CHAPTER III

THE ANCIENT PREJUDICE AGAINST ANALYSIS

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.

I am recording a protest against false reification of what is abstract, the very fault which intuitionism is insistent to lay to the charge of intellectualism. If intuitionism were to conceptualize intuition and intellect, instead of reifying them, it could not appropriate validity to either mode of consciousness and deny it to another. The satisfactoriness and richness of a given mode of consciousness depend no doubt on the constitution of the subject. The validity of consciousness in any mode has nothing to do with such personal idiosyncrasy.

James is less rigorous concerning the validity of relational knowledge than Bergson. Having found relations in the immediate content of conscious data, James cannot deny them an essential constitutiveness in the nature of reality. But such knowledge is “thin” and “poor”, in his homely and human phraseology. This is only a more naïve and genial expression than Bergson’s of the purely eulogistic primacy of quality over relation. Relations are thin and poor aspects of reality, no doubt, if you find them so. Otherwise they may be supremely interesting. That depends on your interests, which depend on your constitution. In any case, they are the aspect of reality primarily indispensable to reflective thought, which is philosophy.

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The characteristic which is most sedulously imputed by the philosophy of instinct to intellect is usefulness, but this characteristic is treated as evidence of cognitive invalidity! In point of fact, serviceableness to action in no way distinguishes intellect from instinct. Each alike is a reactive state resulting in a new situation, a new arrangement of matter; and the only thing that can give true finality to the intelligent act is the affective value of the conscious state arising out of this new situation. But the same is true of the situation which is the outcome of the instinctive act.

The distinction sometimes seems to mean that it is only acquaintance with objects (intuitive knowledge of them) that has affective value, and that this kind of consciousness is therefore an end in itself in a sense in which intellect is not. For knowledge about the object (intellectual knowledge of it) will then be supposed to have no affective value in itself, but only as it may subserve action upon the object, which action will be accompanied by acquaintance with the object. But if knowledge about an object subserves acquaintance with it, the converse is no less true. If knowledge of the location and price of a tennis ball subserves my use of it and acquaintance with it, the latter in turn subserves my knowledge about it in an indefinite number of respects. True, acquaintance with an object may not always lead to knowledge about it so obviously as in the case of the tennis ball; but again it is equally true that knowledge about certain things, for instance lines drawn upon the blackboard, has no obvious leading toward utility; the utility of a certain mathematical equation may seem quite inscrutable. But how obvious the leading may be, or how interesting the utility, is nothing to the point. The question whether or not the connection is necessarily there in all cases is answered peremptorily _a priori_ by the polar character of knowledge by virtue of which acquaintance-with is only an aspect of knowledge-about, and _vice versa_.

It is flagrantly untrue, as a fact, that knowledge-about is without affective value in itself. Experience is as emphatic to the contrary as reason. If a characteristically intellectual state of mind gives you less satisfaction, or more, than one that is characteristically intuitive, the reason is quite personal and accidental in either case. It may just as well give you more as less. Being knowledge in each case, awareness at least, it has its affective value in some degree necessarily, of whichever character it may be predominantly.

* * * * *

Since relation is not divorcible from quality, nor intellect from intuition, it results that, if the artist blunders through critical defect, even better art would, of itself, have saved him in spite of his critical defect. If the mustiness of the philosopher is expressible as lack of a facile instinct, merely a truer theory of life would have corrected him. No doubt life is too intricate for the most robust capacity for ratiocination. Sanity balances securely between the two biases of consciousness. Art and criticism are equally long, and the middle course a is short-cut and an economy of living. But condemnation of the validity of consciousness in any mode is a theoretical proposition irrelevant to maxims of practical sagacity. And it implies either condemning the validity of all consciousness (if intuition and intellect are aspects of each other) or else it presupposes that reality is not categorical, which Bergson fails to show. On page 24 of the present essay, we have seen that he seems, in an inconsistent way, even to maintain the contradictory thesis.

In a former paper[97] I have written as follows:

“Now, Bergson’s idea of the philosopher--an artist in life--is probably no one’s else. He is of that opinion, decidedly; a considerable part of the book [_Creative Evolution_] is a demonstration that actual philosophers, from Plato on, are intellectualists all, dissectors, not artists. But if Bergson’s enterprise is to be a _substitute_ for philosophy and appropriate its name, we who are much addicted to the old enterprise will be careful to know why it is futile and illusory.”

Monsieur Bergson comments on this in a private letter from which I translate:

“It would be so, I recognize, if these intellectualist philosophers had been philosophers only in virtue of their intellectualism. But whereas intelligence pure and simple professes to solve the problems, it is intuition alone that has enabled them to be put. Without the intuitive feeling of our freedom, there would be no problem of freedom, hence no determinist theory; thus, the different forms of determinism, which are so many forms of intellectualism, owe their very existence to something which could not have been obtained by the intellectualist method. For my part, I find, more or less developed, the seeds of intuitionism in most of the great philosophic doctrines, although the philosophers have always tried to convert their intuition into dialectic. Yet it is chiefly in the former that they have been philosophers.”

This seems to me an absolute inversion of intuition and intellect. Does intuition ‘put problems’? It is, certainly, intuition that gives us the material of our problems. But the formulating of a problem--what can be meant by intuition’s formulating anything? Giving forms, I should say, just defines the work of intellect. Intuition gives us our facts, our material. Surely, the putting of problems is an intellectual operation continuous, even identical, strictly, with their solution? A problem well put is rather more than half solved. Certainly the remainder of the solution is not a different order of activity. It carries out the ‘putting’ in its implications. A problem put is only a problem incompletely solved.[98] Solving it is putting it with a satisfactory perspicacity.

Without the intuitive feeling of our freedom there would be no problem of freedom, certainly, but you might easily have the intuition without the problem. In the preface to the _Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience_, Bergson insists that it is the aberrations of intellect that give rise to the problems of freedom. Intellect, then, at any rate, not intuition, puts the problem.

As correlative modes of consciousness, neither is independent, nor primary, of course. Even in the putting of our problems, intellect is only a co-factor, a coefficient with intuition. And in the most abstract reasoning, the intuitive coefficient of thought is indispensable. So far as intellect is actual, concrete knowledge, it must be intuitively correlated, and so far as intuition is the real intuiting of anything, it must be intelligently correlated.

In what respect are the philosophers of whom Monsieur Bergson speaks intuitionists? Does this mean anything more than that they are wide-reaching and far-reaching instead of narrow and dull in their apprehension? Is not philosophy interpretation of experience? Is not the philosopher’s vision, therefore, always necessarily, just so far as he is a _philosopher_, a vision of the formal aspect of reality? To be sure, that is just what Monsieur Bergson is denying. But his reason is that reality is pure quality, a proposition whose logical faultiness and temperamental genesis I have sufficiently noted.

In view of the temperamental basis of the artistic and the philosophical or critical attitudes, it were fatuous for either to propose a reform in the other by way of conformity to a mode distinguished from it thus radically. It is this fatuity which it seems to me Bergson commits in regarding the success of any philosophy as due, by any possibility, to its becoming art instead. As well conceive that the virtue of an artistic product _consists_ in its conformity to critical canons.

Philosophy that is false to art would therein necessarily be false to philosophy; and art that is false to philosophy is false to art; but art is not philosophy, nor philosophy art.