it down right and there's no end and yet the movement itself is unbelievably simple there is nothing simpler than that so intuition grasps its object immediately and completely in a simple in a single simple apprehension what follows is the philosopher trying to explain that intuition and that's where the complexity builds because they have to use words to explain it and then they have to and then once that explanation is out there then it's not quite right so they have to use more words to to tweak it and that's not quite right they have to use more words and then this is misunderstood so they have to use more words and you can see the process bergson talks about this as well actually in the creative mind the way that um every philosopher he says every philosopher worth reading has only one good idea one solid intuition and everything else that they do is to explain that intuition which which is infinitely complex because you can break it down like i said into as many different facets as you like you can you can tear apart a simple intuition um and and draw inferences and draw consequences and draw you know you can get a lot out of that single intuition but that's the driving force behind a good philosopher anyway according to bergson i quite like that idea and that is a nice idea actually heidegger says something simple uh something similar as well what does he say i think he says [Music] he i think he connects it with repetition you um you have one good idea or one one idea his idea was was being and everything else that he says everything that he says afterwards is just an explication of that idea of being everything he says turns around being and he revisits that idea again and again that's repetition but every time he comes back to it he comes back to it differently and and the second cycle second circle is different from the first one even though it's a repetition of the same idea being comes back to it again and again and each time it's it's a repetition of the same idea but but it it has more with it it's approaching the idea from from kind of different directions it's looking to it's just always kind of circling that that that key idea um yeah person's uh heidegger talks about that as well which is which is interesting suspicious he got that i don't know how much of berks and heidegger red if any but some of the parallels between the two are suspicious to say the least anyway so intuition is unclear it's simple and imagination is a key part of it that's the third point imagination is key so the way that we put ourselves in the phenomenon that we're studying the way that we what i talked about earlier installing ourselves in the thing that we're studying so the way we do this through it's an act of imagination i am in person says an intro introduction to metaphysics i am in harmony with these states and enter into them by an effort of imagination so it's not it's not when i talked about installing ourselves in the thing um putting ourselves into the object we're trying to study that's not a mystical way of talking it's not it's not code word for going into a trance and tapping into the underlying truth of blah blah blah it's just imagination it's using your imagination to to to to get behind to get into the thing that you're studying with that idea of duration in mind so with the idea that um you need to understand this thing through movement through change through continuity not through those the fixed categories that the intellect deals with so imagination's key um in introduction to metaphysics bergson talks about he gives an analogy of knowing a character in a book the novelist may multiply traits of character make his hero speak and act as much as he likes all this has not the same value as the simple and indivisible feeling i should experience if i were to coincide for a single moment with the personage himself the actions gestures and words would then appear to flow naturally as though from their source so we don't know the character through an accumulation of descriptions we don't know um we i mean we do get to know the character through an accumulation of descriptions but the way that we can best come to understand the character is not through it's not through these descriptions which would have to go on forever in order for us to really um come into inter and to sync with the character nor in order for us to really get a feel for them from the outside the the descriptions they would have to be infinite a number you could never adequately describe a character from the outside such that i could understand it totally but i can i can get that complete understanding of this character through having read about him or her in a in a variety of situations and maybe we can say getting a feel for what that person would do or say so there's kind of a colloquial term getting a feel for something and and again there's nothing mystical about that getting to know what character is just like you know you've just read enough about this character you've you've you've seen how they behave and you can you can imagine what it's like to be their character you can put yourself in their shoes that's what intuition is it's putting yourself in the shoes not of another person but of whatever it is you're trying to study whether it's we're talking about life we're talking about movement we're talking about these kinds of things we're putting ourselves in the shoes of these things through an act of of imagination and this by the way is also how i think of primary and secondary sources when i'm reading philosophy i'm i'm sure i've talked about this before but in case you don't remember in case i haven't um i'm not a big reader of secondary sources uh just because it it really is it has the sense i have the sense when i when i do that i i don't get to know the the writer themselves i don't fully grasp the philosopher when i read a secondary source it's it's like you know it's it's like a third person and it's trying to understand something from the outside never quite able to to really to really get a hold of the ideas but when you read the primary source and so i'm a big big advocate of reading primary sources when you do that you really do get a sense for what what satra is thinking what he would say if you were to say how he would respond to this kind of question or you know what what bergson's really getting at when he talks about this reading secondary sources is great but but you you never get deeper than than that kind of superficial third person external viewpoint but