QuestionsCan science explain everything?Intelligence is made for matter, not for life
Can science explain everything?True, but not everything

Intelligence is made for matter, not for life

"The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life"; intelligence and intuition

Henri Bergson 1859 · 1941The free act springs from our whole personality: lived duration cannot be cut up like space.
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What it claims

Science, the work of intelligence, is true of matter but does not grasp life: for that, intuition is needed, which places us within life.

Why

Intelligence is made for making things: it cuts and fixes, so it grasps matter but lets slip life, which moves.

The same idea through history
Henri Bergson1907In Creative Evolution, Bergson explains intelligence by its origin: it arose to make tools, not to know the truth of things in themselves.
In short

"Intelligence is made for matter, not for life" is an argument by Henri Bergson (Creative Evolution, 1907, chapters II-III, 1907) on the question "Can science explain everything?" (answer: true, but not everything). Its claim: Science, the work of intelligence, is true of matter but does not grasp life: for that, intuition is needed, which places us within life. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5, P6, P7). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Creative Evolution, 1907, chapters II-III
Valid with an implicit premise

Why are we so strong at building bridges and rockets, and so clumsy at understanding what it is to live, to create, to change? Bergson answers through the history of our intelligence: it was formed to act on objects, so to cut them up, fix them, measure them and redo what has already been done. That is perfect for inert matter. But life is a continuous movement where something new keeps springing up, and what you cut into pieces is no longer life. He does not conclude that science is false: it is true of matter. He concludes that it does not tell everything, and that another way of knowing, intuition, is needed to approach life and duration.

P1Intelligence is, at its origin, the faculty of making artificial objects, above all tools to make tools, and of varying this making indefinitely.
P2Making requires cutting reality into fixed pieces, combining the old with the old and repeating the same movements for the same result. Intelligence is at ease only "in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead"; it admits neither the unforeseeable nor creation.
P3Life is a continuous becoming in which each instant brings something new and the causes are part of the effect: a movement one can feel within, but cannot rebuild from pieces.
P4Intelligence is turned toward inert matter, and science is its work: it delivers more and more completely the secret of physical operations, but of life it gives only "a translation in terms of inertia".
P5 · implicit premiseA faculty formed to fix and recombine elements cannot grasp from within a continuous, creative movement.
P6 · implicit premiseIf intelligence, and therefore science, is turned toward matter, what it says of matter is true.
P7 · implicit premiseIf intelligence does not grasp life from within, another faculty, turned toward life, is needed to know it: intuition, or instinct that has become conscious of itself.
Therefore science, the work of intelligence, is true of matter but does not grasp life: for that, intuition is needed, which places us within life.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, one can say intelligence arose for making but has outgrown its origin, as a hand made for grasping plays the piano: the origin of a faculty does not fix its limits. Without P7, one can accept that science does not say everything about life without accepting that another faculty could say more.
The argument is valid with the hidden premises P5, P6 and P7. P1 and P2 show that intelligence is made for the fixed; P3 that life is mobile; P5 concludes that intelligence does not grasp life; P4 and P6 that science is true of matter; P7 that intuition is then necessary.
Analogy. A film reel is made of still photographs: projected fast, they give the impression of movement, but no photograph contains the movement itself. Intelligence works like the reel: it takes still views of what moves. It is very good at putting them in order, but to feel movement you must be in the movement, not look at the pictures.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Bertrand Russell 1912 · attacks the conclusion

Russell notes that the condemnation of the intellect rests entirely on Bergson's theory of space, and he sets out to refute it by arguments, that is, with the intellect itself. The stakes are total: if Bergson fails in his condemnation of the intellect, "the intellect will succeed in its condemnation of him", for between the two it is war to the knife.

Bergson replies
Henri Bergson Bergson's reply
Bergson foresees the point: intuition "will use the very mechanism of intelligence" to show that its frames do not apply to life. And this is not a rejection: intelligence remains the luminous core of our knowledge and it is from it that comes "the shock" that raises intuition.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: can the intellect alone judge its own limits (Russell, who defends it by argument), or must one also stand outside it to see them (Bergson)? Neither side has won.
J
Jacques Monod 1970 · attacks premise 5

Monod holds that molecular biology has made vitalism unnecessary: living beings are chemical machines, explained by molecules, mutations and natural selection. Scientific intelligence has thus been able to grasp life, without any special intuition.

Bergson replies
Henri Bergson Bergsonian reply
Bergson does not deny that science explains the mechanisms of life; he says it does so by translating it "in terms of inertia", and that it claims no more. What it lets slip is invention itself: it reduces it to old elements rearranged, without having foreseen it.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: is "translating into mechanism" already understanding life (Monod), or letting its essence slip (Bergson)? It depends on what one means by understanding.
Bertrand Russell 1912 · attacks premise 7

Russell remarks that Bergson rarely gives reasons for his opinions: he relies on their charm and on the beauty of his style. An intuition that can be neither repeated nor checked would not be knowledge, only an impression.

Bergson replies
Henri Bergson Bergson's reply
Bergson grants that intuition alone is not enough: dialectic, he says, is "necessary to put intuition to the proof" and to pass it on to others. But he adds that it often only develops what intuition has brought: the philosopher who pushes concepts one behind another soon feels he has "lost his footing", and a new contact with intuition becomes necessary.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: Bergson describes intuition through images (the artist, sympathy) more than through a method. He specified it later (The Creative Mind, 1934), but the question of how to check it remains debated.