Intuition is the method of Bergsonism. Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration, nor a disorderly sympathy, but a fully developed method, one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy. It has its strict rules, constituting that which Bergson calls “precision” in philosophy. Bergson emphasizes this point: Intuition, as he understands it methodologically, already presupposes duration.

First RULE: Apply the test of true and false to problems themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems.

True freedom lies in a power to decide, to constitute problems themselves. And this “semi-divine” power entails the disappearance of false problems as much as the creative upsurge of true ones. “The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than of solving it.

When we ask “Why, is there something rather than nothing?” or “Why is there order rather than disorder?” or “Why is there this rather than that (when that was equally possible)?” we fall into the same error: We mistake the more for the less, we behave as though nonbeing existed before being, disorder before order and the possible before existence. As though being came to fill in a void, order to organize a preceding disorder, the real to realize a primary possibility. Being, order or the existent are truth itself; but in the false problem there is a fundamental illusion, a “retrograde movement of the true,” according to which being, order and the existent are supposed to precede themselves, or to precede the creative act that constitutes them, by projecting an image of themselves back into a possibility, a disorder, a nonbeing which are supposed to be primordial. This theme is a central one in Bergson’s philosophy: It sums up his critique of the negative and of negation, in all its forms as sources of false problems.

SECOND RULE: Struggle against illusion, rediscover the true differences in kind or articulations of the real. '

The Bergsonian dualisms are famous: duration-space, quality-quantity, heterogeneous-homogeneous, continuous-discontinuous, the two multiplicities, memory-matter, recollection-perception, contraction-relaxation* (détente), instinct-intelligence, the two sources, etc. Even the running heads that Bergson puts at the top of each page of his books indicate his taste for dualisms — which do not, however, have the last word in his philosophy. What, therefore, do they mean? According to Bergson, a composite must always be divided according to its natural articulations, that is, into elements which differ in kind. Intuition as method is a method of division, Platonic in inspiration. Bergson is aware that things are mixed together in reality; in fact, experience itself offers us nothing but composites.

This is the Bergsonian leitmotif: People have seen only differences in degree where there are differences in kind.

Intuition leads us to go beyond the state of experience toward the conditions of experience. But these conditions are neither general nor abstract.

THIRD RULE: State problems and solve them in terms of time rather than of space.

Let us consider the principal Bergsonian division: that between duration and space. All the other divisions, all the other dualisms involve it, derive from it, or result in it. Now, we cannot simply confine ourselves to affirming a difference in kind between duration and space. The division occurs between (1) duration, which “tends” for its part to take on or bear all the differences in kind (because it is endowed with the power of qualitatively varying with itself), and (2) space, which never presents anything but differences of degree (since it is quantitative homogeneity).

shows how this sugar differs in kind not only from other things, but first and foremost from itself. This alteration, which is one with the essence or the substance of a thing, is what we grasp when we conceive of it in terms of Duration.

Intuition is not duration itself. Intuition is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations, above or below us. “Only the method of which we are speaking allows one to pass beyond idealism as well as realism, to affirm the existence of objects both inferior and superior to us, though nevertheless, in a certain sense, interior to us.... One perceives any number of durations, all very different from one another”

Continuous multiplicities seemed to him to belong essentially to the sphere of duration. In this way, for Bergson, duration was not simply the indivisible, nor was it the nonmeasurable. Rather, it was that which divided only by changing in kind, that which was susceptible to measurement only by varying its metrical principle at each stage of the division.

The heart of Bergson’s project is to think differences in kind independently of all forms of negation: There are differences in being and yet nothing negative. Negation always involves abstract concepts that are much too general.

We see, therefore, how all the critical aspects of Bergsonian philosophy are part of a single theme: a critique of the negative of limitation, of the negative of opposition, of general ideas.

The question “Where are recollections preserved?” involves a false problem, that is to say, a badly analyzed composite. It is as though recollections had to be preserved somewhere, as though, for example, the brain were capable of preserving them. But the brain is wholly on the line of objectivity: There cannot be any difference in kind between the other states of matter and the brain. For in the latter everything is movement, as in the pure perception that it determines....Recollection, on the contrary, is part of the line of subjectivity. It is absurd to mix the two lines by conceiving of the brain as the reservoir or the substratum of recollections.

We have great difficulty in understanding a survival of the past in itself because we believe that the past is no longer, that it has ceased to be. We have thus confused Being with being-present. Nevertheless, the present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is not, but it acts. Its proper element is not being but the active or the useful. The past, on the other hand, has ceased to act or to be useful. But it has not ceased to be. Useless and inactive, impassive, it IS, in the full sense of the word: It is identical with being in itself.

We are too accustomed to thinking in terms of the “present.” We believe that a present is only past when it is replaced by another present...The past would never be constituted if it did not coexist with the present whose past it is. The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass.

The idea of a contemporaneity of the present and the past has one final consequence: Not only does the past coexist with the present that has been, but, as it preserves itself in itself (while the present passes), it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past, which coexists with each present.

