Part 1 (1/2)
The Misuse of Mind.
by Karin Stephen.
PREFATORY NOTE
Being an extract from a letter by Professor Henri Bergson
AYANT lu de pres le travail de Mrs. Stephen je le trouve interessant au plus haut point. C'est une interpretation personelle et originale de l'ensemble de mes vues--interpretation qui vaut par elle-meme, independamment de ce qui j' ai ecrit. L'auteur s'est a.s.simile l'esprit dela doctrine, puis, se degageant de la materialite du texte elle a developpe a sa maniere, dans la direction qu'elle avait choisi, des idees qui lui paraissaient fondamentales. Grace a la distinction qu'elle ”etablit entre ” fact ” et ” matter, ” elle a pu ramener a l'unite, et presenter avec une grande rigueur logique, des vues que j'avais ete oblige, en raison de ma methode de recherche, d'isoler les unes des autres. Bref, son travail a une grande valeur; il temoigne d'une rare force de pensee.
HENRI BERGSON.
PREFACE
THE immense popularity which Bergson's philosophy enjoys is sometimes cast up against him, by those who do not agree with him, as a reproach. It has been suggested that Berg-son's writings are welcomed simply because they offer a theoretical justification for a tendency which is natural in all of us but against which philosophy has always fought, the tendency to throw reason overboard and just let ourselves go. Bergson is regarded by rationalists almost as a traitor to philosophy, or as a Bolshevik inciting the public to overthrow what it has taken years of painful effort to build up.
It is possible that some people who do not understand this philosophy may use Bergson's name as a cloak for giving up all self-direction and letting themselves go intellectually to pieces, just as hooligans may use a time of revolution to plunder in the name of the Red Guard. But Bergson's philosophy is in reality as far from teaching mere laziness as Communism is from being mere destruction of the old social order.
Bergson attacks the use to which we usually put our minds, but he most certainly does not suggest that a philosopher should not use his mind at all; he is to use it for all it is worth, only differently, more efficiently for the purpose he has in view, the purpose of knowing for its own sake.
There is, of course, a sense in which doing anything in the right way is simply letting one's self go, for after all it is easier to do a thing well than badlyit certainly takes much less effort to produce the same amount of result. So to know in the way which Bergson recommends does in a sense come more easily than attempting to get the knowledge we want by inappropriate methods. If this saving of waste effort is a fault, then Bergson must plead guilty. But as the field of knowledge open to us is far too wide for any one mind to explore, the new method of knowing, though it requires less effort than the old to produce the same result, does not thereby let us off more easily, for with a better instrument it becomes possible to work for a greater result.
It is not because it affords an excuse for laziness that Bergson's philosophy is popular but because it gives expression to a feeling which is very widespread at the present time, a distrust of systems, theories, logical constructions, the a.s.sumption of premisses and then the acceptance of everything that follows logically from them. There is a sense of impatience with thought and a thirst for the actual, the concrete. It is because the whole drift of Bergson's writing is an incitement to throw over abstractions and get back to facts that so many people read him, hoping that he will put into words and find an answer to the unformulated doubt that haunts them.
It was in this spirit that the writer undertook the study of Bergson.
On the first reading he appeared at once too persuasive and too vague, specious and unsatisfying: a closer investigation revealed more and more a coherent theory of reality and a new and promising method of investigating it. The apparent unsatisfactoriness of the first reading arose from a failure to realize how entirely new and unfamiliar the point of view is from which Bergson approaches metaphysical speculation. In order to understand Bergson it is necessary to adopt his att.i.tude and that is just the difficulty, for his att.i.tude is the exact reverse of that which has been inculcated in us by the traditions of our language and education and now comes to us naturally. This common sense att.i.tude is based on certain a.s.sumptions which are so familiar that we simply take them for granted without expressly formulating them, and indeed, for the most part, without even realizing that we have been making any a.s.sumptions at all.
