Here is a short essay that weaves together Henri Bergson’s notions of intellect, mechanism (including language), intuition, and memory, with attention to the metaphysical stakes and experiential implications of his philosophy.
Henri Bergson: Intellect, Intuition, and the Memory of Life
Henri Bergson’s philosophy marks a radical attempt to reverse the metaphysical orientation of Western thought. In a tradition long dominated by static forms, spatial categories, and abstract universals, Bergson proposes a return to duration (la durée)—the lived time of becoming—as the ground of reality. To do this, he draws a sharp distinction between two modes of apprehension: the intellect, which serves the needs of action and survival by spatializing reality; and intuition, which alone gives access to the dynamic flow of life. Language, mechanism, and memory all fall within this philosophical restructuring, each bearing the mark of his central insight: that life is not a thing, but a movement, and that our habitual ways of knowing are misaligned with its essential nature.
The Intellect and the Sediment of Mechanism
Bergson’s critique of the intellect is not that it is faulty or unreliable, but that it is specialized. Evolution has shaped intelligence to deal with a world of solids and surfaces, to manipulate objects, predict outcomes, and communicate across shared reference points. Intellect divides, fixes, and quantifies. In doing so, it renders the mobile immobile and the heterogeneous homogeneous. Its most fundamental gesture is to transform duration into space, to substitute the continuous with the discrete.
This tendency becomes explicit in mechanism, which Bergson views not merely as a physical theory but as a metaphysical outlook. Mechanism posits that the real can be broken into parts and reassembled without loss. The intellect is at home in such a vision, for it too dissects wholes into analyzable fragments. Language plays a central role here: it reinforces the intellect's spatial bias by carving the undivided flow of experience into discrete, nameable units. Words reify what was only meant to be passed through. Categories fossilize the living. Through language, thought becomes aligned with the useful, the repeatable, the communicable—but not the true, if truth is the movement of becoming.
Intuition: Knowing from Within
Against this utilitarian deformation, Bergson sets intuition. Where intellect is analytic, intuition is sympathetic—it seeks not to describe from without but to enter into the movement of a thing from within. Intuition is not emotion or mysticism, but a disciplined philosophical method that overcomes the limitations of spatial thought. It is, in a sense, a reversion—a returning inward to the original flow that the intellect arrests.
To intuit something is not to look at it but to live it, to allow its rhythm to resonate within the self. For Bergson, this is the only way to grasp duration—the continuous, creative, and qualitative becoming that constitutes real time. The intellect cannot represent duration; it can only betray it by breaking it into artificial instants. Intuition, by contrast, is duration recognizing itself.
Memory: The Echo of Duration
In Matter and Memory, Bergson deepens his metaphysical project by locating memory at the intersection of matter and mind. Memory is not, for him, the storage of inert representations but a dynamic, living force—a preservation of the past in the present, as an echo within becoming. He distinguishes between habit memory, which is action-oriented and tied to the body, and pure memory, which is contemplative and non-utilitarian.
Pure memory is not stored in the brain; it survives in time, and is called upon by consciousness when needed. It is an extension of intuition into the past—a direct, non-representational contact with that which has been lived. Memory, in this sense, is a spiritual phenomenon. It links the soul to duration and allows the self to be more than a sum of present states. It is through memory that we avoid becoming mere mechanisms—automatons reacting to stimuli. Memory deepens us.
Toward a Philosophy of Life
Bergson’s opposition between intellect and intuition is not a simple dualism. The intellect has its place: it builds tools, constructs science, and organizes societies. But it should not dominate metaphysics. To understand life as it lives itself—to grasp freedom, creativity, and consciousness—we must turn to intuition, and through it, to duration. Life is not a machine, and any philosophy that treats it as such risks amputating its most vital force.
In this vision, intuition is not a supplement to the intellect; it is its correction. It is the remembrance of a way of knowing that precedes words and survives abstraction. It is, in Bergson’s sense, a return to life.
GPT
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