I have been reading (re-reading? I may have read it long ago) Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution. Bergson is a somewhat underrated philosopher, in my opinion. I was led to him by Deleuze. I was struck by this quote (I have transcribed, at length – typos are thus my own):
Human intelligence, as we represent it, is not at all what Plato taught in the allegory of the cave. Its function is not to look at passing shadows nor yet to turn itself round and contemplate the glaring sun. It has something else to do. Harnessed, like yoked oxen, to a heavy task, we feel the play of our muscles and joints, the weight of the plow and the resistance of the soil. To act and to know that we are acting, to come into touch with reality and even to live it, but only in the measure in which it concerns the work that is being accomplished and the furrow that is being plowed, such is the function of human intelligence. Yet a beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very force to labor and to live. From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that our being, or at least the intellect that guides it, has been formed therein by a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be an effort to disolve again into the Whole. Intelligence, reabsorbed into its principle, may thus live back again its own genesis. But the enterprise cannot be achieved in one stroke; it is necessarily collective and progressive. It consists in an interchange of impressions which, correcting and adding to each other, will end by expanding the humanity in us and making us even transcend it. [pp. 191-192 in my Dover edition]
To the extent that it is a coherent refutation of Plato's allegory, I like it a lot. To the extent it seems to embrace an almost naive pantheism, I don't, though I understand the impulse.
[daily log: walking, 6km]