Process Metaphysics and Mutative Life by Wahida Khandker

Author:Wahida Khandker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030430481
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

ii. Bergson’s theory of intuition opens up questions about our available strategies for overcoming the illusory mechanisms of thought. Bergson’s perspective on the role of philosophy does not supplant, but rather complements, the function of the intellect. His writings on what this intuitive function might be are somewhat scattered and do not form a single, cohesive prescription for thinking about process. As Isabelle Stengers writes rather acerbically, there is a tendency amongst philosophers to place themselves at the terminal point of the traditions to which they respond. Bergson is guilty, on this view, of setting himself up as the unification of the tendencies of the intellect and instinct by trying to exemplify his own theory of intuition (Stengers 2011, p. 115). Yet Stengers’ defence of Whitehead from this tendency should equally apply to Bergson’s thought: what is important is not the status of any particular philosophy within the context of its history. What is interesting, rather, is an ‘adventure of reason’ that is ‘not a definition of reason, but a particular description of the historical process that exhibits what we call “reason” as one of its questions’ (Stengers 2011, p. 115). In Bergson’s case, the historical process is an evolutionary one, in which life itself has evolved as an exploration of its own encounters with the world, manifested in a plurality of forms of life that each blend different degrees of intellectual and instinctive contact with things. As Bergson asks:

What, then, is the principle that has only to let go its tension,—may we say to detend,—in order to extend, the interruption of the cause here being equivalent to a reversal of the effect? For want of a better word we have called it consciousness. […] In order that our consciousness shall coincide with something of its principle, it must detach itself from the already-made and attach itself to the being- made. It needs that, turning back on itself and twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be made to be one with the act of willing,—a painful effort which we can make suddenly, doing violence to our nature, but cannot sustain more than a few moments. (Bergson 1998, pp. 237–238)

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