Intuition (Bergson)

[4] Within philosophy, however, problems arise when the symbols are treated as the objects they represent and when, through composition, the original is expected to be found within the simulacrum.

Unwilling to continue filling in the gaps ad infinitum, they renounce that there is a substance and maintain the properties, or symbols, which are not to be confused with parts, are all that there are.

[1][5] Henri Bergson defined metaphysics as the science that dispenses with symbols to grasp the absolute.

[1] Hence metaphysics involves an inversion of the habitual modes of thought and is in need of its own method, which he identified as intuition.

Henri Bergson defined intuition as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it.

[1][notes 1] Two images Henri Bergson gave in his essay An Introduction to Metaphysics may aid us in comprehending the ideas of intuition, analyses, the absolute and the relative.

[1] It can be seen then that intuition is a method that aims at getting back to and knowing the things themselves, in all their uniqueness and ineffable originality.

[8] It may now be understood that Henri Bergson was dissatisfied with Kantianism, which limited the bounds of reason to such an extent that it deemed knowledge of the absolute an impossibility.

His method of intuition can in fact be seen as a response to Immanuel Kant, who believed that we can only know the world as it appears to us, not as it is in itself.

He maintained that the attempt to know the absolute always resulted in antinomies, a kind of philosophical paradox caused by the limits of reason.