3. Apprehending one’s own self in intuition.
Dispensing with the habitual view of a stable selfhood and replacing it with a model of an ever changing, evolving self, Bergson reviews our perception of epistemological processes and divides them into the perception of the outside features of an object and the perception of an object originating from within.
Due to the practical rationality of everyday life we access the world, other people and our own selfhood from the outside and divide the world up mentally into static fragments that are easily comprehensible and stable. These fragments are then rearranged again and we gain a compete picture which we need for being able to orientate ourselves in the world and act upon it. This also …show more content…
This happens in dreams, in inattentive perception of sounds and in other situations where the self is relaxed and detached from the external world insofar as it does not coordinate its fleeting elements with reference points in the external world, at the pre-reflective stage of consciousness.
In intuition, the self is experienced as heterogeneous in composition—inasmuch as it involves different feelings, memories and perceptions—but is felt, without these differences being explicitly noted, as a continuous flux of interconnected processes. At the heart of this intuition is an awareness that “[t]here is a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it” and that “[n]o one of them begins or ends, but all extend into each other” (Bergson, 1999, p. 25).
Intuiting ourselves in these terms involves letting our consciousness fix its attention on the immediate experience whereby we do not try to name our current state or reflect on the past, however immediate, and without anticipating the future, however proximate. Our conscious awareness then temporally coincides with the actual being of our psyche and follows emotions and sensations as they unfold. For Bergson, this is the only way we could access duration, which “can be presented to us directly in an intuition” and “can never … be enclosed in a conceptual representation” (Bergson, 1999, p.
Dispensing with the habitual view of a stable selfhood and replacing it with a model of an ever changing, evolving self, Bergson reviews our perception of epistemological processes and divides them into the perception of the outside features of an object and the perception of an object originating from within.
Due to the practical rationality of everyday life we access the world, other people and our own selfhood from the outside and divide the world up mentally into static fragments that are easily comprehensible and stable. These fragments are then rearranged again and we gain a compete picture which we need for being able to orientate ourselves in the world and act upon it. This also …show more content…
This happens in dreams, in inattentive perception of sounds and in other situations where the self is relaxed and detached from the external world insofar as it does not coordinate its fleeting elements with reference points in the external world, at the pre-reflective stage of consciousness.
In intuition, the self is experienced as heterogeneous in composition—inasmuch as it involves different feelings, memories and perceptions—but is felt, without these differences being explicitly noted, as a continuous flux of interconnected processes. At the heart of this intuition is an awareness that “[t]here is a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it” and that “[n]o one of them begins or ends, but all extend into each other” (Bergson, 1999, p. 25).
Intuiting ourselves in these terms involves letting our consciousness fix its attention on the immediate experience whereby we do not try to name our current state or reflect on the past, however immediate, and without anticipating the future, however proximate. Our conscious awareness then temporally coincides with the actual being of our psyche and follows emotions and sensations as they unfold. For Bergson, this is the only way we could access duration, which “can be presented to us directly in an intuition” and “can never … be enclosed in a conceptual representation” (Bergson, 1999, p.