The charitable reading: maybe he's doing something closer to phenomenology - describing the structure that experience must have, rather than providing a causal mechanism.

But, on the other hand, Bergson says, there is rotation. In its process of actualization, recollection does not confine itself to carrying out this translation that unites it to the present; it also carries out this rotation on itself in order to present its “useful facet” in this union. Bergson does not clarify the nature of this rotation. We must make hypotheses on the basis of other texts. In the movement of translation, it is therefore a whole level of the past that is actualized at the same time as a particular recollection. Each level thus finds itself contracted in an undivided representation that is no longer a pure recollection, but is not yet, strictly speaking, an image. This is why Bergson specifies that, from this point of view, there is no division at this point...Recollection can only be said to be actualized when it has become image. It is then, in fact, that it enters not only into “coalescence,” but into a kind of circuit with the present, the recollection-image referring back to the perception-image and vice versa.

These, therefore, are the four aspects of actualization: translation and rotation, which form the properly psychic moments; dynamic movement, the attitude of the body that is necessary to the stable equilibrium of the two preceding determinations; and finally, mechanical movement, the motor scheme that represents the final stage of actualization. All this involves the adaptation of the past to the present, the utilization of the past in terms of the present — what Bergson calls “attention to life.

In this way a psychological unconscious, distinct from the ontological unconscious, is defined. The latter corresponds to a recollection that is pure, virtual, impassive, inactive, in itself. The former represents the movement of recollection in the course of actualizing itself: Like Leibnizian possibles, recollections try to become embodied, they exert pressure to be admitted so that a full-scale repression originating in the present and an “attention to life” are necessary to ward off useless or dangerous recollections.

Moreover, what were condemned were the false notions of degree, of intensity, as notions of contrariety or negation, sources of all false problems. Isn’t Bergson now in the process of restoring all that he once dismissed? What differences can there be between relaxation (détente) and contraction except for the differences of degree, of intensity? The present is only the most contracted degree of the past, matter the most relaxed (détendu) degree of the present (mens momentanea).... What then becomes of the Bergsonian project of showing that Difference, as difference in kind, could and should be understood independently of the negative (the negative of deterioration as well as the negative of opposition)? The worst contradiction of all seems to be set up at the heart of the system. Everything is reintroduced: degrees, intensity, opposition. (p75)

Have we really overcome dualism, or have we been engulfed in pluralism? We must begin with this question...Bergson’s texts seem to vary considerably on this point.

Hence, the third hypothesis: There is only a single time, a single duration, in which everything would participate, including our consciousnesses, including living beings, including the whole material world. Now, to the reader’s surprise, it is this hypothesis that Bergson puts forward as the most satisfactory: a single Time, one, universal, impersonal.' In short, a monism of Time. ... Nothing could be more surprising; one of the other two hypotheses would seem to be a better expression of the state of Bergsonism, whether after Matter and Memory or after Creative Evolution. What is more: Has Bergson forgotten that in Time and Free Will he defined duration, that is real time, as a “multiplicity”?

What has happened? Undoubtedly the confrontation with the theory of Relativity. This confrontation was forced on Bergson because Relativity, for its part, invoked concepts such as expansion, contraction, tension and dilation in relation to space and time.

If we take up a position where the division has not yet been carried out, that is, in the virtual, it is obvious that there is only a single time.

The fact that the division is subject to the condition of actually being carried out means that the parts (fluxes) must be lived or at least posited and thought of as capable of being lived.

Hence the triplicity of fluxes, our duration (the duration of a spectator) being necessary both as flux and as representative of Time in which all fluxes are engulfed.

On the other hand, from Bergson’s point of view we can_ (in fact we must) conceive of combinations that depend on a completely different principle. Let us consider the degrees of expansion (détente) and of contraction, all of which coexist with one another: At the limit of expansion (détente), we have matter. While undoubtedly, matter is not yet space, it is already extensity.

Bergson refuses all simple genesis, which would account for intelligence on the basis of an already presupposed order of matter, or which would account for the phenomena of matter on the basis of the supposed categories of intelligence. There can only be a simultaneous genesis of matter and intelligence. One step for one, one step for the other:

Intelligence is contracted in matter at the same time as matter is expanded (détendu) in duration; both find the form that is common to them, their equilibrium, in extensity, even if intelligence in its turn pushes this form to a degree of expansion (détente) that matter and extensity would never have attained by themselves — that of a pure space.

The critique of intensity in Time and Free Will is highly ambiguous. Is it directed against the very notion of intensive quantity, or merely against the idea of an intensity of psychic states? -p91

We discover the differences in kind between two actual tendencies, between two actual directions toward the pure state into which each composite divides. This is the moment of pure dualism, or of the division of composites.

There is therefore no longer any difference in kind between two tendencies, but a difference between the differences in kind that correspond to one tendency and the differences in degree that refer back to the other tendency. This is the moment of neutralized, balanced dualism. (p93)

Duration, memory or spirit is difference in kind in itself and for itself; and space or matter is difference in degree outside itself and for us. Therefore, between the two there are all the degrees of difference or, in other words, the whole nature of difference. Duration is only the most contracted degree of matter, matter the most expanded (détendu) degree of duration.

