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Pure spatial intuition is the goal
– Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Nietzsche and Bergson are my favourite Western philosophers. The first breaks things apart while affirming individual will against society, history, and collectivism. The second builds up, using a logic of intuition.
Nietzsche read Buddhism critically, and Bergson is sometimes consistent with Vedanta. He speaks of matter, consciousness, evolution, vital energy and creative advance.
If I had to choose one or the other it might be Bergson. Deep thinker as Nietzsche is, there’s a Darwinian strain which taken too far becomes bleak. Overcome, certainly, but that’s not a power we always have because “we are human, all too human” as Nietzsche himself said.
We also need peace, rest, and poetic quiet: yin not yang.
Bergson won the Nobel Prize in Literature and I quote from his Creative Evolution. Nature is geometric, corresponding to human faculties:
Whatever is geometrical in things is entirely accessible to human intelligence
For the system of to-day actually to be superimposed on that of yesterday, the latter must have waited for the former, time must have halted, and everything become simultaneous: that happens in geometry, but in geometry alone.
All the operations of our intellect tend to geometry, as to the goal where they find their perfect fulfilment. But, as geometry is necessarily prior to them (since these operations have not as their end to construct space and cannot do otherwise than take it as given) it is evident that it is a latent geometry, immanent in our idea of space, which is the main spring of our intellect and the cause of its working.
We don’t normally think like this yet everything which exists does so as a spatial pattern. This is different from Platonic Forms, not a perfect elsewhere but the reality where we live. If we want to transcend it, or evolve, this needs “the more comprehensive reality of which intellect is only the contraction.”
Bergson is a thrilling read and when I saw his remarks about geometry, knew it was a reason for Conceptual Art. I didn’t know where this would lead and it took me an entire morning to find the aesthetic idea.
The photograph is a path in a field where the city fades and countryside begins. Driving home, I saw a kestrel hovering above the congested road.