- Title: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Introduction à la métaphysique)
- Author: Henri Bergson
- Translated: T. E. Hulme
- Published: 1903
- Publisher: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1913
Bergson’s 1903 essay “An Introduction to Metaphysics” focuses on two fundamentally different ways of knowing reality—the Relative and the Absolute—and the critical distinction between them.
There are two ways of knowing a thing: the Relative and the Absolute.
Relative (Analysis)
- It depends on points of view and symbols.
- Representations of objects are taken from a specific point of view (images).
- It views objects from the outside, translating them into specific symbols (concepts).
- It relies on translation into other symbols or representation from different perspectives.
- It is used as a method of science and logic.
- Because the analytic process reduces objects to elements that are already known, everything is reduced to static components.
- It operates on the immobile (at an instantaneous moment).
- Analysis yields knowledge that is relative and practical, through which we can never reach the object itself.
- The result is ultimately incomplete, remaining an imperfect translation and a permanently incomplete representation.
Absolute (Intuition)
- This is the method of true metaphysics.
- Through intuition, we can attain an absolute knowledge of reality.
- It views objects from the inside, looking at the thing in itself.
- Intuition places itself within mobility (within duration).
- Intuition means placing oneself inside an object through an effort of imagination, bypassing symbols altogether.
Metaphysics
- Metaphysics claims to dispense with symbols.
- We must transcend concepts in order to reach intuition.
- It is an error to believe we can reconstruct the real using fragments (symbolic representations) captured in a static moment.
- Concepts may be extracted from a mobile reality, but we cannot reconstruct the mobility of the real using concepts.
- Philosophy and science claim to reconstruct reality in this way, which is an error bound to fail.
Time & Duration (la durée)
- In analysis, time is a multiplicity of successive states.
- Bergson argued that time is not the tick-by-tick mathematical scale measured by clocks, which is how science treats time.
- In intuition, time is a unified continuity accumulated from the past.
- Time is a continuously flowing stream of experience where the past and present melt together.
