An Introduction to Metaphysics

Summary

Henri Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics is a short essay, first printed in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in January 1903, that compresses the method behind his longer books into some forty pages. It opens with a distinction that the rest of the essay unfolds. There are two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first moves around the object: it takes points of view, uses symbols, and yields knowledge that is relative to the standpoint and the notation chosen. The second enters into the object and coincides with it, and so reaches something absolute. Bergson calls the first analysis and the second intuition, a kind of intellectual sympathy by which the mind places itself within a reality to grasp what is unique and therefore inexpressible in it. His illustrations are homely. A body moving through space looks different from every observer and can be plotted on any coordinate system, but the movement felt from within is single. A novelist may pile up traits of a character without ever giving us the simple feeling of being that person. Photographs of Paris taken from every angle never add up to the city one walks through. Analysis is endless because it tries to rebuild a whole from parts that were cut out of it; intuition is simple. There is at least one reality, Bergson argues, that everyone grasps from within: our own self as it flows through time. He offers three images for this duration, each admitted to be inadequate: a coil unrolling and rolling up at once, a spectrum of colours shading into one another, and an elastic drawn out from a mathematical point. Inner life is neither a string of separate states nor an empty ego that holds them together, and both empiricist and rationalist psychologies go wrong by starting from such fragments and concepts, which are like ready-made clothes that fit no one exactly. From this Bergson draws a programme. Metaphysics is the science that tries to do without symbols. Its task is to reverse the ordinary habit of the intellect, which is shaped for practical action and so prefers fixed concepts to mobile reality, and to follow the moving continuity of things. He suggests that the infinitesimal calculus, by thinking change from within, already shows the intellect working this way, and he answers Kant: Kant was right that the intellect cannot build a metaphysics out of concepts, but wrong to conclude that no other access to reality exists. The essay ends with a numbered set of theses that summarize the method. The essay is brief and lucid but conceptually demanding. Read with care, it raises lasting questions for students: whether knowledge of persons differs from knowledge of objects, what is lost when life is reduced to measurement, and whether an intuition can be shared and tested, or whether Bergson's appeal to it escapes rational criticism.

Plot or Argument

• Relative and absolute knowledge

  The essay opens by contrasting knowledge from outside, through viewpoints and symbols, with knowledge from inside. Examples of a moving body, a character in a novel, a translated line of poetry and photographs of a city show that analysis yields endless partial expressions, while intuition grasps the thing in one simple act.

• The self in duration

  Our own personality, flowing through time, is the reality we most directly know by intuition. Three images (the coil, the spectrum, the elastic) are offered and then set aside as approximations; no image or concept can stand in for the experience of duration itself.

• Why concepts and psychologies fail

  Concepts are general and fixed, cut to fit many things and none exactly. Empiricists treat the self as a collection of psychological states; rationalists add a formal ego to unite them. Both reconstruct a living whole from abstract fragments, and their quarrel cannot be settled on those terms.

• Metaphysics, science and Kant

  Bergson defines metaphysics as the attempt to dispense with symbols and to follow reality in its mobility. He proposes that the intellect, made for action, must reverse its usual direction; points to the calculus as a model of thinking change from within; and argues against Kant that the failure of conceptual metaphysics does not rule out an intuitive one.

• Concluding theses

  The essay closes with a sequence of numbered propositions restating the argument: reality is mobility and tendency, the intellect habitually thinks in fixed views, and a true empiricism would follow the real in its movement and create flexible concepts adapted to each object.

Characters

• Henri Bergson, author

  Professor at the Collège de France from 1900, whose lectures drew large public audiences; author of Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907).

• Immanuel Kant, principal interlocutor

  Bergson accepts Kant's critique of a metaphysics built from concepts but rejects his conclusion that no metaphysical knowledge is possible.

• Empiricists and rationalists, opponents

  Schools of psychology and philosophy that, in Bergson's account, both mistake reconstructions of the self from states or concepts for the self itself.

• T. E. Hulme, translator

  English critic and poet whose 1912 translation and lectures spread Bergson's ideas among English modernist writers.

Lessons

• Knowing about and knowing from within

  Bergson argues that description from outside, however detailed, cannot equal acquaintance from within. His examples of a character in a novel and a city known only through photographs make the point vivid: a thousand facts about a friend are not knowing the friend.

