The Belief in Intuition

Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler

Adriana Alfaro Altamirano

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812297911
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time. The Belief in Intuition shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity, " thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self.Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces, " concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity.According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways.

CHAPTER 1

Individuality and Diversity in Bergson and Scheler

In his essay On Liberty, published in 1859, John Stuart Mill articulated a notion of individuality that is still influential today. Despite 150 years of Marxist, communitarian, and postmodern criticisms, Mill’s defense of individual freedom and personal development gives voice to many concerns that remain alive in our current ethicopolitical debates. For him, as for many among us, the “free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being.”¹ Mill worried that people tended to overlook this fact and that they would therefore undervalue individuality, allowing for an increasing control of society over its members.²

Half a century later, Henri Bergson and Max Scheler would affirm the importance of individuality as well. For both, individuality was necessary for the realization of the full potential of human beings. However, their main worry was not, as for Mill, that people would undervalue it. Fifty years after On Liberty, this danger had receded to some extent. The problem for them had become instead that individuality can be very easily misconceived. For Scheler and Bergson, it deserves special consideration, not (or, at least, not primarily) on account of the risk of it becoming stifled under governmental despotism or under homogenizing social pressures but rather because, in defending it, we are very prone to pervert it. In the words of Bergson, “Individuality … harbors its enemy at home.”³

In their view, individuality remains vulnerable even in the company of those who believe in it, and the reason for this has to do with the character of individuality as something multiple. For Mill, in 1859, a diverse society was important because it helped to preserve individuality. “The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves, grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature.”⁴ In Mill’s view, social diversity nourishes the intellect and reinvigorates our beliefs: it has a preeminent pedagogical character. Thus, he says, “Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.”⁵

For Bergson and Scheler, however, the problem with individuality is not so much that “mankind speedily become unable to conceive it” but that we might become incapable even of perceiving it. Individuality is fragile not only because of the menaces posed to it by external forces that disrupt the environment of diversity in which it can develop, as Mill pointed out; it is fragile also because diversity, being the principal internal characteristic of the individual self, is easily overlooked—and this despite a socially diverse atmosphere or maybe sometimes even as a result of it.⁶ What is simple and unified is easier to grasp; a more complex conception of the self is more difficult to comprehend, convey, and remember. Therefore, “defending individuality” becomes less a question of how to protect it against external pressures toward conformism and control and more a matter of learning how to discern it, not necessarily throughout society but within the individual self.

Individuality, in this sense, requires, first and foremost, that we enhance our cognitive apparatus in order to better identify inner diversity. Scheler and Bergson’s respective works, as I read them, are efforts to put us in a position to observe inner multiplicity and to live or experience individuality accordingly. This entails a strong link between epistemology and morality: as we will see, perception conditions our moral horizon, just as moral action conditions our perception.

In this chapter, I will address the three following questions: first, what is the kind of inner diversity that our authors are interested in, and what makes their account different from other interpretations of the inner life that portray it as also composed of multiple parts? Second, why did they think that such a way of conceiving diversity is so fragile or elusive and therefore easy to overlook? Third, how is the perception of this kind of diversity related to the exercise of individuality? For now, I will emphasize the similarities between the two authors instead of their disagreements; however, as it will become clear throughout the book, their respective philosophical projects were different enough.⁷

So, for instance, while Bergson and Scheler agree that individuality is grounded on internal diversity, they disagree on the role each one of them expects language to play in the exercise of individuality. They differ in the extent to which they think the elusiveness of personality can be effectively addressed through words, signs, and other kinds of expression. Consequently, as we will explore along the way, each view yields different implications regarding the sociopolitical character of language and rhetoric.

“Dissociationist” Psychology

Bergson and Scheler’s insistence on inner multiplicity should be distinguished from another account of the multiplicity of the self, against which they articulated some of their main insights—namely, the empiricist account of the self in associationist psychology. David Hume, one of the main exponents of this view, held that “the capacity of the mind is not infinite; consequently, no idea of extension or duration consists of an infinite number of parts or inferior ideas, but of a finite number, and these simple and indivisible.”⁸ In contrast to this, for both Scheler and Bergson, experience is not originally divided. Rather, it is a stream or a flux, which is certainly divisible—but that happens only later (by means of language, for instance) and sometimes at a cost.

