The Method of Intuition
Henri Bergson sought to address the question of what knowledge one may have of the world exterior to oneself, and one of the central tenets of this effort was the method of intuition that he developed. It was a recurring theme in almost all of his work, but in this paper I mainly draw upon his short text An Introduction to Metaphysics (Bergson 1912). My objective here is not to give a full account of Bergson's philosophy nor of the method's full implications.[9] Instead, I will attempt to propose a method inspired by Bergson by means of which the questions in the previous paragraph may be addressed.
The more general interpretation of intuition relates to the things we do without thinking about them: one may act intuitively, for example, upon a situation that is wrong or dangerous. Intuition may be likened to an internalized and automated system that makes us act upon what is going on in the world around us, perhaps more akin to instinct. In phenomenology, intuition has a slightly different meaning. There it gives the subject first-person knowledge, and in this sense an object can be said to be intuited by a subject. Bergson's use of intuition is described by philosopher Michael R. Kelly “as a method of reflecting on instinctual or sympathetic engagement with things in all their flux before the framework of practical utility obfuscates our relation to them and to life” (Kelly 2010: 10). It is this meaning of intuition that the rest of this paper is leaning on.
In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson defines two incommensurable ways to approach an object: either through signs and concepts – relatively– or through entering into the object, exploring it from the inside – absolutely. This exploration from the inside is achieved by entering into what he calls sympathy with the object. It enables him to "no longer grasp the movement from without, remaining where I am, but from where it is, from within, as it is in itself" (Bergson 1912: 3). The latter is what he refers to as absolute knowledge: "But the absolute, which is the object and not its representation, the original and not its translation, is perfect, by being perfectly what it is” (Bergson 1912: 5-6).
An example that Bergson gives to describe representational knowledge is a photographic view of a city. If all angles and all surfaces of a city area have been photographed and documented to achieve something similar to the street view that online maps now offer, a reasonably detailed replica of the space may be achieved. Exploring such a model, however, cannot be equated with the experience of being in the city. It will offer a representation, and as such it will still be a qualitatively different experience from a live experience. Another example Bergson gives is the translation of a poem into different languages. Each translation can give the reader an idea of the meaning of the poem, sometimes even revealing new articulations, but it would "never succeed in rendering the inner meaning of the original" (Bergson 1912: 5).
One of Bergson's central propositions is that the kind of knowledge that arises from a relative perspective is always a reduction of the thing under consideration. Scrutinizing the object from an outside perspective allows for analytical precision, but whatever arises through this process is always a reduction:
In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn, analysis multiplies without end the number of its points of view in order to complete its always incomplete representation, and ceaselessly varies its symbols that it may perfect the always imperfect translation. It goes on, therefore, to infinity. (Bergson 1912: 8)
The absolute, on the other hand, derives from intuition and intellectual sympathy with the object. Intuition allows for a perception of the object's unique qualities and is the perfect absolute in contrast to the imperfect analysis. The science of intuition is metaphysics, and metaphysics is "the science which claims to dispense with symbols" (Bergson 1912: 9).
The one reality that almost always emerges from within comes when we engage in self-reflection. Bergson describes the various strata that might be revealed during the process of introspection, when slowly moving toward the center of the self. A protecting "crust" is the first layer, made up of all perceptions coming from the outside world. Then memories of interpretations of perceptions are encountered, followed by motor habits that are both connected and detached from the other layers. Bergson describes, at the core, the continuous flux of a concatenation of states in an ongoing movement back and forth. The metaphor used here is that of a coil, constantly unrolled and rolled up again through the various layers – motor habits, memories, and the outer crust – out toward the outside and back in again. Admittedly, this comparison is far from perfect, and the idea of the rolling up of the coil may be misleading. However, it still has some merit in the current context, albeit when understood slightly differently from how Bergson intended it. It brings in a possible deconstruction of the two poles in Bergson's model, as the movement between the various strata in this metaphor can be seen as a continuum from the outside to the inside. An analysis is rarely exclusively analytical or intuitive, outside or inside, but more often a motion where both contribute to knowledge. This evokes a passage in an earlier work by Bergson ([1896] 1991), which gives, to some extent, a different image of the movements back and forth through presence, memory, and experiences. Conscious practice is displayed here as a cone whose tip is moving over a similarly moving plane; the point of the cone represents the present and the cone itself the accumulated memories and experiences:
The bodily memory, made up of the sum of the sensori-motor systems organized by habit, is then a quasi-instantaneous memory to which the true memory of the past serves as base. Since they are not two separate things, since the first is only, as we have said, the pointed end, ever moving, inserted by the second in the shifting plane of experience, it is natural that the two functions should lend each other a mutual support. So, on the one hand, the memory of the past offers to the sensori-motor mechanisms all the recollections capable of guiding them in their task and of giving to the motor reaction the direction suggested by the lessons of experience. It is in just this that the associations of contiguity and likeness consist. But, on the other hand, the sensori-motor apparatus furnish to ineffective, that is unconscious, memories, the means of taking on a body, of materializing themselves, in short of becoming present. (Bergson [1896] 1991: 152–53)
Sensorimotor habits are informed by memories which guide them in the work they are set out to do, and because no single memory is ever stable – it is always altered by the present in the interaction between what Bergson refers to as the "pointed end" and the past memory – the experience is continuously altered by past experiences, which in turn influence the present. Interesting for the current discussion is the connection brought up between sensorimotor mechanisms and past experiences and the fact that this connection is not unidirectional – from memory to habit – but also from habit back to memory.
