Instinct, Intelligence, Tools and Organs

Bergson attempts, in Creative Evolution, to sketch out the progress of life ascending up to man. It is from and examination of this progression, Bergson maintains that we can shed some light on the emergence of intellect and instinct, two modes of action, allowing an individual to "secure the perfect fitting of out body to its environment." (1) For Bergson, it is important to accompany his attempts at a theory of life with a theory of knowledge.

"A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. On the other hand, a theory of knowledge which does not replace the intellect in the general evolution of life will teach us neither how the frames of knowledge have been constructed nor how we can enlarge or go beyond them. It is necessary that these two inquiries, theory of knowledge and theory of life, should join each other, and, by a circular process, push each other on unceasingly." (viii)

In order to obtain a theory of knowledge Bergson makes a distinction between intellect and instinct. It is from this initial distinction that he hopes to gain insight into the pre-existing frames. As, most immediately, faculties for action, Bergson links each with its means for action: tools and organs. This helps to clarify the mechanic process of intellect contrasted with the organic process of instinct. Therefore, Bergson understands intellect and instinct, tools and organs as tendencies for an organism to act upon the material world.

In his attempt to trace the divergence of instinct and intelligence, Bergson considers how the two are manifested as actions. He divides the two based upon their use of manufactured objects and organic instruments. Tools and organs both define and are defined by the concepts of intelligence and instinct, providing provisional distinction between what Bergson describes as the two "modes of action" in which tools are the instruments of intelligent action and organs are the instruments of instinctual action.

Tools are defined by Bergson as artificial, manufactured objects. (138) The use of tools is in this case an indicator of intelligence. Throughout the history of man, the best example of an intelligent organism, eras have been demarcated by the use of technology (manufactured objects). From the Stone Age to the present, the progress of man has been inseparably linked to the invention of tools. The process of invention itself can be used to stratify levels of intelligent use of tools. According to Bergson, invention begins with the faculty of inference, which "consists in an inflection of past experience in the direction of present experience." (138) At the point that knowledge is being appropriated to draw conclusions it can be assumed that intelligence exists such as the use of a rock by an otter to obtain food. The ability to employ inference is exemplified by the use of tools by non-human beings for which there is no evidence of manufacture or invention, only the appropriation of existing tools in present circumstances. The actual creation of new tools whose manufacture varies indefinitely and becomes increasingly complex to the point of tools which make tools, however, undeniably indicates intelligence.

Organs are opposed to this as the instruments of instinct. Organs unlike tools are extensions of the body that uses them along with the endowment of the instinct to employ them. Thus instinct is in large part the "natural ability to use inborn mechanisms." (139) In such a case it is difficult to determine where the organism begins and where the action of instinct ends. The two form a continuum in which instinct organizes organic instruments into movement.

Thus instinct is the characterized by the use of organized instruments while intelligence occurs with the construction and use of unorganized tools. However, this differentiation between intelligence and instinct is too reductive. To understand the relationship between intellect and instinct it is important to look closer at each faculty.

The faculty of intellect is primarily concerned with the ability of an individual to act upon organized solids. This primary aim of intelligence manifests itself in fabrication carving the necessary form upon inert matter. In order to accomplish this, the intellect must conceive of the material world as a space upon which to work. In this view the intellect must decompose the material world before recomposing it at need. It is in the process of decomposition and recomposition that the intellect must focus on discontinuous objects fixed in time. The ability to view a discontinuous material world prevents the intellect from comprehending the progression that is characteristic of material extension. It rather attempts to view movement as a progression of homogenous positions or states from the present into the future, masking the flow of becoming in apparent immobility.

Instinct's aim, like that of intellect, is action but of a different sort. Bergson explains that where intelligence proceeds mechanically, instinct progresses organically. Once again, the body of an individual and the instinct that accompanies it are integrally linked, forming a continuum. Instinct maintains nature's efforts at organizing matter; it is merely part of the work by which nature forms a unity of life. Bergson describes this unity as a "whole sympathetic to itself." (167) In this sympathetic, instinct forms from a progress of a sort of knowledge.

"we trail behind us, unawares, the whole of our past; but our memory pours into the present only the odd recollection or two that in some way complete our present situation." (167)

The knowledge of instinct is unconscious, wound up in action rather than thought, in that it does not involve inference but is "molded on the very form of life." (165) Instinct builds upon itself from germ to germ, rather than directly transmitting from individual to individual. At the heart of this transmission is an effort by which nature fits the needs of the organism to its environment. This occurs as the "sympathy"