The heterogeneity of our inner life is not, in their view, an assemblage of discrete parts associated with one another but a result of the process of dissociation of experience. Relying on empirical research in the field of child psychology, Scheler claims that, at first, experiences do not belong to individual persons. On the contrary, in his view, emotions, memories, and expectations become “ours” only through a “gradual formation of ever more stable vortices” in our stream of experience.⁹ Children, as they grow up, he says, “raise [their] mental head, as it were, above [the] stream flooding over it”¹⁰ and only then become able to isolate particular ideas and feelings, identifying them as their own. This happens, typically, as they learn how to speak.¹¹ Adults can have, in his view, a similar experience when they learn a foreign language. Allegedly, as people become aware of the peculiarities of their own native tongue, they become able to rearrange or reappropriate certain experiences that only then become utterable.¹²

For Scheler, this process of dissociating and gradually appropriating perceptions applies not only to outer but also to inner perception. He argues that we can hardly be aware of any experience within our stream of consciousness that lacks a name or some other socially valid expression to identify it.¹³ In other words, our social world codifies and simplifies our inner life. In that sense, he says, not even a solitary life is a solipsistic one because we use language and other socially constructed frameworks to identify experiences within ourselves. Consequently, according to Scheler, the potential social relevance of an experience “virtually overshadows the private life of the individual, and conceals it, as it were, from the possessor himself.”¹⁴

This is, however, something that associationism would miss: assuming that the mind is only constituted by that which we are conscious of and interpreting consciousness as a conglomerate of pieces, it fails to notice that we regularly, as it were, select from the whole of our consciousness only what we have a name for. Thus, associationism cannot see that our inner life is richer than what we are able to perceive.¹⁵

Bergson defends the same idea. “Association is not the primary fact: dissociation is what we begin with.”¹⁶ For him, associationism begs the question of why things become associated in the first place: “The truth is that this independent image is a late and artificial product of the mind. In fact, we perceive the resemblance before we perceive the individuals which resemble each other; and in an aggregate of contiguous parts, we perceive the whole before the parts.”¹⁷ So, like Scheler, Bergson begins with dissociation and understands perception as a process of selection guided by our intellect. The latter’s work, he contends, is to prepare the field of action in accordance with practical interests, either material or affective. In other words, according to Bergson, we are capable of paying attention only to what concerns us practically.¹⁸ The brain, in turn, he says, is best understood not as a “receptacle of representations” or as a “holder of sensations” but as a filter, whose main task is not to store knowledge but to coordinate movement.¹⁹ Its role, just as in the case of the human intellect, is mainly practical, not speculative: “That which is commonly called a fact is not reality as it appears to immediate intuition, but an adaptation of the real to the interests of practice and to the exigencies of social life.”²⁰

Indeed, both authors agree that the discovery of lawfulness and regularities in nature (i.e., science) depends primarily on practical necessities. This does not mean that lawfulness in nature is illusory but that the selection of these natural laws and not others responds mainly to pragmatic reasons. Thus, Bergson says, our intellect is like a photographic camera, which takes “partial views” of experience to facilitate our action. “It is philosophers who are mistaken when they import into the domain of speculation a method of thinking which is made for action.”²¹ Intellectual “clarity and distinctness” are, what he calls, “interruptions” or “cuts” of what is originally given to our consciousness. The intellect, therefore, has a clear idea only of what is discontinuous and motionless.²² Likewise, Scheler holds that “both the mechanical view of nature and its counterpart, association psychology, select [from all existing things and relations] only those … that can have significance as points of departure for conduct to control nature.”²³

In sum, according to our authors, a mechanistic view of the mind achieves, at best, a clumsy reconstruction of our mental life. This “Frankenstein’s monster,” they think, made out of bits and pieces of sensation, cannot ever possibly come to life.²⁴ On the contrary, for Scheler and Bergson, true individuality must have its roots in something real, alive, and more “original.” The question is, then, the following: what constitutes, for our authors, this original source of experience in which individuality can be directly intuited?

For Bergson, “true reality” is constituted by movement and change. He argues, for instance, that the movement of my hand from A to B does not pertain to the same degree of reality as the infinity of points that satisfy the equation of the trajectory that my hand has traversed. The latter is the curve that my intellect models; the former is more real. The same happens in cases where movement is not immediately obvious. Take, for instance, the painting on a canvas. He argues that the painting as a whole is more real than the mosaics into which my eye decomposes the painting. The intellect can analyze a painting, but it will always leave unexplained the mobility that is essential to it. How is mobility “incorporated” in the painting? Bergson explains,

I have here a piece of paper on which I have drawn a few lines. What are these lines? Somehow, they are the movement of the hand that traced those lines, but already halted, immobilized. Movement constitutes true reality. What is this piece of paper? It is the activity of the worker that turned the chunks of wood into paper, but already solidified, concretized, immobilized. Those chunks of wood, what are they? They are the work of the sun, that is, a vibrating movement executed during man...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Individuality and Diversity in Bergson and Scheler
• Chapter 2. Attempts at Free Choice: Bergson and Scheler on Agency and Freedom
• Chapter 3. Bergson and the Morality of Uncertainty
• Chapter 4. Varieties of Sympathy: Max Scheler’s Critique of Sentimentalism
• Chapter 5. Personal Authority and Political Theology in Bergson and Scheler
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments