Intuitive knowledge via the inversion of intelligence

pp. 11-50

in: Messay Kebede, Bergson's philosophy of self-overcoming, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

This chapter establishes the existence of two forms of knowledge, intuition, and intelligence, and elaborates their distinctive features. While representation and intelligence juxtapose things in space and moments in spatialized time for the purpose of practical and social life, intuitive knowledge gathers the spatially distinct moments and things and thinks them in duration. In so doing, intuitive knowledge enacts the real and so grasps it from inside. The relationship between intelligence and intuition is thus not one of opposition but of complementarity, since intuition is the effort to reintegrate what the analytic function of intelligence separates and externally connects.