when you read bergson himself it really is feels like you're you're you're installed in books and you're really you're you're getting something much deeper than when you just read what someone else has has read or said about him like me so actually i so even though i do these videos i always always recommend you read the primary sources these videos no video no book will ever be a substitute for creative evolution itself and even i'm not going through the books kind of chapter by chapter but even when i do that like i usually do um because that's i i really wanted to delve into the details um i always recommend you read the book as at the same time because just listening to me rant and rave it really is it's kind of superficial at the end of the day no matter how much i try and explain it's never going to be worth what it is and the pages of the book that i'm that i'm talking about itself so anyway but that's a good example actually of of intuition just getting into the thing itself installing yourself and what it is you're studying so that's done through intuition the fourth point sorry it's done through imagination the fourth point the fourth thing about intuition is that it is a different way of thinking and i'm just going to give you a quote and then we'll break this down whether it be intellection or intuition thought of course always utilizes language and intuition like all thought finally becomes lodged in concepts such as duration qualitative or heterogeneous multiplicity unconsciousness even differentiation so whether it be intellection or intuition thought that that very first part of that quote there intuition is not an alternative to thought we're still thinking when we're doing when we're when we're using intuition it's still thinking it's not it's not another it's not another sense it's not another sensory mode right and again this is another stumbling block that i think is it's very easy to to get tripped up on when you when you're thinking about person's intuition because we do think of it as as this extra sense you know i got this intuitive insight it didn't come from any of my normal senses it's like the sixth sense there's that sense there's that feeling that that's what it is um that is not what intuition bexonian intuition is it's just thought there's nothing it's not it's not anything other than just normal thought whether it be intellection or intuition thought is is what we're talking about here so what it is then oh and also remember um from earlier that the the quote from the very beginning of this section my intuition is reflection so it's again it's a reflective activity intuition it's not anything other than just thinking but it's thinking in a specific way it's thinking in a particular way it's thinking with those ideas of change of movement of continuity of essentially thinking in terms of duration instead of in terms of analysis in terms of the intellect in terms of concepts and that's all it is it's just a different way of thinking um and what what it means then the the difference that's going to to make the difference here is we're going to use metaphor and comparisons instead of logic and measurement when we're describing our intuitive insights and like i've said before that's just because those concepts or rigid concepts measurements quantitative quantitative analyses they don't work when we're trying to describe the whole they're only useful for the paths so we're going to have to when we when we talk about intuition we're going to have to resort to metaphor we're going to have to resort to comparisons but each metaphor that we use will highlight a different aspect that we're trying to to show of intuition um or of duration or of change and so that that's that's the the way that we use language so we're still using language we're still thinking it's just that we're using it in a slightly different way we're appealing to we in a sense we're kind of holding the words open instead of letting them close in around their meanings around their concepts we're using the words we're using the concepts but with the the understanding that these words and concepts remain open they remain fluid they remain they have to be understood in a different way than if we were doing it than if we were analyzing something so that's the fourth feature of intuition the fifth is it's rigorous it's still rigorous i don't have a good quote for this um and i don't remember bergston saying intuition is rigorous but i i i this is what i what i see in books only in intuition we're not abandoning clear thinking here we're not we're not it's not like anything goes now and if if if it seems like or if you feel like something then it's true we're not we're not we're not opening the door to to this kind of you know like i said divine inspiration or a sudden flash of inspiration you had while reading some text or whatever we're still there's still philosophical rigor behind intuition so the idea is not to indulge irrationality and abandon evidence bergson for example is always tying his theories to science to evidence he's always trying to connect what he's talking about to to the sciences right he's not he's not offering kind of off-the-wall theories that don't have any connection to science he's always tethered to science to to the concrete so we're not indulged we're not we're not heading down the path of superstition or mysticism here we're just trying to see the situation we're trying to understand the object without the categories of the intellect seeing in a way that is not following a hunch or indulging some irrational fantasy but thinking in terms of duration and an interesting analogy i thought of with this which i think applies here is einstein and his beam of light when um when he was before he came up with or when he came up with relativity he [Music] he imagined he asked himself what would it be like to ride on a beam of light what would i see and uh and when he did that well what you'd normally expect right is if you're following the the the the way that we understood the universe at the time was if you're riding on a beam of light next to another beam of light and you looked over at that beam what would you what would you see you'd just see a static beam of light right because both beams of light are traveling at the same speed but the insight that that einstein had was that if even if when i looked at this beam of light we're traveling at the same speed i would see the beam of light next to me racing ahead of me at precisely the speed of light even