Bergson, Kant, Organism

The Critique of Judgment implicitly acknowledges the inadequacy of the Intellect to biological phenomena, and, hence, implicitly affirms the irreducibility of Biology to mechanistic Physics. Bergson agrees with that affirmation, furthermore proposing that Intuition is adequate where Intellect is not, i. e. as cognitive access to the primal biological force, Elan Vital. However, Intuition is, nevertheless, inadequate to a significant biological phenomenon, for a reason that is inverse to that of the shortcoming of Intellect. An Organism is a vital unity of multiple functions, of which, as Kant shows, Intellect can constitute only those functions, thereby requiring a complementary postulation of uncognizable Purposiveness to account for the unity entailed in any knowledge of Organism. In contrast, Bergson's Intuition is a consciousness of only unitary phenomena, which is reflected in his struggle to account for the multiplicity of physical relations that are unified in an Organism. His vacillating descriptions of the Matter of an Organism present that multiplicity as sometimes a degenerate aspect of, as sometimes an incidental byproduct of, but, in either case, as incommensurate with, its Spiritual unity. In other words, while asserting the irreducibility of Biology to Physics, Bergson leaves the inorganic processes that constitute an Organism severed from its vital principle.