Bergson

Bergson is emphatic about the significance of unity, which he takes in the specific form of continuity: the quality whereby time, for example, is made not of instants but of times, which melt and merge into each other, thus realizing a succession without distinction—a multiplicity of parts arranged in sequence but without any clear demarcations among them. Continuity first emerges in his work, indeed, within a study of the consciousness of time, but is later generalized to just about everything else: to life, nature, matter, and even to the relation between matter and consciousness. The division of continuity into separate objects is realized by intelligence, for practical, utilitarian purposes, whereas intuition remains in more direct contact with it. For a long time intelligence has prevailed, in the sciences and in logic, and Bergson insists that intuition must receive its due, though ultimately he argues that the two faculties should join forces (prove continuous with one another?) and even refers to an “ultra-intellectual intuition” where the one would be absorbed in the other. In what is generally regarded as a minor work on laughter, Bergson states that there is a logic to the comic, that it is the same as the logic of dreams, and that, in order to reconstruct it, we should “behold in the depths of our mind, like a sheet of subterranean water, the flow of an unbroken stream of images which pass from one into another.” This is an important suggestion, which goes beyond the conventional opposition asserted by Russell (and by Bergson himself) between Bergson’s views and logic, in the direction (which will be explored in the rest of this book) of a different kind of logic that Bergson, and mysticism, might be adhering to.