though i'm also traveling at the speed of light that was his insight and that that's what led to relativity um so when he did this when he when he when he when he made this intuitive leap he didn't abandon clear rigorous thinking and fantasize you know some kind of outlandish religious or supernatural story about beams of light and how fast things travel but he abandoned preconceived notions and instead imagined something different intuited what it would be like intuited that riding on this beam of light you would see another beam of light moving away from you at the speed of light so that's kind of the way i see intuition here it's it's still rigorous it's still a rigorous thought it's not it's not anything goes it's not it's not the doors aren't flung open for any any old theory or anything that you you can come up with um we still have to tether ourselves to to rigorous thought but we're just we're looking beyond the categories of the intellect we're looking beyond fixed concepts we're looking to think in terms of duration so that's the fifth thing the sixth feature of intuition is that it is practically useless it doesn't help us live within the world it doesn't help us achieve anything in the world it doesn't it doesn't help us do anything that we need to do that's what the intellect is for the intellect helps us the intellect is practical because the intellect deals with the abstractions from the whole it deals with the things the objects it helps us it's what allows us to manipulate them because it lets us see them in the first place it lets us um grasp them as as things as the things that they are for us so the intellect helps us live within the world the intellect is practical but it can't help us understand that world as a whole we can't use those same concepts those same categories of thought to understand the whole as the intellect uses to understand the parts and so the opposite is true for intuition intuition gets us to reality itself it lets us a nice expression of berksen's hold reality in a firm and final embrace but it doesn't let us live it doesn't it doesn't help us achieve any of our goals so it's good for this kind of an understanding of the whole but if you want to manipulate the whole if you want to achieve your your your ends that's where the intellect comes in that's the power of the intellect and the last point i have to note here is that intuition always comes first and this was quite an interesting idea one cannot proceed backwards to an intuition that one has not had in other words you can't deduce an intuition the intuition comes first and that lights the way forward for the intellect to go about its task of analyzing so you have to have that that guiding light of the intuition first that's what we talked about earlier you have that intuition and then and it's simple it's always simple idea but when you try and explain it you end up down a rabbit hole of twists and turns and complexities and convolutions and because just the nature of trying to explain the thing it always becomes um complicated through just because of the way we're trying to explain it we're trying to explain it we're trying to explain it in terms of parts when in actuality it's a whole so we're always going to to find ourselves always chasing down this intuition always trying to to better capture it better describe it um but what that means is you have to have the intuition first you have the intuition and then you analyze you can't analyze something to get the intuition you can't go from the analysis to the intuition intuition the example that burkeson gives is uh being given letters of a poem but all jumbled up or randomly mixed mixed up in order to put the poem back together you need a guiding intuition of the whole before you begin you have to have an idea of what the poem is before you can put the the letters back in the correct order and this is because so if you try sorry if you tried to do it randomly just that kind of brute force attack it would be almost impossible virtually impossible to do it and the reason is that the letters are elements not parts so they are the distinction that bursa makes here elements are pieces of a hole constitutive of that hole they only make sense in the hole it only makes sense in relation to other elements which make up that same hole excuse me parts on the other hand they're independent they're discreet they're separate they make sense on their own they're abstracted out from the whole so the letters here they're elements as bergson uses the word they only make sense within the whole and so they only make sense in their relation to other letters that make up this whole and so that's a good way of thinking about this distinction which i've talked about before and the bees and the hive cells in the body the elements they don't make sense understood as parts okay so that is kind of my breakdown of intuition i've got a couple more things to say before we wrap up the first is just a point about intuition and life so i'll give you a quote which we'll break down talking about intuition by the sympathetic communication which it establishes between us and the rest of the living by the expansion of our consciousness which it brings about it introduces us into life's own domain which is reciprocal and penetration endlessly continued creation so the point that i wanted to emphasize with this quote was that life can only be understood through intuition intuition is the only way we can we can grasp life through that that simple direct unmediated apprehension so life can only be understood through intuition and intuition is only about understanding life it's only useful for understanding the whole why because life is duration right and intuition is thinking in terms of duration so we just we're just kind of reinforcing these ideas that i've mentioned before there is an objection what if you object by saying that you know don't we always use intelligence we're always using the intellect we can't we can't not use the intellect that's just the way we work how how is it possible to get beyond it person discusses this in creative evolution and he gives the analogy of swimming he says it if you think about swimming it seems impossible if you consider it rationally thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield the rule for swimming come into the water and when you know how to swim you will understand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking swimming is an extension of walking but walking would never have pushed you on