The Misuse of Mind Part 1

The Misuse of Mind.

by Karin Stephen.

PREFATORY NOTE

Being an extract from a letter by Professor Henri Bergson

AYANT lu de pres le travail de Mrs. Stephen je le trouve interessant au plus haut point. C'est une interpretation personelle et originale de l'ensemble de mes vues--interpretation qui vaut par elle-meme, independamment de ce qui j' ai ecrit. L'auteur s'est a.s.simile l'esprit dela doctrine, puis, se degageant de la materialite du texte elle a developpe a sa maniere, dans la direction qu'elle avait choisi, des idees qui lui paraissaient fondamentales. Grace a la distinction qu'elle "etablit entre " fact " et " matter, " elle a pu ramener a l'unite, et presenter avec une grande rigueur logique, des vues que j'avais ete oblige, en raison de ma methode de recherche, d'isoler les unes des autres. Bref, son travail a une grande valeur; il temoigne d'une rare force de pensee.

HENRI BERGSON.

PREFACE

THE immense popularity which Bergson's philosophy enjoys is sometimes cast up against him, by those who do not agree with him, as a reproach. It has been suggested that Berg-son's writings are welcomed simply because they offer a theoretical justification for a tendency which is natural in all of us but against which philosophy has always fought, the tendency to throw reason overboard and just let ourselves go. Bergson is regarded by rationalists almost as a traitor to philosophy, or as a Bolshevik inciting the public to overthrow what it has taken years of painful effort to build up.

It is possible that some people who do not understand this philosophy may use Bergson's name as a cloak for giving up all self-direction and letting themselves go intellectually to pieces, just as hooligans may use a time of revolution to plunder in the name of the Red Guard. But Bergson's philosophy is in reality as far from teaching mere laziness as Communism is from being mere destruction of the old social order.

Bergson attacks the use to which we usually put our minds, but he most certainly does not suggest that a philosopher should not use his mind at all; he is to use it for all it is worth, only differently, more efficiently for the purpose he has in view, the purpose of knowing for its own sake.

There is, of course, a sense in which doing anything in the right way is simply letting one's self go, for after all it is easier to do a thing well than badlyit certainly takes much less effort to produce the same amount of result. So to know in the way which Bergson recommends does in a sense come more easily than attempting to get the knowledge we want by inappropriate methods. If this saving of waste effort is a fault, then Bergson must plead guilty. But as the field of knowledge open to us is far too wide for any one mind to explore, the new method of knowing, though it requires less effort than the old to produce the same result, does not thereby let us off more easily, for with a better instrument it becomes possible to work for a greater result.

It is not because it affords an excuse for laziness that Bergson's philosophy is popular but because it gives expression to a feeling which is very widespread at the present time, a distrust of systems, theories, logical constructions, the a.s.sumption of premisses and then the acceptance of everything that follows logically from them. There is a sense of impatience with thought and a thirst for the actual, the concrete. It is because the whole drift of Bergson's writing is an incitement to throw over abstractions and get back to facts that so many people read him, hoping that he will put into words and find an answer to the unformulated doubt that haunts them.

It was in this spirit that the writer undertook the study of Bergson.

On the first reading he appeared at once too persuasive and too vague, specious and unsatisfying: a closer investigation revealed more and more a coherent theory of reality and a new and promising method of investigating it. The apparent unsatisfactoriness of the first reading arose from a failure to realize how entirely new and unfamiliar the point of view is from which Bergson approaches metaphysical speculation. In order to understand Bergson it is necessary to adopt his att.i.tude and that is just the difficulty, for his att.i.tude is the exact reverse of that which has been inculcated in us by the traditions of our language and education and now comes to us naturally. This common sense att.i.tude is based on certain a.s.sumptions which are so familiar that we simply take them for granted without expressly formulating them, and indeed, for the most part, without even realizing that we have been making any a.s.sumptions at all.