There is no longer any dualism between nature and degrees. All the degrees coexist in a single Nature that is expressed, on the one hand, in differences in kind, and on the other, in differences in degree. This is the moment of monism: All the degrees coexist in a single Time, which is nature in itself.

But the unity occurs at a second turn: The coexistence of all the degrees, of all the levels is virtual, only virtual. The point of unification is itself virtual. This point is not without similarity to the One-Whole of the Platonists. All the levels of expansion (détente) and contraction coexist in a single Time and form a totality; but this Whole, this One, are pure virtuality.

The possible has no reality (although it may have an actuality); conversely, the virtual is not actual, but as such possesses a reality. Here again Proust’s formula best defines the states of virtuality: “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” On the other hand, or from another point of view, the possible is that which is “realized” (or is not realized). -p96

For, in order to be actualized, the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts. The reason for this is simple: While the real is in the image and likeness of the possible that it realizes, the actual, on the other hand does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies.

Evolution takes place from the virtual to actuals. Evolution is actualization, actualization is creation.

For what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that cannot be summed up, each one retaining the whole, except from a certain perspective, from a certain point of view. These lines of differentiation are therefore truly creative: They only actualize by inventing, they create in these conditions the physical, vital or psychical representative of the ontological level that they embody.

By dividing the animal in two, Arthropods and Vertebrates, we have not taken into account the two other directions, Echinoderms and Mollusks, which are a setback for the élan vital.

This is the constant theme of Bergsonism from the outset: The confusion of space and time, the assimilation of time into space, make us think that the whole is given, even if only in principle, even if only in the eyes of God...time is only there now as a screen that hides the eternal from us, or that shows us successively what a God or a superhuman intelligence would see in a single glance. Now this illusion is inevitable as soon as we spatialize time. -p104

On the other hand, there is a proof of finality to the extent that we discover similar actualizations, identical structures or apparatuses on divergent lines (for example, the eye in the Mollusk and in the Vertebrate)...We see here how, in the process of actualization, the very category of resemblance finds itself subordinated to that of divergence, difference or differentiation. While actual forms or products can resemble each other, the movements of production do not resemble each other, nor do the products resemble the virtuality that they embody...there is finality because life does not operate without directions; but there is no “goal,” because these directions do not pre-exist ready-made, and are themselves created “along with” the act that runs through them. -p105

Man therefore creates a differentiation that is valid for the Whole, and he alone traces out an open direction that is able to express a whole that is itself open. Whereas the other directions are closed and go round in circles, whereas a distinct “plane” of nature corresponds to each one, man is capable of scrambling the planes, of going beyond his own plane as his own condition, in order finally to express naturing Nature...On man’s line of differentiation, the élan vital was able to use matter to create an instrument of freedom, “‘to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism..." -p107

Take, for example, obligation: It has no rational ground. Each particular obligation is conventional and can border on the absurd; the only thing that is grounded is the obligation to have obligations, “the whole of obligation”; and it is not grounded in reason, but in a requirement of nature, in a kind of “virtual instinct,” that is, on a counterpart that nature produces in the reasonable being in order to compensate for the partiality of his intelligence. Each line of differentiation, being exclusive, seeks to recapture, by its own means, the advantages of the other line. Thus, in their separation, instinct and intelligence are such that the one produces an ersatz of intelligence, the other, an equivalent of instinct. This is the “story-telling function”: virtual instinct, creator of gods, inventor of religions, that is, of fictitious representations “which will stand up to the representation of the real and which will succeed, by the intermediary of intelligence itself, in thwarting intellectual work.” And as in the case of obligation, each god is contingent, or even absurd, but what is natural, necessary and grounded is having gods; it is the pantheon of gods. In short, sociability (in the human sense) can only exist in intelligent beings, but it is not grounded on their intelligence: Social life is immanent to intelligence, it begins with it but does not derive from it. -p108

And what is this creative emotion, if not precisely a cosmic Memory, that actualizes all the levels at the same time, that liberates man from the plane (plan) or the level that is proper to him, in order to make him a creator, adequate to the whole movement of creation?’ This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in creative emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls...And from soul to soul, it traces the design of an open society, a society of creators, where we pass from one genius to another, through the intermediary of disciples or spectators or hearers. -p 111

Already motivated by emotion, the philosopher extracted the lines that divided up the composites given in experience. He prolonged the outline to beyond the “turn”; he showed in the distance the virtual point at which they all met. Everything happens as if that which remained indeterminate in philosophical intuition gained a new kind of determination in mystical intuition — as though the properly philosophical “probability” extended itself into mystical certainty. Undoubtedly philosophy can only consider the mystical soul from the outside and from the point ofview of its lines of probability. But it is precisely the existence of mysticism that gives a higher probability to this final transmutation into certainty, and also gives, as it were, an envelope or a limit to all the aspects of method.