to swimming that's a nice analogy right when you when you look when you stand kind of at the beginning and you're trying to understand this process that we're talking about it doesn't make sense doesn't make sense according to the intellect how can we go beyond the intellect we're always thinking in terms of the intellect we can't get beyond it come into the water then you'll you'll see you'll you'll get that intuition you'll you'll you'll understand what it is to think in terms of duration but if you just if you analyze it from the start if you before you even attempt it you won't bother attempting because it will always seem impossible it will always seem impossible when you analyze it it will always seem impossible to the intellect so bergson talks here of a leap not a leap into faith we're not leaping into um you know this is not a hopefully it'll work or hopefully you know god will help us out on the way or whatever or you know maybe i'll tap into the currents of the universe and get this intuition that's not it's not that kind of leap but it's a leap in the sense that there's no step-by-step progression from reason and the intellect to life you can't just follow a path that's laid out from one from the one to the other the transition from the intellect to life from thinking in terms of concepts and ideas to thinking in terms of duration is a transition from the quantitative to the qualitative and so it's and that is the leap to go from the quantitative to the qualitative you can't get there by adding more quantitative steps you have to make a leap to a different kind of thinking a different way of thinking that like i say you can't you can't get to by just putting one foot in front of the other in the manner of of logic or of reason or of intellect so it's nice that uh that quote swimming is an extension of walking both are forms of movement and the the parallel for us intuition is an extension of the intellect both are forms of thought but again you can't get from the intellect to the intuition in the same way that you can't get from walking to swimming unless you come into the water okay so that is intuition that's that's all of the that's everything i wanted to say about intuition i just wanted to make a give a caveat not a caveat but uh um just a note here you remember at the beginning of this section intuition i said what i've taken uh what i've talked about here is is from creative evolution and from the creative mind so from that period of bergson's philosophy and the reason that's important is because in his later thought and i'm thinking particularly here of the two sources of morality and religion which was written in 1935 so very late in his in his uh in his life he does muddy the water here a little bit and he starts talking about extending intuition to mysticism specifically christian mysticism and i haven't touched that at all and i'm not going to touch it here anyway um i'll just i'll just say a couple of things about what he what he talks about in the two sources intuition kind of takes takes on for him a different he's really talking about something completely different from what he's taught from from the intuition that he was talking about in creative evolution in his earlier writings the intuition the way that it gets kind of transformed into sources is it's it's an intuition which not it's not available for everybody it's not it's not philosophical intuition it's not something you can can really hope to engage in on your yourself because it's it's for only a few people he can he likens it to um to genius when it comes to art when it comes to art not everybody can be not everybody is an artistic genius you only get those those rare individuals who who are so um have that that way of seeing the object that they're able to capture it and paint or in sculpture or whatever that that that that's like genius level um artwork it's the same thing here with the intuition that he talks about and linking it to christian mysticism it's only available to those rare individuals like the christian mystics who have had this apprehension of something beyond beyond themselves and this apprehension of the whole and he talks about love a lot and he talks about kind of just getting beyond the the the the the state of of play in which we are warring with each other in which we we're kind of at odds with other people or we're states at odds with other states um to this to getting to see this this bigger picture in which we're all together which we're all participating in this this grand um project called life and that's the intuition he's talking about getting an apprehension of that having a sense a felt sense of this this idea that we are all parts of this greater whole but this yeah like i say the intuition that he talks about here now is only available to the the rare few the rare um not talented but the maybe the lucky or maybe the unlucky depending on how look at it the the few who are able to have this intuition um so it really like i say intuition takes a completely different turn and and it really it does kind of become something that you um something mystical something supernatural something religious so does that negate everything i've just said here about how it's not mystical it's not religious i don't think so and there are there are two reasons for that the first reason is that i think berson himself is drifting from the course that he laid out in creative evolution in the creative mind i'm not drifting from the path of bergson bergson's drifting from his own path i think so i i'm this is where i park company with bergson and the two sources and that's why i've i've left all of what i've said about intuition as i've said it because i think that's truer to bergson's original thoughts about intuition and his later stuff i think in the two sources i i think he's uh he's he's gone off topic a bit um but you know read it for yourself you can you can decide whether i'm right or or if you think um you want to scrap what i've said and follow books and into the into the two sources but i will say as well or let me give you a quote actually from the two sources and then give you the other reason why i don't think it negates anything that i've said here no doubt we are here going beyond the conclusions we reached in creative evolution we wanted then to keep as close as possible to facts we stated nothing that could not in time be confirmed by the tests of biology here we are in the field of probabilities alone so in the two sources he is he says there right