Bergson's princ.i.p.al aim is to direct our attention to the reality which he believes we all actually know already, but misinterpret and disregard because we are bia.s.sed by preconceived ideas. To do this Bergson has to offer some description of what this reality is, and this description will be intelligible only if we are willing and able to make a profound change in our att.i.tude, to lay aside the old a.s.sumptions which underlie our every day common sense point of view and adopt, at least for the time being, the a.s.sumptions from which Bergson sets out. This book begins with an attempt to give as precise an account as possible of the old a.s.sumptions which we must discard and the new ones which we must adopt in order to understand Bergson's description of reality. To make the complete reversal of our ordinary mental habits needed, for understanding what Bergson has to say requires a very considerable effort from anyone, but the feat is perhaps most difficult of all for those who have carefully trained themselves in habits of rigorous logical criticism. In attempting to describe what we actually know in the abstract logical terms which are the only means of intercommunication that human beings possess, Bergson is driven into perpetual self-contradiction, indeed, paradoxical though it may sound, unless he contradicted himself his description could not be a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader to pa.s.s over the self contradictions, hardly even being aware of them, and grasp the underlying meaning: the trained logician is at once pulled up by the nonsensical form of the description and the meaning is lost in a welter of conflicting words. This, I think, is the real reason why some of the most brilliant intellectual thinkers have been able to make nothing of Bergson s philosophy: baffled by the self-contradictions into which he is necessarily driven in the attempt to convey his meaning they have hastily a.s.sumed that Bergson had no meaning to convey.

The object of this book is to set out the relation between explanations and the actual facts which we want to explain and thereby to show exactly why Bergson must use self-contradictory terms if the explanation of reality which he offers is to be a true one.

Having first shown what att.i.tude Bergson requires us to adopt I have gone on to describe what he thinks this new way of looking at reality will reveal. This at once involves me in the difficulty with which Bergson wrestles in all his attempts to describe reality, the difficulty which arises from the fundamental discrepancy between what he sees the actual fact to be and the abstract notions which are all he has with which to describe it. I have attempted to show how it comes about that we are in fact able to perform this apparently impossible feat of describing the indescribable, using Bergson's descriptions of sensible perception and the relations of matter and memory to ill.u.s.trate my point. If we succeed in ridding ourselves of our common-sense preconceptions, Bergson tells us that we may expect to know the old facts in a new way, face to face, as it were, instead of seeing them through a web of our own intellectual interpretations.

I have not attempted to offer any proof whether or not Bergson's description of reality is in fact true: having understood the meaning of the description it remains for each of us to decide for himself whether or not it fits the facts.

KARIN STEPHEN.

Cambridge, January, 1922.

CHAPTER I

EXPLANATION

IN order to understand Bergson it is not necessary to have any previous acquaintance with philosophy, indeed the less the reader knows of current metaphysical notions the easier it may perhaps be for him to adopt the mental att.i.tude required for understanding Bergson.

For Bergson says that the tradition of philosophy is all wrong and must be broken with: according to his view philosophical knowledge can only be obtained by "a reversal of the usual work of the intellect."[4]*

* Introduction to Metaphysics, page 34.

The usual work of the intellect consists in a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification: if you have anything presented to you which you do not understand the obvious question to put yourself is, "what is it?"

Suppose in a dark room which you expected to find empty you stumble against something, the natural thing to do is to begin at once to try to fit your experience into some cla.s.s already familiar to you. You find it has a certain texture which you cla.s.s as rather rough, a temperature which you cla.s.s as warm, a size which you cla.s.s as about two feet high, a peculiar smell which you recognise and you finally jump to the answer to your question: it is "a dog." This intellectual operation is a sample of the way in which it comes natural to us to set to work whenever we find ourselves confronted with any situation which we are not able to cla.s.sify off hand, we are not easy till we can say what the situation is, and saying what consists in hitting upon some cla.s.s with which we are already familiar to which it belongs: in this instance the question was answered when you succeeded in describing the situation to yourself as "stumbling upon a dog." Now you were only able to cla.s.s what was stumbled upon as a dog after you had recognised a certain number of properties as being those shared by dogsthe rough texture, the size, the smell. You a.n.a.lysed the situation as containing these qualities and thereupon cla.s.sified what had been stumbled upon as a dog.