Bergson's princ.i.p.al aim is to direct our attention to the reality which he believes we all actually know already, but misinterpret and disregard because we are bia.s.sed by preconceived ideas. To do this Bergson has to offer some description of what this reality is, and this description will be intelligible only if we are willing and able to make a profound change in our att.i.tude, to lay aside the old a.s.sumptions which underlie our every day common sense point of view and adopt, at least for the time being, the a.s.sumptions from which Bergson sets out. This book begins with an attempt to give as precise an account as possible of the old a.s.sumptions which we must discard and the new ones which we must adopt in order to understand Bergson's description of reality. To make the complete reversal of our ordinary mental habits needed, for understanding what Bergson has to say requires a very considerable effort from anyone, but the feat is perhaps most difficult of all for those who have carefully trained themselves in habits of rigorous logical criticism. In attempting to describe what we actually know in the abstract logical terms which are the only means of intercommunication that human beings possess, Bergson is driven into perpetual self-contradiction, indeed, paradoxical though it may sound, unless he contradicted himself his description could not be a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader to pa.s.s over the self contradictions, hardly even being aware of them, and grasp the underlying meaning: the trained logician is at once pulled up by the nonsensical form of the description and the meaning is lost in a welter of conflicting words. This, I think, is the real reason why some of the most brilliant intellectual thinkers have been able to make nothing of Bergson s philosophy: baffled by the self-contradictions into which he is necessarily driven in the attempt to convey his meaning they have hastily a.s.sumed that Bergson had no meaning to convey.
The object of this book is to set out the relation between explanations and the actual facts which we want to explain and thereby to show exactly why Bergson must use self-contradictory terms if the explanation of reality which he offers is to be a true one.
Having first shown what att.i.tude Bergson requires us to adopt I have gone on to describe what he thinks this new way of looking at reality will reveal. This at once involves me in the difficulty with which Bergson wrestles in all his attempts to describe reality, the difficulty which arises from the fundamental discrepancy between what he sees the actual fact to be and the abstract notions which are all he has with which to describe it. I have attempted to show how it comes about that we are in fact able to perform this apparently impossible feat of describing the indescribable, using Bergson's descriptions of sensible perception and the relations of matter and memory to ill.u.s.trate my point. If we succeed in ridding ourselves of our common-sense preconceptions, Bergson tells us that we may expect to know the old facts in a new way, face to face, as it were, instead of seeing them through a web of our own intellectual interpretations.
I have not attempted to offer any proof whether or not Bergson's description of reality is in fact true: having understood the meaning of the description it remains for each of us to decide for himself whether or not it fits the facts.
KARIN STEPHEN.
Cambridge, January, 1922.
CHAPTER I
EXPLANATION
IN order to understand Bergson it is not necessary to have any previous acquaintance with philosophy, indeed the less the reader knows of current metaphysical notions the easier it may perhaps be for him to adopt the mental att.i.tude required for understanding Bergson.
For Bergson says that the tradition of philosophy is all wrong and must be broken with: according to his view philosophical knowledge can only be obtained by ”a reversal of the usual work of the intellect.”[4]*
* Introduction to Metaphysics, page 34.
The usual work of the intellect consists in a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification: if you have anything presented to you which you do not understand the obvious question to put yourself is, ”what is it?”
Suppose in a dark room which you expected to find empty you stumble against something, the natural thing to do is to begin at once to try to fit your experience into some cla.s.s already familiar to you. You find it has a certain texture which you cla.s.s as rather rough, a temperature which you cla.s.s as warm, a size which you cla.s.s as about two feet high, a peculiar smell which you recognise and you finally jump to the answer to your question: it is ”a dog.” This intellectual operation is a sample of the way in which it comes natural to us to set to work whenever we find ourselves confronted with any situation which we are not able to cla.s.sify off hand, we are not easy till we can say what the situation is, and saying what consists in hitting upon some cla.s.s with which we are already familiar to which it belongs: in this instance the question was answered when you succeeded in describing the situation to yourself as ”stumbling upon a dog.” Now you were only able to cla.s.s what was stumbled upon as a dog after you had recognised a certain number of properties as being those shared by dogsthe rough texture, the size, the smell. You a.n.a.lysed the situation as containing these qualities and thereupon cla.s.sified what had been stumbled upon as a dog.
a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification are the two methods which we are accustomed to rely upon for improving our knowledge in unfamiliar situations and we are accustomed to take it that they improve our knowledge of the whole situation: anyone who said that after you were able to say what you had stumbled upon you knew less of the whole situation than you knew before would find it difficult to get you to agree. And yet this is very much the position which Bergson takes up.