Intellect, Instinct, Intuition

In Creative Evolution Bergson treats intellect, instinct, and intuition not as three rungs of one ladder but as divergent directions of a single consciousness, differing in kind not in degree — "the major error, the one that has been passed along since Aristotle," is to see them as "three successive degrees of a single tendency" (EC 135). Intellect is the faculty of fabricating artificial (unorganized) instruments — Homo faber before Homo sapiens — and is therefore at home only with solids, the discontinuous, the immobile, and space; it is "characterized by a natural incomprehension of life." Instinct is the faculty of using and constructing organized (natural) instruments — a lived, enacted knowledge that is sympathy, knowing its object "from within." Intuition is "instinct become disinterested, self-conscious, and capable of reflecting on its object and enlarging it indefinitely," which "takes us into the very interior of life" — yet it requires the intellect to lift it out of instinct: "Without the intellect, intuition would have remained in the form of instinct" (EC 178).

Key Points

  • Divergence, not hierarchy. Intellect (perfected in the vertebrate line, culminating in humans) and instinct (perfected in the arthropod line, esp. Hymenoptera) are "the endpoints of different lines" — "there is no intellect in which we do not discover traces of instinct, and... no instinct that is not surrounded by a fringe of intelligence" (EC 136).
  • Intellect = Homo faber. "Perhaps we would not say Homo Sapiens, but rather Homo Faber" — intellect is "the faculty of fabricating artificial objects, in particular tools for making tools" (EC 139). Its natural object is "the inorganic solid"; "we are only at ease in the discontinuous, in the immobile, and among the dead" (EC 166).
  • Instinct knows things, intellect knows relations. Instinct's knowledge is categorical ("here is what is"), full but tied to one object; intellect's is hypothetical ("if... then"), empty but universal. Hence the formula: "There are things that the intellect alone is capable of looking for, but will never find. Instinct alone could find these things, but it will never go looking for them" (EC 151).
  • Instinct is sympathy. It knows its object "from within" — the paralyzing wasp "knows" its prey's vulnerability not as an entomologist knows it but by "a sympathy... that would inform it from within"; "instinct is to the intellect what vision is to touch" (EC 169, 174). Rooted in life as "a whole that is sympathetic with itself" (Plotinus).
  • Intuition requires intellect. Intuition is instinct disinterested + self-conscious; the aesthetic faculty proves "an effort of this type is not impossible." But it is not the rejection of intellect — Bergson insists (to Carr, 1908) the intellect is "surrounded by a fringe of intuition," and (to Borel) that he never opposed instinct to intellect but distinguished their domains.
  • The intellect touches the absolute. On inert matter, "physics touches the absolute" — the intellect is approximate-not-relative in its own domain; only its extension to life becomes symbolic. So Bergson is not "anti-intellectual."
  • The open and the closed. At the climax: the animal, "by pulling on its chain... merely... lengthen[s] it"; man "breaks the chain." From the closed to the open is "a difference of nature" (EC 264) — the seed of the open/closed society of The Two Sources (1932).

What the Concept Does

The triad operationalizes the difference-in-kind method that organizes the whole book: by showing that intellect and instinct have different objects (the inert vs. the living), Bergson explains why the intellect (built for action on solids) systematically falsifies life — and how, nonetheless, life can be known (by intuition, the disinterested deepening of instinct, lifted out of instinct by the intellect's surplus). It thereby converts the apparent paradox of the book — using the intellect to criticize the intellect — into a method: intuition uses "the resources of intellect to show the limitations of the intellect."

What It Rejects

  • Aristotle's scala naturae — torpor/instinct/reason as successive degrees of one soul.
  • Instinct as compound reflex (neo-Darwinism) or fallen intellect (neo-Lamarckism) — both translate instinct into the intellect's terms.
  • Intuition-as-coincidence read subjectively — and equally the charge of anti-intellectualism (Borel): intuition uses the intellect.
  • Homo sapiens as the primary self-definition of the human — tool-making precedes disinterested reason.

Stakes

The triad is where Creative Evolution most directly touches the wiki's existing concerns. The henri-bergson entity, following Merleau-Ponty, reads the "wholly positive Bergson of intuition-as-coincidence" as "the polemical Bergson," and the mature Bergson as a philosopher of reading (grasping a meaning in a style). CE's own text already mediates coincidence by intellect (intuition requires the intellect; instinct is sympathy plus the disinterest that only intellect supplies) — so the primary text is closer to MP's "reading, not coincidence" than the polemical caricature implies. The Homo faber thesis and the open/closed distinction are also load-bearing genealogically (toward Heidegger's tool-analysis and toward Bergson's own Two Sources).

Positions

  • Bergson: three divergent faculties differing in kind; intuition = disinterested self-conscious instinct, requiring intellect; the intellect touches the absolute on inert matter.
  • Merleau-Ponty: "the best of Bergsonism" is not intuitive coincidence but the metamorphosis-across-oppositions, intuition as a reading; CE's intuition "reverts into its contrary" (perception = "discernment," a positive poverty).
  • Ruyer (1959): defends instinct-as-savoir (knowledge/competence, not pouvoir/ability) and the thematic character of instinct (a transposable theme, like a linguistic root) — but judges the instinct/intelligence (organic-tool/inorganic-tool) bifurcation "forced," since the crucial human transition is symbolism, not tool-use.
  • Borel (1907): "how could a man who writes books be anti-intellectual?" — the charge Bergson rebuts by distinguishing the domains of intellect and intuition.

Connections

  • is a division of elan-vital — instinct and intellect are the divergent directions into which the élan splits.
  • requires duree — intuition is the grasp of durée "wherever it may appear"; the intellect spatializes durée.
  • is the method of creative-evolution — intuition (using intellect against intellect) is how the book's "philosophy of becoming" proceeds.
  • contrasts with henri-bergson entity's MP-mediated framing — CE's intuition already requires intellect (closer to "reading" than "coincidence").
  • has cross-tradition cousin institution — instinct-as-sympathy / life-known-from-within and MP's institutional sense-grasp (registral divergence: vital sympathy vs. embodied-intersubjective institution).
  • is developed by henri-bergson.

Motif Weight & Corpus Recurrence

The luminous-core/fringe figure (intellect as a bright core in a nebulosity of intuition, and the symmetrical fringe of intelligence around instinct) is a STRUCTURAL motif recurring across all three chunks of the extraction note. The paralyzing-wasp and theme-and-variations figures anchor instinct-as-sympathy. See motifs §"luminous core / fringe (intellect ↔ intuition)". (To be confirmed at audit.)

Open Questions

  • The relation of CE's intuition to Bergson's "Introduction à la métaphysique" (1903) account (intuition as "entering into" the object) and to MP's reading of late Bergson as a philosopher of expression.
  • The genealogy of the open/closed distinction forward to The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) — not yet ingested.
  • Whether the Homo faber thesis is a genuine anthropology or a heuristic for characterizing the intellect's object. (Ruyer presses that tool-use is "still an organic formation.")

Sources

  • bergson-1907-creative-evolution — Ch. II [THE MAIN DIRECTIONS] (EC 135–166): difference-in-kind; Homo faber; intellect/instinct objects; the intellect's incomprehension of life. Ch. II [THE NATURE OF INSTINCT] (EC 166–178): instinct as sympathy; intuition as disinterested instinct requiring intellect. Ch. III (EC 264): the open and the closed. Reply to Carr (1908): the "fringe of intuition." Ruyer (1959) and MP (1956–57) commentaries in the edition.