a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification are the two methods which we are accustomed to rely upon for improving our knowledge in unfamiliar situations and we are accustomed to take it that they improve our knowledge of the whole situation: anyone who said that after you were able to say what you had stumbled upon you knew less of the whole situation than you knew before would find it difficult to get you to agree. And yet this is very much the position which Bergson takes up.

a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification, he would admit, are the way to get more knowledge, of a kind; they enable us to describe situations and they are the starting point of all explanation and prediction. After a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification you were able to say, "I have stumbled upon a dog," and having got so far you could then pa.s.s on to whatever general laws you knew of as applying to the cla.s.ses into which you had fitted the situation, and by means of these laws still more of the situation could be cla.s.sified and explained. Thus by means of the general law, "dogs lick," you would be furnished with an explanation if perhaps you felt something warm and damp on your hand, or again knowledge of this law might lead you to expect such a feeling. When what we want is to describe or to explain a situation in general terms then Bergson agrees that a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification are the methods to employ, but he maintains that these methods which are useful for describing and explaining are no use for finding out the actual situation which we may want to describe or explain. And he goes a step further. Not only do these methods fail to reveal the situation but the intellectual att.i.tude of abstraction to which they accustom us seriously handicaps us when we want not merely to explain the situation but to know it. Now it is the business of science to explain situations in terms of general laws and so the intellectual method of abstract-ion is the right one for scientists to employ. Bergson claims, however, that philosophy has a task quite distinct from that of science. In whatever situation he finds himself a man may take up one of two att.i.tudes, he may either adopt a practical att.i.tude, in which case he will set to work to explain the situation in order that he may know what to do under the circ.u.mstances, or he may take a speculative interest in it and then he will devote himself to knowing it simply for the sake of knowing. It is only, according to Bergson, in the former case, when his interest is practical, that he will attain his object by using the intellectual method of abstraction which proceeds by a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification. These intellectual operations have such prestige, however, they ' have proved so successful in discovering explanations, that we are apt to take it for granted that they must be the best way to set, to work whatever sort of knowledge we want: we might almost be tempted, off hand, to imagine that they were our only way of knowing at all, but a moment's reflection will show that this, at any rate, would be going too far.

Before we can a.n.a.lyse and cla.s.sify and explain we must have something to a.n.a.lyse, some material to work upon: these operations, are based upon something which we know directly, what we see, for instance, or touch or feel. This something is the foundation of knowledge, the intellectual operations of a.n.a.lysis cla.s.sification and the framing of general laws are simply an attempt to describe and explain it. It is the business of science to explain and intellectual methods are the appropriate ones for science to employ. But the business of philosophy, according to Bergson, is not to explain reality but to know it. For this a different kind of mental effort is required.

a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification, instead of increasing our direct knowledge, tend rather to diminish it. They must always start from some direct knowledge, but they proceed, not by widening the field of this knowledge but by leaving out more and more of it. Moreover, unless we are constantly on the alert, the intellectual habit of using all our direct knowledge as material for a.n.a.lysis and cla.s.sification ends by completely misleading us as to what it is that we do actually know. So that the better we explain the less, in the end, we know.

There can be no doubt that something is directly known but disputes break out as soon as we try to say what that something is. Is it the "real" world of material objects, or a mental copy of these objects, or are we altogether on the wrong track in looking for two kinds of realities, the "real" world and "our mental states," and is it perceived events alone that are "real?" This something which we know directly has been given various names: "the external object," "sense data," "phenomena," and so on, each more or less coloured by implications belonging to one or other of the rival theories as to what it is. We shall call it "the facts" to emphasise its indubitable reality, and avoid, as far as possible, any other implications.

