I still wonder what precisely philosophy is. There are so many different ways to define it or think of it. Deleuze calls it the creation of concepts. Rousseau, Bloom tells me, speaks of it as the purposeful ordering of the soul. Collingwood spoke of it as a form of second order knowledge, and later controversially claimed it to be a purely historical form of thought.
One thing seems undeniable: It begins with an admission of ignorance and from there proceeds into a
quest for knowledge. It is above all a process, no doubt. A verb, not a noun.
Fortunately the philosopher I am most focused on right now, Henri Bergson, understood that the world is pure process, and that it is our business to think in a way that moves in tandem with the world. Bergson challenges us to think movement, think change, and, above all, to
think time (whereas thought is typically spatial). I don't have the chops to go into this yet. I'm working on sorting Bergson, but he's a challenge.
One thing, however, is definitely clear to me: Bergson believed that the task of philosophy was to purposefully intensify our experience of the world, to attune us to the constant unfolding of novelty that is always happening within and without. As he says in his essay "The Possible and the Real," he is struck by "the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty which seems to be going on in the universe."This explosion of novelty, moreover, is far from an abstract phenomenon, but a deeply personal experience: "As far as I am concerned, I feel I am experiencing it constantly. No matter how I try to imagine in detail what is going to happen to me, still how inadequate, how abstract and stilted is the thing I have imagined in comparison to what actually happens!" ('The Possible and the Real, in
The Creative Mind, 73). I literally laughed out loud as I finished typing that quotation. Bergson's sense of the world was so wondrous and beautiful! He felt the intensity and uniqueness of every moment with such clarity. I can't read his writing without also being struck by the novelty and freshness of every moment. There is no such thing as identity, no such thing as sameness, only difference. Reading Bergson makes this infinitely clear, not only intellectually, but
viscerally and emotionally.
The world is more intense after reading Bergson, and he would be delighted to hear me say that.
He provokes such love and such fear in me. He opens my eyes to the world in a way that I badly crave. Reading him is like staring at the familiar landscape with a new friend who is seeing it for the first time: he imparts such freshness and such particularity unto that which has become so stale and generic. I'm holding back tears as I write this, his thought creates such emotions in me.
So, the obvious question is, Why is it so hard to perceive the uniqueness of the world? What stands in the way of us and a raw experience of reality in all of its particularity and unpredictability?
Chiefly, classificatory and generalized language. When we speak of the world in terms of 'kinds' and 'types' we reduce things to what makes them similar, essentially sheering off all their elements that make them different. Thinking in terms of generalities, moreover, is a pervasive modern habit that comes out of our relationship with natural science.
The intensification of inner life, becoming attuned to the novelty of every moment, is therefore partially a matter of overcoming our attachment to general concepts.
The process of shedding our conceptual apparatus is to be conducted through metaphysical study, which Bergson thus calls 'the science of dispensing with symbols'. Metaphysics, then, is a way of using language that is supposed to help us leave behind our general conceptual apparatus. Hmmm.
It has something to do with Bergson's concept of the image. The kind of language used in metaphysics differs from scientific or classificatory language because what it seeks to do is to plunge is directly into the flow of novelty and unity of our lives. Metaphysics is meant to plunge is into the flow of
time, whereas scientific language is meant to divide the world in terms of
space. Metaphysics is meant not to give us an
analytical understanding of reality, but is supposed to give us an
intuition of the pure flow of time, which he called
duration. Thus he said that "the philosopher's sole aim should be to start up a certain effort which the utilitarian habits of mind of everyday life tend, in most men, to discourage.... No image will replace the intuition of duration but many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, snce it would then be driven out immediately by its rivals" ('Introduction to Metaphysics', in
The Creative Mind, 139).
I'm sorry I'm just throwing these quotations out. But the idea is that metaphysics involves a use of language that is supposed to get us past language and instead plunge us into the ineffable novelty of reality. We are meant to use diverse forms of language so that we can dive head first into the flow of time and reality.
Oof. Challenging thinking.
A final point.
Bergson's thinking about metaphysics, about intuition, about what stands between us and the intensification of our inner lives and a purer relationship with reality, can be called a form of subtractive learning (a la Nassim Taleb in
Antifragile). Taleb is a strong advocate of what he calls subtractive epistemology: We get smarter by taking junk out of our heads, not by adding things. Bergson, too, believes that contact with pure duration and reality is achieved mostly by forgetting all of the generalizations that we have become so habituated to. Metaphysics is a form of purposeful forgetting, or subtractive learning.
Such beauty in him.
