“Can Serendipity Be a Philosophical Method?” – Anthony Nestel

This week’s TiM seminar addressed notions about serendipity. Serendipity was first defined by British writer Horace Walpole in a letter to indicate the art of discovering phenomena “by accident and sagacity while in pursuit of something else” (Van Andel & Bourcier 2009, 27). In their paper “Interdisciplinary Research Boosted by Serendipity” (2014) Darbellay, Moody, Sedooka & Steffen delineate the necessary requirements for serendipity: cognitive availability and sagacity. The first requirement speaks for itself, one must be cognitively available to encounter the accidental. The second requirement, however, is a bit more complicated in the way that one must possess sagacity and be “capable of analysing and understanding the surprise effect so as to exploit it for truly creative purposes” (Darbellay, Moody, Sedooka & Steffen 2014, 5). In other words, one must be in the possession of certain knowledge for serendipity to be distinguished. In the following reflection, I wish to place serendipity in close proximity to Bergson’s philosophical method of “intuition”. This conjunction will allow me to argue that serendipity can perform as a philosophical method as I identify many parallels between the two.

Bergson’s philosophical method cannot be confused with empathy, sympathy or feelings; it strives to restore the knowledge of intelligence as oriented outward and the knowledge of instinct as oriented inward. This entails some basis between the two forms of knowledge, which extracts its internal sympathetic perception of life as an unpredictable duration, an unfolding of life as an event from instinct, and the capability for generalization, abstractions and representation from intelligence (Bergson 1998). Consequently, intuition consists of two reciprocal stages. Stage one, which, I argue, corresponds to the moment of accident in the serendipitous event and which requires cognitive availability, is an introspection, an absorption in the durational continuity of life – in life’s becoming. This step, I argue, is also the deeply relational side of the event as it unfolds in the immersion of oneself with the becoming of the world. Consequently, the first step of this method requires abating the intellect’s grasp on the future of the object. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the intellect has no role in the method of intuition since, as Bergson argues, the second stage of the method depends on the intellect for intuition to have an impact. Therefore, intuition is not anti-intellectual since it requires language, a mediation of the intellect, after the fact, to be shared, communicated, to turn into a form of knowledge, as intuition is not capable to symbolise itself (Bergson 1998). Bergson’s stage two coincides with Darbellay, Moody, Sedooka & Steffen second requirement, that of sagacity. Sagacity, they argue, “is the step that sets in motion an exploratory process that must then be exploited by reason” (Darbellay, Moody, Sedooka & Steffen 2014, 5). In sum: sagacity and reason, or in Bergson’s terms the intellect, must catch and mediate the moment of becoming/chance/accident for it to have an impact, for it to be recognized as a moment of serendipity, for it to be serendipity.

References:

• Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution. New York: Dover Publications Inc.
• Darbellay, Frédéric, Moody, Zoe, Sedooka, Ayuko & Steffen, Gabriela. 2014. “Interdisciplinary Research Boosted by Serendipity.” Creativity Research Journal, 26:1, 1-10, DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2014.873653