The restrictive conception of intellect is a very old one. The incompatibility of intellect and life, as cognitive organ and object, is certainly as old a belief as the era of the Sophists. It can be said, that is, with historical certainty, that, from the time of Protagoras—and I have no doubt it has been true ever since the first philosopher, whoever he was, undertook to make an examination of the universe as one thing—it has always been true that many of the best minds have been convinced, by the futile results of such undertakings, that the universe as one thing, on one hand, and intellect, on the other, make a pair as incompatible, in the relation of cognitive organ and object, as the faint star and the fovea: you have an organ and an object which by nature are unsuited to each other. That kind of organ cannot see that kind of object. Not that the faint star is invisible, but, to see it, you musn’t look! Then it will swim into the field of the organ that is made to see it, the retinal tissue surrounding the fovea. Thus it is not a question of human finitude or limitation. The formulæ of intellect, applied to such an object, are mere silliness, reducible, as Kant showed, to all manner of antinomy and paradox. Not only that, but whatever is most important and interesting within this whole, everything concerning the nature and meaning of concrete cases of life, eludes and baffles conceptual statement,—which is the only kind of statement there is,—inevitably eludes it, like smoke in a child’s hand who tries to catch it. Your essences or definitions, of life or any of its manifestations, are stuff and nonsense, not inadequate, but absurd. What logical sentence has ever been uttered that, upon the least reflection, does not fail to develop into a grotesquely false caricature when applied to any genuine phase or interest of life, great or small—whether God, freedom, immortality, or the heart of a woman, or of a child, or of a man (to take them in a descending order of their unsearchableness)? You may labor your conception with prodigious precision—the truth of the matter is always beyond, when you are speaking of matters that are real.
This is the artist’s temper of mind when the artist has inadvertently gulped down a noxious dose of metaphysics. It is the feeling of the novelists, the dramatists, the poets, that Bergson voices: life may be lived—nobly or basely, courageously or cowardly, truly or falsely;—and the flavor and significance of life may be heightened, life may be realized more abundantly, in artistic activity, which is putting oneself into one’s object, making it become not an object, identifying oneself with it. But one thing is not given to man, and that is to interpret life.
Everyone is familiar with the telling dramatic force of the device which consists in involving a philosophical hero, a man addicted to principles of high generality, in sudden overwhelming emotional chaos, in which all his philosophy goes to smash. The refractoriness of sexual love, for instance, to all his theories is such a delicious reductio ad absurdum of the theories. First you make your philosopher develop his maxims, in a besotted, fatuous conviction of their infallibility: then a particularly impossible she enters, one who is conspiciously unfitted, by artlessness or disabilities of worldly station, for the upsetting of principles great and high. The philosopher goes through his paces, eating his maxims whole, with unction; and you have the spectacle of Life rising serene, untouched, above the futilities of theory. The theory doesn’t work. The obvious conclusion is that there is some fundamental incommensurability between it and the simple facts of life that can flout it so. Simon the Jester is a very delightful example of what I mean. Simon is bound to come to grief, he is so smugly philosophical. The wise novel-reader knows what to expect. Not that philosophy is not an ornament to a man, a civilizing, disciplining exercise. All that is one thing, but acting as if such notions apply is quite another. This good philosophical chap gives the result of his philosophy in regulating his life, as follows:
“Surely no man has fought harder than I have done to convince himself of the deadly seriousness of existence; and surely before the feet of no man has Destiny cast such stumbling-blocks to faith ... No matter what I do, I’m baffled. I look upon sorrow and say, ‘Lo, this is tragedy!’ and hey, presto! a trick of lightening turns it into farce. I cry aloud, in perfervid zeal, ‘Life is real, life is earnest, and the apotheosis of the fantastic is not its goal,’ and immediately a grinning irony comes to give the lie to my credo.
“Or is it that, by inscrutable decree of the Almighty Powers, I am undergoing punishment for an old unregenerate point of view, being doomed to wear my detested motley for all eternity, to stretch out my hand forever to grasp realities and find I can do naught but beat the air with my bladder; to listen with strained ear perpetually expectant of the music of the spheres, and catch nothing but the mocking jingle of the bells on my fool’s cap?
“I don’t know. I give it up.”
Giving it up is obviously the moral, here. The change of attitude implied in the last words marks the beginning of an era of glorious fulfilment of life in the former philosopher’s history. What was necessary was that he should stop theorizing and learn to live. That is, philosophy, as supreme experience, is the art of living. It is the artist that really knows, that knows inwardly and truly. The genuine philosopher is the artist in living. The intellectualist philosopher is a dissector of life’s defunct remains.
The nature of the opposition between the two modes of consciousness called intuition and intellect is discussed in the chapter on Bergson’s epistemology. The intuitionist philosopher is such never for logical reasons, always for temperamental reasons. He is a man to whom life is richer and fuller, more self-fulfilling, more natural, in the intuitional mode of consciousness than in the intellectual. Hence the suspicious and disparaging disposition toward the intellectual mode of consciousness, in a very numerous class of minds of the highest order. From a personal feeling of safety and security in intuition and of dissatisfaction with intellectual efforts, the transition is natural to a conviction that the trouble is in the essential nature of intellect. A mode of consciousness which is so inveterately and (presumably) inevitably beset with self-frustration cannot be knowledge. It is too obviously the opposite of knowledge, to wit error and delusion.
But once the opposition has reached this point, where not only the convenience but the very validity of intellect is impugned, one is involved in a disjunction between these two modes of consciousness that is demonstrably false, both logically and psychologically. It is surely a false hypostasis of terms whose distinction is merely abstract, to set over against each other in this way two aspects which are equally essential to any conception of the nature of consciousness. For intuition and intellect can be seen to imply each other with the same necessity with which quality and quantity imply each other. And there is the same absurdity, on the side of epistemology, in regarding intuition as valid knowledge and intellect as not valid, as, on the side of ontology, in regarding quality as real and quantity—or relation in general—as not real. As if either were conceivable except as a co-aspect or coefficient with the other, in the nature of reality. This would be to conceive of quality as quality of nothing, or relation as relation between no terms.
If philosophy must be reflective (and reflectiveness to some degree is undoubtedly an inevitable condition of human consciousness, perhaps of any consciousness), it must be, quatenus philosophy, intellectual, and not, quatenus philosophy, intuitional. Intuition will assuredly be there, in any philosophy, as the pole is inseparable from its antipodes. But the philosophicalness of philosophy is just its reflectiveness; that is, once more, quatenus philosophy, it is intellectual.