Method
Bergsonian Intuition
Classification
- Method family
- Experiential
- Domains
- Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind
Overview
Bergsonian intuition is a disciplined way of investigating reality from within rather than reconstructing it from external perspectives. It begins with lived duration because ordinary analysis tends to divide continuous experience into stable, spatialized units.
Purpose. The method tries to reach the movement and qualitative difference of an experience before conceptual analysis breaks it into parts. Intuition is not an unexplained hunch: Bergson describes a demanding series of acts that reverse habitual intelligence, enter duration, and differentiate the tendencies within it.
Characteristic operations
- Reverse habitual analysis: Notice how practical intelligence divides a moving reality into fixed concepts and external viewpoints.
- Enter duration: Attend sympathetically to experience as a continuous, qualitative movement rather than as a sequence of separate states.
- Extend the starting experience: Follow the differences and tensions within duration instead of treating the first introspective moment as the whole.
- Return to conceptual mixtures: Use the distinctions disclosed by intuition to reconsider the composites that ordinary analysis presents as basic.
Used by traditions
Applied to questions
References
- Henri Bergson, 'Introduction to Metaphysics', in The Creative Mind
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Henri Bergson, §3 'The method of intuition'