Intuition and Feeling: Reading Bergson with Neidjie and Country

This article strives to connect Henri Bergson’s intuition of duration as the basis for thinking the universe as an enduring Whole in Creative Evolution with the teaching of feeling articulated by the Australian Indigenous elder Bill Neidjie in his book, Story About Feeling.1 This is a difficult relation to engender because these two thinkers belong to vastly different traditions and each thinker elaborates a conceptual world that is irreducible to the world of the other. The reasons that I wish to connect their thinking are political and ethical as well as philosophical. For all of the differences between Neidjie and Bergson, both thinkers elaborate rigorous methods for thinking as participation in the rhythms of life. Each thinker in his own way, teaches that participation in the rhythms of life is participation in the love of the world, the love of becoming, the love of the places in which we live and that we are. These teachings are crucially important in an age increasingly pervaded by nihilism, regression into xenophobic fantasies and wall building.