It is in thinking about embodiment and motor habits that Bergson's understanding of what intuition might be is perhaps best applied: When a leg or a hand is moved, the subject may have a unique insight into what is going on, one that would be difficult, or impossible, to acquire from the outside in the same way. Analyzing the movement from an outside perspective will fail to understand it completely, since the analysis only pins the movement to a sequence of states. The actual change, the mobility or, as Bergson would put it, the duration, can only be understood through intuition. Furthermore, any new experience within such a movement, as well as any past experience, will introduce changes in the system.
When you raise your arm, you accomplish a movement of which you have, from within, a simple perception; but for me, watching it from the outside, your arm passes through one point, then through another, and between these two there will be still other points; so that, if I began to count, the operation would go on for ever. (Bergson 1912: 6)
I have learned to move my arm, and every new piece of information about what I can do with it will add to my arm-moving-knowledge, and intuition is the modality through which knowledge is gathered. For a subject able to observe the thing from the inside – that is, intuitively – there are no states, only duration and mobility informed by experience and knowledge. Without this inside access, one is left with a conceptual analysis from the outside, and no matter how many different perspectives this analysis is performed from, it will never fully capture the true motion of the object. The contradictions between this and the intuitive knowledge that Bergson is arguing for
arise from the fact that we place ourselves in the immobile in order to lie in wait for the moving thing as it passes, instead of replacing ourselves in the moving thing itself, in order to traverse with it the immobile positions. They arise from our professing to reconstruct reality – which is tendency and consequently mobility – with percepts and concepts whose function it is to make it stationary. (Bergson 1912: 67)
One central aspect of the distinction between analytical and intuitive knowledge made here is that the intuitive, being in motion or duration, can form the basis for concepts and analytical knowledge, whereas it is impossible to reconstruct motion from fixed concepts. An analysis may arise as a result of examining intuition, but intuition cannot arise from analysis. An analysis from the outside is performed on one particular state of the duration; in the case of multiple analyses or states, one may imagine that the mobility may be reconstructed by simply adding the different states together. This, however, is the critical point that Bergson objects against: It is only through intuition that the variability of reality may be fully experienced as mobility. A succession of static states is radically different; it is a series of frozen frames of time added together, one slice after the other. The error in thinking that reality may be accessed through analysis, claims Bergson, "consists in believing that we can reconstruct the real with these diagrams. As we have already said and may as well repeat here – from intuition, one can pass to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition" (Bergson 1912: 48).
To conclude this brief overview of Bergson's theory of intuition there are a few things that, I claim, connects it to the general discussion of the uncertainty of the epistemology of artistic research: what knowledge can we expect from this research? The inside perspective is often brought up as a significant aspect of artistic research. If this perspective can be approached through intuition and analyzed, as Bergson is suggesting, intuition should be a valid method, both in general and in relation to the ambition of this paper. Furthermore, self-reflection is a recurring concept in the discussions around artistic research, as noted by Borgdorff: "Art’s epistemic character resides in its ability to offer the very reflection on who we are, on where we stand, that is obscured from sight by the discursive and conceptual procedures of scientific rationality” (Borgdorff 2010: 50). Self-reflection, according to Bergson, is a way to understand and develop intuition, as it fully relies on the inside perspective. It develops intuition, which enables access to an inside perspective that may then be analyzed and communicated in a continuum of moving between internal and external vantage points.