he's gone beyond where he was with creative evolution in creative evolution we we stayed with the facts we kept with the facts we kept with the facts of biology we kept with the facts of of the science of physics intuition fit into that framework there now we're now in in the two sources now he's going beyond into the field of probabilities and this is something he really didn't do prior to that he was quite careful about this and the the speech he gave about dreams he also says there he seems open to the idea that maybe there's something more maybe the the paranormal maybe something that that's worth investigating but he says explicitly and and it's a it's a speech that he gives to the society the psychical society or something like that british society of something something to do with you know the paranormal anyway psychical society that's what i keep getting but um he says this is where this is as far as i go wherever you go from here you can pick it up from here but where you go where you take what i've just said about dreams um that's that that's that's your that's your task my task the task of philosophy brings us only to this point beyond here um i can't say and uh in the two sources he does say he decides to to push it beyond but and that this is the other reason why i think what i've said is valid is it's clear that he is extending the idea of intuition into christian mysticism it's not it's not intuition as he had it laid out for us in creative evolution it's in a sense it's even something quite different a different kind of thing so i think everything i've said about intuition i stand by stand behind even though i think bergson eventually carries it carries intuition further than i'm prepared to but but i'm not with him on that it pains me to say i have to part company with with the man himself uh in the two sources i was really disappointed actually when i read two swords the first half is brilliant it's just classic bergson it's it's excellent and then the second half he starts talking about religion static religion and he breaks religion too static and dynamic religion and the dynamic religion gets this gets his kind of stamp of approval um and yeah he starts playing with words like god and love and you know all these kinds of there's nothing wrong with love but but kind of adding adding metaphysical overtones that i don't think i don't think are there are warranted so anyway i part company with them there you can you can take what i've said and take it or leave it make your own decision on it but but that's where i stand on it anyway summary time right so first we looked at instinct and we saw that instinct is an unthinking harmony with life it's just life made manifest so instinct in in fact shows us life itself then we looked at intuition that was the main focus a couple of definitions to start with intuition is to think in duration think in terms of duration think in terms of movement change continuity instead of static concepts it's also to install oneself within the phenomenon within the thing that you're studying so those are some decent definitions i think then we looked at what intuition is not it's not a feeling it's not a gut feeling it's not a hunch that you get it's not a meditative insight it's not something that comes to you through an altered state of of um of awareness or some kind of you know flash of of of insight that you get while while in meditation nor is it an external revelation it's not it's not something that you tap into you don't you don't you don't get this by unlocking your hidden potentials or anything like that the seven features of intuition that i pulled out in this video it's unclear and that's because we're not using intellectual categories it's simple it grasps its idea immediately and completely complexity comes when you try and explain that that simple idea it uses the imagination and this is this is how we install ourselves within change how we install ourselves within the thing we're thinking about we do it through an act of imagination not an act of imagination an act of imagination it's also a different way of thinking so think about the swimming analogy compared with walking it's still movement it's just a different kind of movement intuition is still thinking it's just a different kind of thinking from thinking that we do with the intellect so that means that intuition is still rigorous it's rigorous thought it's not we're not abandoning reason we're not abandoning kind of clear clear thinking we're not we're not um indulging irrational thought that's that's i think the main thing and my example there was einstein his intuition of writing on a beam of light i think is a good example of how intuitive thinking works it's practically useless it has no value for us in living our lives it doesn't make our lives any easier doesn't make it it doesn't help us achieve our goals it gives us an understanding of the whole rather than the parts that's all and it's prior to intellection you can't work backwards to an intuition you've not had you can't deduce an intuition from an analysis of the paths you can't deduce the whole from an analysis of the paths really so the intuition comes first and finally we looked at later bergson and the way that he extends intuition into christian mysticism an idea which i'm not very um i'm not very taken with to say to put it lightly but um like i said there i don't think it it it i don't think it negates anything that that i've said about intuition in this in this video and i think a lot of what we what i've said comes straight from an earlier phase of bergson and so in a sense i'm just remaining true to early bergson not late but it's not really right to talk of earlier in later books and it's not like there was a big change in his thought uh the way that we talk about like early heidegger and later heidegger but still there is that that difference and intuition and that kind of drifting into mysticism which we won't follow him the path we won't follow him down and that is everything i have to say this this is i'm not sure how long this video is i know it's long though um but uh i don't know what can i say it's just there's just so much to talk about hope you got something from that thanks for listening thanks for watching as always and i will see you in the next video you

Channel: Absurd Being

Views: 1,605

Keywords: Henri Bergson, Philosophy, Intuition, Instinct, Creative Evolution

Id: XgVxAQWNupg

Length: 87min 5sec (5225 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021