  • Why does Bergson say analysis is endless but intuition is simple?
  • Is there a difference between knowing many facts about a person and knowing that person? Give an example.
  • What does Bergson's distinction suggest about reading a book versus reading summaries of it?

• Time lived and time measured

  For Bergson, the clock divides time into equal units for practical purposes, but lived duration is continuous and qualitative. His three images of the self, each offered and then set aside, show both the reality he wants to describe and the limits of language in describing it.

  • Explain one of Bergson's images for duration and why he thinks it falls short.
  • Does an hour in class feel the same as an hour with friends? What would Bergson say about the difference?
  • How does Bergson's view of time compare with Augustine's question in Confessions XI, 'What then is time?'

• The intellect made for action

  Bergson holds that our ordinary way of thinking was formed for practical life, which needs stable objects and repeatable concepts. Philosophy requires an effort against this habit. The claim is suggestive, but students should ask whether it undervalues reason and whether an intuition can be checked by anyone else.

  • Why does Bergson compare concepts to ready-made clothing?
  • If intuition cannot be fully expressed in words, how can a philosopher argue for it?
  • Where does Bergson's view agree with, and where does it challenge, the classical Christian confidence in reason as a gift for knowing truth?

Context

Bergson wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, when positivism and mechanistic psychology dominated French intellectual life and laboratory psychology was measuring sensation and reaction time. His defence of duration, freedom and intuition answered that climate. He became one of the most famous thinkers in Europe; his lectures at the Collège de France were crowded with the public, and his ideas spread to artists, writers and religious thinkers, including Catholic converts such as Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, who first found in him a release from scientism before turning to Thomism.

Composition

The essay appeared in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in January 1903, between Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907). Bergson later revised it slightly and included it in the collection La Pensée et le mouvant (1934), translated as The Creative Mind. T. E. Hulme's English translation was published in 1912 in New York and 1913 in London.

Reception

The essay became a standard short introduction to Bergson's method. William James praised Bergson in A Pluralistic Universe (1909); Bertrand Russell attacked his anti-intellectualism; Hulme and other modernists drew on him for theories of image and style. Bergson received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His works were placed on the Catholic Index in 1914, though he moved toward Catholicism late in life. Interest declined after his 1922 debate with Einstein over time, and revived later through Gilles Deleuze and phenomenology.

Comparisons

• Critique of Pure Reason

  Bergson takes Kant as his chief opponent: he grants the Critique's case against a metaphysics of pure concepts but contests Kant's denial of any intuition of things in themselves, proposing instead an intuition of duration.

• Science and the Modern World

  Whitehead acknowledged a debt to Bergson; his 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness', mistaking abstractions for concrete reality, restates in the idiom of a mathematician Bergson's complaint against the spatializing intellect.

• Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

  James and Bergson admired each other; both attacked rigid conceptual systems in favour of experience in flux, though James tested ideas by their practical consequences while Bergson sought an intuition beyond practical interest.

• Swann's Way

  Proust, related to Bergson by marriage, built In Search of Lost Time on involuntary memory and the felt continuity of the past; readers often compare it with Bergson's duration, although Proust himself distinguished his approach.

• Relativity: The Special and General Theory

  In 1922 Bergson debated Einstein in Paris, defending lived duration against the relativity of simultaneity; reading the two side by side shows the gap between physical time and the time Bergson's essay describes.

Quotes

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Describe a place you know well first by listing facts and measurements, then by writing as someone who lives there. Use the contrast to evaluate Bergson's distinction between analysis and intuition.

• Poetry

  Write a short poem that tries to capture the passing of one ordinary afternoon without naming any clock time, then note what Bergson would say your poem could and could not convey.

• Dialogue

  Write an exchange between Bergson and a laboratory psychologist of 1903 who wants to measure attention in milliseconds; let each explain what the other leaves out.

Further Reading

• Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson

  Bergson's first book (1889), where the idea of duration is first developed.

• The Creative Mind, Henri Bergson

  The 1934 collection that reprints this essay with an extended introduction on method.

• Bergsonism, Gilles Deleuze

  Influential short study of intuition as Bergson's method.

• Bergson, Leszek Kolakowski

  A clear short general introduction to Bergson's philosophy (Oxford, 1985).