BERGSON’S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
What, then, is called philosophic “method” and is distinguished thereby from “doctrine,” is really, in fact, always the cardinal principle of the content of the philosophy in question, its fundamental doctrine. If this doctrine is acceptable to reason, if it is reasonable, logical principles must determine it. No anti-intellectualist philosophy legitimately evades the rules of the game of dialectic by the representation that it is a ‘method rather than a doctrine.’ For this is the game that anyone plays who undertakes to show, by reasonable discourse, why reality and knowledge conform to a certain definition, or (the same mental procedure) why they do not conform to other definitions. Since dialectic is just significant discourse with a meaning to be judged, it may vary in form between any degree of syllogistic baldness, at one extreme, and of suggestive subtlety at the other. It is dialectic if it is constituted of statements, explicit or implied, which relate to each other.
There is, therefore, I say, a misleading irrelevance in the characterization which Bergson himself has set the fashion of attributing to his philosophy, the characterization of it as rather a method than a system of doctrine. A method implies a system, that is to say an ordered conviction about the nature of reality and knowledge. Such a system is essential to any meaning in Bergson’s method.
* * * * *
Intellectualism in philosophy implies the conviction that the parts of reality are connected together in thinkable ways; that a comprehensive understanding of things as a connected system or unity is therefore theoretically possible; if actually impossible, this is merely because of the endlessness of relationships and the limitedness of any actual thinker’s time and strength. But in fact even human finitude is no obstacle to a comprehension of the principles of reality. Detail is immaterial to the unity of such a view.
One of the sayings attributed to Professor James is that there is one thing you can always pronounce with assurance, upon any philosophical system, in advance of hearing a word of it, and that is that it is false. This suggests at any rate, very well, the meaning of philosophical anti-intellectualism, which implies the conviction contradictory to intellectualism, to wit that the parts of reality are not connected in thinkable ways.
The connectedness of the intellectualist’s universe may have any degree of significance or casualness. A mere “and” may express much of it.[94] Intellectualism may be as pluralistic in this sense as you like, or as monistic. But if things are a universe in any such sense that they are comprehensible in intellect’s discursive way, which anti-intellectualism denies—on such a hypothesis anti-intellectualism and intellectualism have commonly agreed that some principle is embodied in this total comprehensibleness, a supreme induction, which would constitute the final interpretation of any fact. Like a master-key, it would open all the chambers of the many-mansioned universe. Every philosopher, as a fact, has some controlling thought which has the value, for him, of such a supreme principle. But always, it seems, there are doors which the master-key will not unlock. It is the conviction of intellectualism that this is because the maker of the key has missed them, and so left them out of account in fashioning it; while anti-intellectualism believes it is an illusion to see the situation as a case of locks to be turned by a key, at all. Entrance into possession of reality is otherwise conditioned, altogether; the procedure, in consequence, is radically different from this. But it is, I think, a true historical generalization that the success with which a philosopher, of whatever method, avoids a supreme principle of interpretation, corresponds exactly with the success with which he avoids being a philosopher at all. I suppose Omar Khayyam and Aristippus the Cyrenaic are two of the least unifying philosophers of history; yet their philosophy, like that of any absolutist, can be resumed in a single idea. Omar has uttered it in one of his own famous sentences: “Oh take the cash, and let the credit go!”
Aside from the presence, in each, of a generative principle, there is little enough in common between the anti-intellectualism of Omar and that of Henri Bergson. If critics have been able to find seeds of skepticism and of pessimism in Bergson,[95] these characters are at any rate foreign to any intention visible in its author. No more positive philosophy, in its intention, was ever composed. The positiveness of its name, intuitionism, is altogether proper. Its significance, to be sure, is sharply defined by its negative relation to intellectualism, and therefore I stated it negatively above as the thesis that the parts of reality are not connected in a thinkable way. But the intuitionist would readily admit: if not in a thinkable way, then in no way, evidently. And, again, if not connected at all, no more are the parts of reality disconnected, since any disconnection between things is only their particular mode of connection. The fact is, reality has no parts, and that is just why intellect, which sees parts in everything, is alien and blind to the true nature of reality. Still one may object that intellect is itself a fact. What possible meaning can there be in saying that any fact is alien to reality? As Bergson himself has said, we swim in reality, and cannot possibly get clear of it. We cannot talk, we cannot think, we cannot act about nothing.
The answer to this objection is the master principle of Bergson’s metaphysics: reality is life. Knowledge is “sympathetic” living. If intellect is real, so is every abstraction, e. g., the inside of your hat. The inside and the hat itself are at any rate real in senses so importantly different that “real” and “unreal” hardly exaggerate the contrast. Intellect, says Bergson, is the cross-sectioning of reality. There is no thickness, no concreteness in it. It exists as much in inert matter as in consciousness; in fact, it exists in neither except in the sense in which a surface can be said to exist in a solid body. What is the surface in itself? Why, nothing; it is an abstract aspect of the body. The body is real, but its aspects are not real, because they do not constitute the body—no multiplication or addition of them does so. No millions of surfaces make any thickness. In this sense the surface is other than and alien to the real nature of the body. And so other manifestations of intellect—space, juxtaposition, extension, number, part out of part—have no existence, as the surface has none.
As facts, nevertheless, what are they? How are they facts? What is their raison d’ être? Their raison d’ être is a faculty life has, the faculty of action. They are the ways in which life acts. They are not concrete entities. In this, they are alien to the concreteness of reality. Try to reconstruct reality out of such abstractions, and the result is a construction like that of geometrical imagination. You have constructed an abstract symbol of the reality, which symbol the mind, preoccupied with its practical bias, can mistake for the reality only because it is so preoccupied.