Social Intuition - The Metaphysics of Co-Creation

By Lionel Yang Created 28th April 2024

Many have been written on cooperation, collaboration and collective creation based on the rational basis of it. However, to Bergson, joined work should be sustained via intuition. 

“reality is not to be reached by any elaborate construction of thought : it is given in immediate experience as a flux, a continuous process of becoming, to be grasped by intuition, by sympathetic insight. Concepts break up the continuous flow of reality into parts external to one another, they further the interests of language and social life and are useful primarily for practical purposes. But they give us nothing of the life and movement of reality” - pg. x, Time and Free Will.

Intuition is aim at arriving at knowledge through simultaneous heterogeneity or multiplicity, itself, means intuition is resisting linear sequence and reductive analytics, but at the same time, aiming for the organic whole if intuition is engaged through co-creation. But Bergson warns us the concrescence of social endeavors could lead us to the death of intuition itself by indulging in perceptive representation separated from this “organic whole”, which i presume mean the indivisibility of collective memory through time and duration :

“…a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole…Consciousness, goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self.” - pg. 128, Time and Free Will

Bergson sees that social life inherits habitual homogenous spaces but dead to heterogeneity or diversity.  He sees this kind of intellectualizing thinking must be resisted through intuition of multiplicity and flowering of thought. 

“We reach (social representation) by deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate one another and of which the succession in duration has nothing in -common with juxtaposition in homogeneous space.” - pg. 231, Time and Free Will 

Nevertheless, change of an individual only comes about through social progress:

“…it is to social life that evolution leads, as though the need of it was felt from the beginning, or rather as though there were some original and essential aspiration of life which could find full satisfaction only in society. Society, which is the community of individual energies, benefits from the efforts of all its members and renders effort easier to all. It can only subsist by subordinating the individual, it can only progress by leaving the individual free: “ - pg. 33, Mind Energy

And the freedom or free will of an individual is achieved by the action of one’s intuition to pure duration according to Bergson. In addition to allow the flow and flux of memory or pure duration, Bergson also suggests to inflict memory with “tension and elasticity” in order to sustain the resilience of personal as well as social intuition: 

“What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, together with a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adapt ourselves in consequence. TENSION and ELASTICITY are two forces, mutually complementary, which life brings into play. If these two forces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent, we have sickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they are lacking in the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency, every variety of insanity. Finally, if they are lacking in the character, we have cases of the gravest inadaptability to social life, “ - pg.8b, Laughter

Bergson suggests that the exercises of tension and elasticity has something to do with ‘laughter”, the humility of self-depreciative confession: 

“Now, comic fancy is indeed a living energy, a strange plant that has nourished on the stony portions of the social soil, until such time as culture should allow it to vie with the most refined products of art…Consequently it expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events. ” - pg.22a - pg.22b, Laughter

Bergson further iterates: 

“laughter has a social meaning and import, that the comic expresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society” - pg.41b, Laughter 

“…function of laughter. Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter is, really and truly, a kind of social "ragging." - pg.42a

“By organising laughter, comedy accepts social life as a natural environment, it even obeys an impulse of social life. And in this respect it turns its back upon art, which is a breaking away from society and a return to pure nature. “ - pg.52b

What about the vision of a community or society emerged out of social intuition? 

If we read and integrate all of Bergson work and come this far to his last work in “Two Sources of Morality and Religion”, it is not surprise that he advocates a kind of open society in constant flux and flowering of heterogeneous intuition with people of open soul and with it and from it the free will  made to be the organism : 

“a society composed of free wills…are organized…assume the guise of an organism” - pg.7

“for it is only through God, in God, that religion bids man love mankind” - pg. 27

“the soul that is opening, and before whose eyes material objects vanish, is lost in sheer joy…The morality of the Gospels is essentially that of the open soul:” - pg.49

“The open society is the society which is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity. A dream dreamt, now and again, by chosen souls…” - pg.221