The Misuse of Mind

by Karin Stephen

The usual work of the intellect consists in analysis and classification: if you have anything presented to you which you do not understand the obvious question to put yourself is, “what is it?” Suppose in a dark room which you expected to find empty you stumble against something, the natural thing to do is to begin at once to try to fit your experience into some class already familiar to you. You find it has a certain texture which you class as rather rough, a temperature which you class as warm, a size which you class as about two feet high, a peculiar smell which you recognise and you finally jump to the answer to your question: it is “a dog.” This intellectual operation is a sample of the way in which it comes natural to us to set to work whenever we find ourselves confronted with any situation which we are not able to classify off hand, we are not easy till we can say what the situation is, and saying what consists in hitting upon some class with which we are already familiar to which it belongs: in this instance the question was answered when you succeeded in describing the situation to yourself as “stumbling upon a dog.” Now you were only able to class what was stumbled upon as a dog after you had recognised a certain number of properties as being those shared by dogs—the rough texture, the size, the smell. You analysed the situation as containing these qualities and thereupon classified what had been stumbled upon as a dog.

Analysis and classification are the two methods which we are accustomed to rely upon for improving our knowledge in unfamiliar situations and we are accustomed to take it that they improve our knowledge of the whole situation: anyone who said that after you were able to say what you had stumbled upon you knew less of the whole situation than you knew before would find it difficult to get you to agree. And yet this is very much the position which Bergson takes up. Analysis and classification, he would admit, are the way to get more knowledge, of a kind; they enable us to describe situations and they are the starting point of all explanation and prediction. After analysis and classification you were able to say, “I have stumbled upon a dog,” and having got so far you could then pass on to whatever general laws you knew of as applying to the classes into which you had fitted the situation, and by means of these laws still more of the situation could be classified and explained. Thus by means of the general law, “dogs lick,” you would be furnished with an explanation if perhaps you felt something warm and damp on your hand, or again knowledge of this law might lead you to expect such a feeling. When what we want is to describe or to explain a situation in general terms then Bergson agrees that analysis and classification are the methods to employ, but he maintains that these methods which are useful for describing and explaining are no use for finding out the actual situation which we may want to describe or explain. And he goes a step further. Not only do these methods fail to reveal the situation but the intellectual attitude of abstraction to which they accustom us seriously handicaps us when we want not merely to explain the situation but to know it. Now it is the business of science to explain situations in terms of general laws and so the intellectual method of abstract-ion is the right one for scientists to employ. Bergson claims, however, that philosophy has a task quite distinct from that of science. In whatever situation he finds himself a man may take up one of two attitudes, he may either adopt a practical attitude, in which case he will set to work to explain the situation in order that he may know what to do under the circumstances, or he may take a speculative interest in it and then he will devote himself to knowing it simply for the sake of knowing. It is only, according to Bergson, in the former case, when his interest is practical, that he will attain his object by using the intellectual method of abstraction which proceeds by analysis and classification. These intellectual operations have such prestige, however, they have proved so successful in discovering explanations, that we are apt to take it for granted that they must be the best way to set, to work whatever sort of knowledge we want: we might almost be tempted, off hand, to imagine that they were our only way of knowing at all, but a moment’s reflection will show that this, at any rate, would be going too far.

Before we can analyse and classify and explain we must have something to analyse, some material to work upon: these operations, are based upon something which we know directly, what we see, for instance, or touch or feel. This something is the foundation of knowledge, the intellectual operations of analysis classification and the framing of general laws are simply an attempt to describe and explain it. It is the business of science to explain and intellectual methods are the appropriate ones for science to employ. But the business of philosophy, according to Bergson, is not to explain reality but to know it. For this a different kind of mental effort is required. Analysis and classification, instead of increasing our direct knowledge, tend rather to diminish it. They must always start from some direct knowledge, but they proceed, not by widening the field of this knowledge but by leaving out more and more of it. Moreover, unless we are constantly on the alert, the intellectual habit of using all our direct knowledge as material for analysis and classification ends by completely misleading us as to what it is that we do actually know. So that the better we explain the less, in the end, we know.

