What does playing chess blindfolded, learning the waltz, listening to a language we only half understand, and inventing new things or theories all have in common? They all require concentration, and mental effort. In this essay, Intellectual Effort, Bergson asks the question whether there is something to be learnt from examining the kinds of ideas and situations that call upon us to exercise mental, or intellectual, effort, examining all of the before mentioned examples. Is there a ‘grain’ to how to the intellect normally moves that in some instances, it must move against? What is it about these ideas that the mind finds itself pushing against them in an effort?
Bergson’s answer is that intellectual effort is felt not when me move from image to image (be those visual images, or auditory, or linguistic, or kinaesthetic, or so on). The mind is quite at home with these determinate images with clear boundaries. Instead, argues Bergson, effort is felt when we find ourselves trying to turn what he terms an ‘Idea’ or a ‘dynamic scheme’ into clear, determinate images. These dynamic schemes are not themselves images among others, they don’t have clear boundaries, and are instead dynamical fluxes of reciprocal interdependence. The work of remembering, of learning, of understanding, or of creating, when effort is felt, is the work of attempting to convert these schemes, mobile, tangled and whole, into images that are determinate and fixed, images that can be seen as mere isolated and interacting parts.
Towards the end of the essay, Bergson draws two interesting conclusions. The first is that in the production of a novel solution to a problem, the problem itself must have the status of the dynamic scheme: its role is to coordinate and suggest novel connections between what seemed previously to be disparate images. It’s what groups them together so they constitute a single, novel, solution. Thus, there is a difference of order and type between solutions and problems. The second conclusion is that this movement, from scheme to image, cannot be accounted for in terms of either efficient nor final causation, but requires a new form of causation between these two. Though not named in this essay, this new form of causation is actualization from the virtual, and will becomes central to Bergson’s account of life, and the organization of nature, explored in Creative Evolution, as well as to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, where the actualization of problem-Ideas forms a central piece of machinery.