§80. Intuitive Experience
Experience comes to us under two aspects. One of these takes the form of “facts side by side with other facts, which repeat themselves more or less, which can to a certain extent be measured.” This is the experience empiricism dignifies as the source of concepts, meaning, and scientific evidence.
This mode of experience is external; it “unfolds outwards” and “perceives things as external to one another,” that is, bodies in space. The other mode of experience is internal, an experience of “reciprocal penetration, which is pure duration.” This is our experience when consciousness “turns back within itself, takes possession of itself, and develops in depth.” Philosophers tend to throttle inner experience, though a line from Avicenna to Locke, Leibniz, Maine de Biran, and Dilthey resists this tendency, and Bergson most strenuously.25Whether it is called reflection, auto-affection, inner awareness, selfconsciousness, or intuition, inner life is an autonomous source of experience not well modeled on external sense perception, which is experience with bodies in space. Even odors are extensive, that is, spatial, voluminous, and embodied. Intuition is experience with the phenomena of duration, including endurance, mobility, continuity, and development. We do not see continuity or movement; we see only where they stop. What we know of movement or passage is by auto-affection, consciousness of consciousness, mind feeling mind. We hear a melody, hear the continuity and development, only because intuition adds duration and interpenetration to externally perceived tones.
Experience is more than sense perception, which is experience with bodies in space. Intuition is Bergson's word for experience with the phenomena of duration, such as movement, becoming, development, passage, and continuity. He says the fundamental meaning of intuition is “to think in duration,” having “the mobility of duration” as its object.
Bergson does not want to correct perception, as Plato expected dialectic to correct the senses. His goal is to enhance philosophy's empiricism, enlarging philosophy's experience with experience. Enrolling intuition in philosophy is not an alternative to intellectual thinking or concepts; it is a way to make concepts more subtle and philosophical. For instance, empiricism ancient and modern is mired in anthropocentrism. Rationalists and idealists, even Nietzsche and the pragmatists, have made this seem philosophically respectable. Against this trend Bergson unfolds an empiricism for which the phenomena of duration point beyond the pragmatic prejudices that have disfigured empirical philosophy.26By supplementing sense perception with intuition Bergson does what he said a more consistent empiricism should do, which is to introduce experience before it has been colored by “that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience”; that is, adapted, evolved, tuned to hominid survival in a terrestrial environment. Nothing perspectival, nothing anthropocentric, limits the experience of duration’s phenomena. That is why Bergson can say that intuition takes thought “beyond the human state,” though only by reversing the normal direction of our thinking—thinking backward, back up the line from adaptive practical rationality to the obscure and distinct intuition of movement, say, or development, continuity, and change.
The normal direction of thought is perception for action, concepts for application, intellectual analysis for efficiency and advantage. To reverse course does violence to everything practical, pragmatic, and all too human in our thinking, which is Bergson’s design. He says a philosopher’s sole aim “should be to start up a certain effort which the utilitarian habits of everyday life tend, in most men, to discourage.” Attention to intuition requires a “constant dilation of our mind, the constant renewed effort to go beyond our actual ideas and perhaps our simple logic as well.”27