Controversy about "the facts" has been mainly as to what position they occupy in the total scheme of reality. As to what they are at the moment when we are actually being acquainted with them one would have thought there could have been no two opinions; it seems impossible that we should make any mistake about that. No doubt it is impossible to have such a thing as a false experience, an experience is what it is, only judgments can be false. But it is quite possible to make a false judgment as to what experience we are actually having, or, still more commonly, simply to take for granted that our experience must be such and such, without ever looking to see whether it is or not. A small child taken to a party and told that parties are great fun if questioned afterwards will very likely say it has enjoyed itself though, if you happened to have been there, you may have seen clearly that it was really bewildered or bored. Even when we grow up names still have a tendency to impose upon us and disguise from us the actual nature of our experiences. There are not very many people who, if invited to partake, for instance, of the last bottle of some famous vintage wine, would have the courage to admit, even to themselves, that it was nasty, even though it was, in fact, considerably past its prime. Cases of this kind, with which we are all familiar, are enough to make us realize that it is actually quite possible to make mistakes even about facts which we know directly, to overlook the actual fact altogether because we have made up our minds in advance as to what it is sure to be.

Now Bergson says that such errors are not confined to stray instances, such as we have noticed, in which the imposition of preconceived ideas can readily be detected by a little closer attention to the actual facts. He believes that a falsification due to preconceived ideas, runs right through the whole of our direct experience. He lays the blame both for this falsification and for our failure to detect it upon our intellectual habit of relying upon explanation rather than upon direct knowledge, and that is one of the reasons why he says that our intellectual att.i.tude is an obstacle to direct knowledge of the facts. The intellectual method of abstraction by which we a.n.a.lyse and cla.s.sify is the foundation of all description and explanation in terms of general laws, and the truth is that we are, as a rule, much more preoccupied with explaining the facts which we know than with the actual experiencing of them.

This preoccupation is natural enough. The bare fact which we know directly is not enough to enable us to carry on our everyday lives, we cannot get on unless we supplement it with some sort of explanation and, if it comes to choosing between fact and explanation, the explanation is often of more practical use than the fact. So it comes about that we are inclined to use the facts which we know directly simply as material for constructing explanations and to pay so little attention to them for their own sakes that we simply take it for granted that they must be what our explanations lead us to suppose they are.

Now according to Bergson the att.i.tude of mind required for explaining the facts conflicts with that which is required for knowing them. From the point of view simply of knowing, the facts are all equally important and we cannot afford to discriminate, but for explanation some facts are very much more important than others. When we want to explain, therefore, rather than simply to know, we tend to concentrate our attention upon these practically important facts and pa.s.s over the rest. For in order to describe and explain a situation we have to cla.s.sify it, and in order to do this we must pick out in it properties required for membership of some one or other of the cla.s.ses known to us. In the situation which we originally considered by way of ill.u.s.tration, for instance, you had to pick out the qualities of roughness, warmth and so on, in order to cla.s.sify what you had stumbled upon as "a dog." Now the picking out of these particular qualities is really an operation of abstraction from the situation as a whole: they were the important features of the situation from the point of view of cla.s.sifying what you had stumbled upon, but they by no means exhausted the whole situation. Our preoccupation with explaining the facts, then, leads us to treat what we know directly as so much material for abstraction.

This intellectual att.i.tude, as Bergson calls it, though practically useful, has, according to him, two grave drawbacks from the point of view of speculation. By focussing our attention upon anything less than the whole fact, and so isolating a part from the rest, he says we distort what we knew originally: furthermore just in so far as we make a selection among the facts, attending to some and pa.s.sing over others, we limit the field of direct knowledge which we might otherwise have enjoyed. For these two reasons Bergson insists that it is the business of philosophy to reverse the intellectual habit of mind and return to the fullest possible direct knowledge of the fact.

"May not the task of philosophy, "he says," be to bring us back to a fuller perception of reality by a certain displacement of our attention? What would be required would be to turn our attention away from the practically interesting aspect of the universe in order to turn it back to what, from a practical point of view, is useless. And this conversion of attention would be philosophy itself."[5]*

* La Perception du Changement, page 13. 24

At first sight it appears paradoxical and absurd to maintain that our efforts to a.n.a.lyse, cla.s.sify and explain the facts tend rather to limit than to extend our knowledge, and furthermore distort even such facts as we still remain acquainted with. Common sense has no doubt that, far from limiting and distorting our knowledge, explanation is the only possible way in which we can get beyond the little sc.r.a.ps of fact which are all that we can ever know directly.

