Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1Mitchell, Arthur
Philosophy
Humanistic Studies of the University of Kansas, Vol. 1
Mitchell, Arthur
Humanities
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.
PART TWO
BERGSON’S SYSTEM OF DOCTRINE
CHAPTER I
ONTOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY
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