There can be no doubt that something is directly known but disputes break out as soon as we try to say what that something is. Is it the “real” world of material objects, or a mental copy of these objects, or are we altogether on the wrong track in looking for two kinds of realities, the “real” world and “our mental states,” and is it perceived events alone that are “real?” This something which we know directly has been given various names: “the external object,” “sense data,” “phenomena,” and so on, each more or less coloured by implications belonging to one or other of the rival theories as to what it is. We shall call it “the facts” to emphasise its indubitable reality, and avoid, as far as possible, any other implications.

Controversy about “the facts” has been mainly as to what position they occupy in the total scheme of reality. As to what they are at the moment when we are actually being acquainted with them one would have thought there could have been no two opinions; it seems impossible that we should make any mistake about that. No doubt it is impossible to have such a thing as a false experience, an experience is what it is, only judgments can be false. But it is quite possible to make a false judgment as to what experience we are actually having, or, still more commonly, simply to take for granted that our experience must be such and such, without ever looking to see whether it is or not. A small child taken to a party and told that parties are great fun if questioned afterwards will very likely say it has enjoyed itself though, if you happened to have been there, you may have seen clearly that it was really bewildered or bored. Even when we grow up names still have a tendency to impose upon us and disguise from us the actual nature of our experiences. There are not very many people who, if invited to partake, for instance, of the last bottle of some famous vintage wine, would have the courage to admit, even to themselves, that it was nasty, even though it was, in fact, considerably past its prime. Cases of this kind, with which we are all familiar, are enough to make us realize that it is actually quite possible to make mistakes even about facts which we know directly, to overlook the actual fact altogether because we have made up our minds in advance as to what it is sure to be.

Now Bergson says that such errors are not confined to stray instances, such as we have noticed, in which the imposition of preconceived ideas can readily be detected by a little closer attention to the actual facts. He believes that a falsification due to preconceived ideas, runs right through the whole of our direct experience. He lays the blame both for this falsification and for our failure to detect it upon our intellectual habit of relying upon explanation rather than upon direct knowledge, and that is one of the reasons why he says that our intellectual attitude is an obstacle to direct knowledge of the facts. The intellectual method of abstraction by which we analyse and classify is the foundation of all description and explanation in terms of general laws, and the truth is that we are, as a rule, much more preoccupied with explaining the facts which we know than with the actual experiencing of them.

This preoccupation is natural enough. The bare fact which we know directly is not enough to enable us to carry on our everyday lives, we cannot get on unless we supplement it with some sort of explanation and, if it comes to choosing between fact and explanation, the explanation is often of more practical use than the fact. So it comes about that we are inclined to use the facts which we know directly simply as material for constructing explanations and to pay so little attention to them for their own sakes that we simply take it for granted that they must be what our explanations lead us to suppose they are.

Now according to Bergson the attitude of mind required for explaining the facts conflicts with that which is required for knowing them. From the point of view simply of knowing, the facts are all equally important and we cannot afford to discriminate, but for explanation some facts are very much more important than others. When we want to explain, therefore, rather than simply to know, we tend to concentrate our attention upon these practically important facts and pass over the rest. For in order to describe and explain a situation we have to classify it, and in order to do this we must pick out in it properties required for membership of some one or other of the classes known to us. In the situation which we originally considered by way of illustration, for instance, you had to pick out the qualities of roughness, warmth and so on, in order to classify what you had stumbled upon as “a dog.” Now the picking out of these particular qualities is really an operation of abstraction from the situation as a whole: they were the important features of the situation from the point of view of classifying what you had stumbled upon, but they by no means exhausted the whole situation. Our preoccupation with explaining the facts, then, leads us to treat what we know directly as so much material for abstraction.

This intellectual attitude, as Bergson calls it, though practically useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of view of speculation. By focussing our attention upon anything less than the whole fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, he says we distort what we knew originally: furthermore just in so far as we make a selection among the facts, attending to some and passing over others, we limit the field of direct knowledge which we might otherwise have enjoyed. For these two reasons Bergson insists that it is the business of philosophy to reverse the intellectual habit of mind and return to the fullest possible direct knowledge of the fact. “May not the task of philosophy, “he says,” be to bring us back to a fuller perception of reality by a certain displacement of our attention? What would be required would be to turn our attention away from the practically interesting aspect of the universe in order to turn it back to what, from a practical point of view, is useless. And this conversion of attention would be philosophy itself.”[^[2]]

[2] La Perception du Changement, page 13. 24