Intuition as a Method in Philosophy

Bibliographic Note: Deleuze, Gilles, Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 13 – 35

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My critical summary of Chapter 1 of Bergsonism. I provided my own examples apart from what Deleuze gave. This is an exercise in making reflective memos, a tip I got from Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog.

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In Chapter 1 of his book entitled Bergsonism, Deleuze emphasized that intuition is a method of ‘precision’ that follows a set of ‘strict rules’. This is indeed counter-intuitive to what we usually think as ‘intuition’. Intuition is not a gut feel; neither it is the feeling that wins you over a bet or a game of luck. It is, for Bergson and also for Deleuze, a philosophical method, a decisive turn in a given duration or state of things. Intuition provides us precise ways of knowing and differentiating lived experiences and reality itself.

Deleuze wrote that Bergson considers intuition as a simple act but this simplicity is accompanied by the act’s involvement with the plurality of meanings and irreducible multiplicities in any given experience. The intuition as a method follows three rules:

• Statement and creation of problems (a method of problematizing)
• Discovery of genuine difference in kind (a method of differentiating)
• Apprehension of real time (a method of temporalizing)

Intuition as a Method of Problematizing

Deleuze’s first criterion for the method of intuition is to ‘apply the test of true and false to problems themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems.’

In philosophy, problematizing something i.e. an event, an object, a set of relations, is one of the first steps in drafting a philosophical proposition. Problems are always tied to philosophical concepts and percepts. Bergson (via Deleuze) proposes that it is not enough to state one’s problems accompanying a set of solutions. One has to discern or evaluate whether the stated problem is true or false. In order to do so one uses intuition as a method of qualifying and evaluating problem statements.

Tracing and Mapping Time

This is just a quick update on my research project. Some exploratory notes on the domain of research. 

My research project on Lav Diaz is becoming a rigorous cartographic project of existing literature exploring the domain of all possible and impossible fields that might actually play in dispensing and distilling the idea of cinema and time. It is unforgivable to perform cartographic sketch for a filmmaker coming from only one root or one guiding framework. Frameworks are arborescent structures. They are centric and centered on subjectivity and historical & cultural determination decreasing potentiality of the plane generative of pure events. The plane for this project must manifest as a empirical space for contending issues which includes not only the problematics of time and cinema but also the following: ontology of representation which dates back to Plato, emancipatory power of cinema , the author/auteur, affect and perception, spectatorship, political economy of time, ethics, the Other and the Minoritarian, digital era, etc.

After tracing and mapping ‘time’ from all directions: from Rodowick (digital x time) to Flusser (post-history) to Bliss Cua Lim (postcolonialism x time) to Agamben (time vs. history) to Deleuze (who reads Bergson, Spinoza and Kant) to Guattari (transversality, ecology) to Derrida (time’s invisibility, differance, trace, critique of metaphysics of presence) to Massumi (perception x time), I am now entering  a differential passage.

• Toni Negri for labour time
• Bernard Stiegler for technology x time
• Jacques Ranciere for image x politics and his writing on Bela Tarr
• Quentin Meillassoux for his striking proclamation of ‘time as absolute’ in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency​
• Ray Brassier for relation of time to extinction
• some contemporary writings on slow cinema (recently Justin Remes’ Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis)

The project is becoming a hyperplane, a manifold of intersecting discourses, which will eventually collapse into a field or a network of relations that would answer the question: What is the relationship of time and the film image? 

Time is the most difficult component of the project, while Diaz’s cinema remains as an object of philosophical and critical analysis. The relation of time and Diaz’s cinema is a difficult mix of philosophy and cinema studies. I can, however, remain considerably ‘disciplined’ by focusing only on film studies aspect reviewing and integrating only the literature available within the film discipline along with extensive formal film analysis, generating a work of secondary literature. The addition of time as a component to the research stretches the domain of the project.