The Belief in Intuition: Individuality and Authority in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler

241 Pages·2021·1.792 MB·English

by  Adriana Alfaro Altamirano

The Belief in Intuition
INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
OF THE MODERN AGE

Series Editors
Angus Burgin
Peter E. Gordon
Joel Isaac
Karuna Mantena
Samuel Moyn
Jennifer Ratner- Rosenhagen
Camille Robcis
Sophia Rosenfeld
The Belief in Intuition
Individuality and Authority
in Henri Bergson and Max Scheler
Adriana Alfaro Altamirano
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Individuality and Diversity in Bergson and Scheler 12
Chapter 2. Attempts at Free Choice: Bergson and Scheler
on Agency and Freedom 40
Chapter 3. Bergson and the Morality of Uncertainty 78
Chapter 4. Varieties of Sympathy: Max Scheler’s Critique
of Sentimentalism 99
Chapter 5. Personal Authority and Political Theology
in Bergson and Scheler 120
Conclusion 157
Notes 169
Index 225
Acknowledgments 231

Introduction
In 1973, Hannah Arendt wrote that Henri Bergson was “the last philosopher
to believe firmly in ‘intuition.’”1 Two years later, in 1975, a reviewer writing
for The Review of Metaphysics said of a book on Max Scheler that the contri-
bution that its author intends to make in ethics “can be made only if there is a
prior acceptance of Scheler’s philosophical belief in intuition. That, however,”
the reviewer adds, “is a belief which few English and American philosophers
share.”2 As these quotations indicate, Bergson and Scheler pertain to a time or
a context in which it was a sensible thing for a philosopher to believe in intu-
ition; their tone suggests, moreover, that the disappearance of such a belief
entails some kind of loss. Today, more than four decades after these passages
were written, the belief in intuition that Arendt and the reviewer ascribe
to Bergson and Scheler, respectively, has admittedly gained some ground.3
However, it continues to be challenged from a number of fronts, both in phi-
losophy and in the social sciences. The original motivation behind this book
is to understand what it means—ontologically, ethically, and politically—to
entertain such a belief and what is lost in these respects if we neglect it. It is
an exploration of the implications of the belief in intuition in relation to the
self, human agency, and authority.
What does intuition mean for Bergson and Scheler? In order to see its
distinctiveness, it might be useful to distinguish “intuition” in their sense
from at least two other ways in which the term is regularly used in moral
and political philosophy. The first one is the conception of “moral intuitions”
as used in Rawlsian debates, which refers to our considered convictions and
judgments about particular instances or cases, originally made intuitively
and later revised, in reflective equilibrium, in light of the principles and rules
that we believe to ground them.4 The second one is used by so- called ethi-
cal intuitionists, according to whom intuitions are basic, self-e vident moral
propositions, such that they can be known without the need of argument.5
Neither of these corresponds to “intuition” in either Bergson’s or Schel-
er’s sense. Convictions and judgments about the morality of particular actions
2 Introduction
(i.e., intuitions in Rawls), as well as self-e vident moral propositions (i.e.,
intuitions in ethical intuitionism), are objects of thought or understanding.
Instead, for Scheler and Bergson, intuition is, first of all, a human ability or,
perhaps we could say, a human power.6 It is distinct from both reason and sen-
sibility because it addresses something that is neither rational nor sensuous. In
Bergson’s words, intuition aims at something that, being ineffable and imma-
terial, “slips away” (s’envole) at the philosopher’s attempt to see it and grasp it.7
Against idealism (both ancient and modern), as well as against the
empiricism and materialism of the Enlightenment, Bergson and Scheler
see intuition as the key to something that is both deeper and more complex
than matter but still empirical, that is, something given in experience but not
only through the senses—hence, the title of Bergson’s first book, Les données
immédiates de la conscience (in English, The Immediate Data of Conscious-
ness), and Scheler’s designation of what is given in intuition as “das materiale
Apriori” (something simultaneously material and a priori). Their appeal to
intuition is an invitation to turn to “the things themselves” as they are given
in experience; for that reason, both authors are usually identified with, or at
least related to, what is known in philosophy as phenomenology.8
Now, such an appeal to intuition has been often identified with irrational,
essentialist, or romantic perspectives, turning it into the likely seed of poten-
tially violent positions—especially when transferred into ethical or political
debates.9 It cannot be denied that the connections between intuition in poli-
tics, on the one hand, and violence, on the other, are plausible and, indeed,
historically true.10 However, at a time when the moral psychology of liber-
alism—with its double emphasis on both reason and will—has, once more,
been found wanting in terms of its resources to articulate a meaningful and
strong enough conception of freedom, collectivity, and authority,11 it might
not be unwise to turn back and scrutinize our tradition in pursuit of different
perspectives, even if they strike us today as a bit foreign or obscure.
Through a hermeneutical approach to Bergson and Scheler’s texts, I offer
a politicophilosophical reading of them intended to show that intuition, in
their sense, has three main implications. First, it translates into a conception
of freedom that—compared to the modern view focused on the sovereignty
of the will—becomes more capable of coping and coexisting with things such
as hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity.
Second, as we will see, such a conception of freedom can only be pred-
icated of a self that remains true to its constitutive “inner multiplicity.” In a
distinct critique of the liberal notion of the self—which, however, rejected
several assumptions that were present at the time in both Romanticism and
Introduction 3
socialism—they put forward a “deep” or “dense” conception of the person,
whose uniqueness turns it into the eminent site of experience and whose
prominent way of access to reality resides, again, not in reason or in sensibility
but in intuition.
Notice, however, that the acknowledgment of individuality as multiple
does not mean for Scheler and Bergson that the person is “illusory,” as per-
haps later some poststructuralist currents would eventually have.12 Rather, in
their common battle against what they saw as “depersonalizing currents”—
namely, first, a formalistic philosophical background dominated by Enlight-
enment rationalism and Hegelian idealism; second, a religious environment
dominated by pantheism; and, finally, an emerging materialist social science
dominated by associationist psychology and evolutionary biology—they
both tried to keep a first- personal perspective, without therefore renouncing
the reference to truth, reality, or objectivity. These, according to Scheler and
Bergson, are given uniquely to a person through intuition. Hence, their theo-
retical approach is sometimes described as “personalism.”
Accordingly—and this is the third politicophilosophical implication I
want to draw from their texts—the kind of authority best suited to address
the individual in their sense will not be that of the law but of another person.
(This does not mean, though, that the law cannot properly address us; in fact,
the way it can do so will be part of the focus of Chapter 2.) This yields a con-
ception of personal authority that, compared to Weberian rational authority
or, perhaps more recently, to Raz’s epistemic authority, is allegedly better at
speaking to us meaningfully—that is, both persuasively and compellingly—
as an authority. The conception of authority that corresponds to their person-
alist outlook is known as “exemplarity.”
What do we learn from these implications? As I will try to argue, focusing
on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler
did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that
mean to regulate our actions “from the outside.” These devices, such as law
and rights, may not only carry pernicious side effects for freedom but also,
more troublingly, oftentimes “erase their traces,” concealing the very ways
in which they are detrimental for a richer notion and experience of subjec-
tivity.13 This is especially true, as I will delve further into in the conclusion of
the book, at a time when the behavioral sciences, backed by the power of both
neuroscience and big data, are being used to affect—or, as a commentator
puts it, plainly manipulate—human action, both for commercial and political
purposes.14 Today, as back in the 1940s, it remains an unsettling concern that
perhaps “the peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned . . . commodity