If the views of common sense on this question were formulated, which, for the most part, they are not, they would be something like this.

Until we begin to think the facts which we know directly are all muddled together and confused: first of all it is necessary to sort them by picking out qualities from the general confusion in which they are at first concealed. It is possible that during this process, which is what is called a.n.a.lysis, we may be obliged, at first, to overlook some of what we already know in a vague sort of way, but this insignificant loss is compensated by the clarity of what remains, and is, in any case, only temporary. For as the a.n.a.lysis proceeds we gradually replace the whole of the original mere muddle by clear and definite things and qualities. At first we may be able to distinguish only a few qualities here and there, and our preoccupation with these may possibly lead us, for a time, to pay insufficient attention to the rest of the muddle which we know directly but have not yet succeeded in a.n.a.lysing. But when the a.n.a.lysis is completed the distinct things and qualities which we shall then know will contain all that we originally knew, and more besides, since the a.n.a.lysis will have revealed much that was originally concealed or only implicit in the original una.n.a.lysed fact. If, for instance, you look at a very modern painting, at first what you are directly aware of may be little more than a confused sight: bye and bye, as you go on looking, you will be able to distinguish colours and shapes, one by one objects may be recognised until finally you may be able to see the whole picture at a glance as composed of four or five different colours arranged in definite shapes and positions. You may even be able to make out that it represents a human figure, or a landscape. Common sense would tell you that if your a.n.a.lysis is complete these colours and shapes will exhaust the whole of what you originally knew and moreover that in the course of it much will have been discovered which originally you could hardly be said to have known at all, so that a.n.a.lysis, far from limiting your direct knowledge, will have added to it considerably.

Starting, then, originally, from a very meagre stock of direct knowledge, a.n.a.lysis, according to the common sense view, by discovering more and more qualities, builds up for us more and more direct knowledge.

Bergson begins just the other way up. He starts from the idea of a whole field of direct knowledge vastly more extended than the actual facts of which we are normally aware as making up our direct experience. He calls this whole field of knowledge "virtual knowledge." This field of virtual knowledge contains the whole of the actions and reactions of matter in which our body has its part at any moment, the mult.i.tude of stimulations which actually a.s.sail the senses but which we normally disregard, together with all the responses by which our bodies adjust themselves to these stimulations, and, in addition, the whole of our past. For Bergson the problem is to explain, not how we increase our direct knowledge, but how we limit it: not how we remember, but how we forget. "Our knowledge," he says, "far from being built up by a gradual combination of simple elements, is the result of a sharp dissociation. From the infinitely vast field of our virtual knowledge we have selected, to turn into actual knowledge, whatever concerns our action upon things; the rest we have neglected. The brain appears to have been constructed on purpose for this work of selection. It is easy enough to show that this is so in the case of memory. Our past, as we shall show in the next lecture, is necessarily preserved, automatically. It survives in its entirety. But it is to our practical interest to put it aside, or at any rate only to accept just so much of it as can more or less usefully throw 'light on the present situation and complete it. The brain enables us to make this selection: it materialises the useful memories and keeps those which would be of no use below the threshold of consciousness. The same thing may be said of perception: perception is the servant of action and out of the whole of reality it isolates only what interests us; it shows us not so much the things themselves as what we can make of them. In advance it cla.s.sifies them, in advance it arranges them; we barely look at the object, it is enough for us to know to what category it belongs."[6]*

* La Perception du Changement, pages 12 and 13. 27

According to Bergson the facts which we actually know directly in the ordinary course are discriminated out of a very much wider field which we must also be said in a sense to know directly though most of it lies outside the clear focus of attention. This whole field of virtual knowledge is regarded as standing to the actual facts to which we usually devote our attention, much as, for instance, the whole situation of stumbling upon something in a dark room stood to the single quality of roughness: in both cases there is a central point in the full focus of attention which we are apt to look upon as the fact directly known, but this central point is really surrounded by a vastly wider context and this too is known in some sense though it is commonly ignored.

