The Gestural Origin of Intelligence in Bergson, and the Need for Intuition

Over a long temporality, Henri Bergson maintains that our intelligence did not fall from the sky. On the contrary, it was forged very gradually during the evolution of the human species, through the intentional (interested) contact of the human body with the materiality of the world:

[And] as matter is regulated by intelligence, as there is an evident agreement between them, one cannot engender the one without producing the genesis of the other. An identical process must have cut out matter and intelligence, at the same time, from a stuff that contained both¹.

This Bergsonian hypothesis, remarkably original for its time, was in a certain way supported empirically by the work of the paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan in the 1960s (we will return to this). It proposes a processual and evolutionary vision of a human faculty, intelligence, which until then had been imprisoned in classical dualist conceptions (matter/mind), while also shaking the equally classical distinction between subject and object.

For Bergson, this is an intelligence which, by way of perception, allows the human to delimit its possible action on the “things” that surround it², while establishing in consciousness a specific division of the real³. Indeed, for Bergson, intelligence is constituted through the establishment of distinct concepts, at the same time as the real itself is organized by consciousness into “objects external to one another⁴.” Thus, for the philosopher, the intellectualization of consciousness also implies the spatialization of matter.

However, Bergson maintains that it is – only – inert matter (which he distinguishes from the living) that took part in shaping our intelligence, in a critique he extends to scientific positivism, which, according to the philosopher, has a natural contact with the inert world while failing to grasp the living⁵. Philosophical thought, for its part, compelled to follow the course of knowledge imposed by the efficacy of science, had to superimpose on scientific knowledge a knowledge of a different kind, namely metaphysics⁶.

In the schema Bergson proposes to describe the genesis of intelligence, which corresponds to a temporality on the order of that of the evolution of the species (that is, phylogenetic), the external contribution (external to possible experience, transcendent) that might have affected the co-structuring of the intellect and the representation of matter is minimized⁷. Indeed, intelligence arises from a transformation that takes place in close connection with the material world; it is the capitalization of the experience of our sensorimotor system (our body) in the face of matter, in a dynamic that has no relation of exteriority to the things of the world: “In the absolute we are, we move and live. The knowledge we have of it is incomplete, no doubt, but not external or relative⁸.” Bergson here addresses a critique to Kant, who conceives of our consciousness as the expression of elements that are not transcendent (that is, situated beyond all possible experience) but transcendental, or a priori, in the sense that they precede experience and make it possible. Kant thereby points to a fundamental insufficiency of our reason, which, so conceived, remains incapable of acquiring complete knowledge of the world in itself.

On the contrary, Bergson maintains that it is possible to grasp the real in its intimate nature, thanks to a form of affinity expressed at the level of intuition. Bergson sees matter as what has been traversed by consciousness in the course of its evolution, an evolutionary and experiential process during which intelligence and intuition appear as complementary faculties:

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them⁹.

In this beautiful Bergsonian image, we find a schema that allows us to reflect fruitfully on the artistic creative processes of interest to us here, which mobilize high-technology means: intelligible aspects, such as protocols and methods – involving the use and interconnection of technical dispositifs – deploy a structure that sets in motion the quest for forms, a quest that will succeed only if, at one moment or another of the creation, there is expressed a form of gesture that cannot be deduced directly from the intelligible means mobilized, but that answers to the expression of a form of intuition become action. In this process, the body plays a role as the support of both intellect and intuition, a body which, in the internal and external specificities of its physicality, is itself the result of an evolutionary process during which it was shaped by its gestural experience – increasingly equipped with tools – of the materiality of the world.

1. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, op. cit., p. 200.↩︎

2. Ibid., p. 189.↩︎

3. Ibid., p. 190.↩︎

4. Ibid.↩︎

5. Scientific advances in genetics can be understood as having qualified this aspect of Bergson’s thought.↩︎

6. Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice, op. cit., p. 190.↩︎

7. Indeed, in many passages of Évolution créatrice (p. 145, p. 150, etc.), Bergson presents the notion of immanence as associated more or less directly with his vital impetus, a force that would not, moreover, be infinite: it must make choices in the course of its evolution.↩︎

8. Ibid., p. 190.↩︎

9. Ibid., p. 152.↩︎