Young Wolves 3

Instinctual Intelligence: The Life In Between Thinking and Knowing

Creative Evolution is a text written in 1907 by Henri Bergson. It identifies what he calls a vital momentum (élan vital) that he sees as an essential freeness running through all ‘organized’ beings (aka all living organisms). This creative impulse is something whole and something other than accidental living gestures emerging out of the natural tendencies of inert or ‘unorganized’ matter (aka the claim of materialism). He holds that rather than life coming out of dead materiality, both life and matter are more like motions which pass through one another:

“An action which is making itself across an action of the same kind which is unmaking itself.” ¹

“I am trapped in nature
I am expected to eat the blossom of the tree
Some reincarnated clothes fetishist
Chewing maniacally up the cloth of thought.”

-Kerouac, Some of the Dharma

According to Bergson, there is a genius proper to the thrust of life. Having first chosen the development of mobility (ie. animals) over fixity (ie. plants) in which to cultivate consciousness—the term he’s chosen for the awareness basic to any organism that is not a plant or fungi. This genius then developed, from a limited sensory germ-knowing, into one of two dominant capabilities for knowledge: Intelligence and Instinct. Both of which were developed in the context of inert matter as effective means for free action in the world by those free actions themselves.

Further, these two action oriented channels of knowing have inverse characteristics. Bergson sees man as the pinnacle of the former and the insect world as the best guardians of instinct. Though in either you may find a mix of both ways of knowing. 

Intelligence is the knowledge of relations in the action of construction or manufacture, especially of tools, and is directed primarily on solid, discontinuous, immobile, matter. Intelligence allows us to regard matter as indifferent to form. ‘The intellect is characterized by the unlimited power of decomposing according to any law and a free composing into any system.’² So that concepts are understood as outside each other like objects in space. In intelligence, ‘Logic and geometry engender each other.’³

Instinct on the other hand, can be seen as a knowing analogous to vital processes, like the heart beat. Instincts are always accompanied by a corresponding embodied instrument rather than oriented towards making an external one. Where there is a wing, there is an instinct that knows how to fly. The keenest expressions of its genius are always performances. This knowing operates like a musical theme, which is originally felt rather than thought, it is known best in humans as intuition. Interestingly he remarks that the residue of instinct left in man is evidenced in the aesthetic faculties and that if we could cultivate the knowing of instinct we would have a much better understanding of life proper to the living.

“Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could extend its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us the key to vital operations—just as intelligence, developed and disciplined, guides us into matter. For—we cannot too often repeat it—intelligence and instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former towards inert matter, the latter towards life.”⁴

“When intelligence treats everything mechanically, instinct proceeds, so to speak, organically. If the consciousness that slumbers in it should awake, if it were wound up into knowledge instead of being wound off into action, if we could ask and it could reply, it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life.”⁵

If a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand… or would we? What about a wolf? Surely the language animal finds himself nearer in experience to the wolf than to the ant. Bergson and many others have noted, human language is grown out of spatialized concepts.

“Outside and Inside form a dialect of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in the metaphorical domain.”⁶

If human life is, as Bergson argues, conscious through a disproportion of intellect to instinct; If, in the great arc of life, it was in order to act skillfully upon matter that we began to intellectualize, cities have proven excellent crucibles. In the defined and built circle of settlement, a mind orient towards the knowledge of solid, discrete, immobile, inert and changeless forms, would seek to carve out havens of geometrical formalism from thickets of organically organized wilderness. That a mind like this, being born and raised and dying within a cultural evolution continuous with a changing ‘environment’ may find itself evermore at home in places ordered by its own intellect, and manufacturing action. That the human mind may possess space, in order to self-recognize and self-incubate:

“Measuring is a wholly human operation” - Bergson

The problem with a city wall is that it cannot be hermetically sealed. The form of knowing that has been accelerated in this culture jar, is not all-knowing. It has blind-spots. It cannot fully enclose everything, and these failures produce mysteries: places where intellect cannot tread. Thus these  mysteries cannot abide in the polis and are left outside the city walls where one must venture if they are to be encountered..

“There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.” ⁷

It seems like the psyche is something older than Bergson’s Intellect/instinct divergence, for by all accounts it is not indifferent to these mere topographies: these places. For all our progress with the intellect: We are still left asking; What does it mean to be a human? We can often easily say what we are not. We can often easily identify when we’ve been treated inhumanely. The hunter and the warrior, though both dealing in the business of death, are two very different practices; in one case you need to learn how to rightly kill an animal, and in the other you must learn how to rightly kill a man.

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1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, pg 231.

2. ibid, pg 92.

3. ibid, pg 96.

4. ibid, pg 101.

5. ibid, pg 96.

6. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, pg 211.

7. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, pg 89