For all philosophies, whether they be Bergson's or the view of common sense or any other, the actual facts which require to be explained are the same, and, though any positive a.s.sertion as to what these facts are may be hotly disputed, it will probably be admitted that as we ordinarily know them they consist in some direct experience, undeniable as far as it goes. The point at issue between Bergson and common sense is, precisely, how far it does go. Both sides would admit that, in this fact directly known, what is in the full focus of attention at any given moment is very limited; on the other hand both would admit that this fully focussed fact is set in a context, or fringe, with no clearly defined limits which also goes to make up the whole fact directly known though we do not usually pay much attention to it. The fact directly known being given the problem is to find out what it is and how it comes to be known. What is actually given and needs to be accounted for is the fact clearly focussed, with its less clearly defined fringe: Bergson's sweeping a.s.sumption of the existence of a further vast field of virtual knowledge in order to account for it, does, at first sight, seem arbitrary and unwarranted and in. need of considerable justification before it can be accepted. For him the problem then becomes, not to account for our knowing as much as we do, but to see why it is that we do not know a great deal more: why our actual knowledge does not cover the whole field of our virtual knowledge. Common sense, on, the other hand, sets out from the a.s.sumption of ignorance, absence of awareness, as being, as it were, natural and not needing any accounting for, and so it regards the problem as being to explain why any experience ever occurs at all. The a.s.sumption of ignorance as being the natural thing seems at first sight to need no justification, but this may well be due merely to our having grown accustomed to the common sense point of view. When one begins to question this a.s.sumption it begins to appear just as arbitrary as the contrary standpoint adopted by Bergson. The actual facts are neither ignorance nor full knowledge and in accounting for them it is really just as arbitrary to a.s.sume one of these two extremes as the other. The truth appears to be that in order to account for the facts one must make some a.s.sumptions, and these, not being facts actually given, are bound to be more or less arbitrary.

They seem more or less "natural" according as we are more or less accustomed to the idea of them, but they are really justified only according to the success with which they account for the actual facts.

This idea of putting the problem of knowledge in terms exactly the reverse of those in which it seems "natural" to put it was originally suggested to Bergson by his study of the important work on amnesia carried out by Charcot and his pupils, and also by such evidence as was to be had at the time when he wrote on the curious memory phenomena revealed by the use of hypnotism and by cases of spontaneous dissociation. It is impossible to prove experimentally that no experience is ever destroyed but it is becoming more and more firmly established that enormous numbers of past experiences, which are inaccessible to ordinary memory and which therefore it would seem "natural" to suppose destroyed, can, if the right methods are employed, be revived even with amazing fullness of detail.

In recent years since Bergson's books were first published, great strides have been made in the experimental investigation of the whole subject of memory, and the evidence thus obtained, far from upsetting the theory of memory suggested to him by the less extensive evidence which was available at the time when he wrote, lends it striking support.

It appears to be accepted by doctors who use hypnotism in psychotherapy that under hypnotism many patients can perfectly well be taken back in memory to any period of their lives which the doctor chooses to ask for, and can be made not only to remember vaguely a few incidents which occurred at the time but actually to re-live the whole period in the fullest possible detail, feeling over again with hallucinatory vividness all the emotions experienced at the time.

This re-living of past experience can, with some patients, be made to go on indefinitely, through the whole day, if the doctor has time to attend to it, every little incident being faithfully recalled though the actual event may have taken place 20 or 30 years previously. And this happens not simply in the case of some very striking event or great crisis which the patient has been through, indeed it is just the striking events that are often hardest to recover. Some doctors, in order to get at the crisis, have found it useful occasionally to put patients back through one birthday after another right back even as early as their second year, to see at what point in their lives some particular nervous symptom first appeared, and each successive birthday is lived through again in the utmost detail.[7]*

* See Psychology and Psychotherapy by Dr. William Brown.