Common errors: The belief that nonbeing precedes being. The confusion of being-present with Being. The belief that possibility precedes reality. The belief that disorder precedes order. That the primordial void exists prior to being. To see differences in degree when actually there are differences in kind.

The intuitive method: First, the stating of problems. Second, the discovery of genuine differences in kind. Third, the apprehension of duration.

First Rule: Intuition is a lived act. Being, order, existence are constituted by the creative act, that is to say, generative by the posing of the problem in duration (Durée). “True freedom is the power to decide, to constitute problems themselves.” The role of philosophy is to find and posit the problem. The properly stated question already entails its solution. Reject false problems, embrace true problems. More importantly, stating the problem is not a discovery (of what already exists). It is a creative act of invention (may never have happened). Often in practice this means inventing the terms (or mathematical formulations) in which the problem can be properly stated. Or, to state in another way, the problem has the solution it deserves.

False problems are two kinds: nonexistent problems (e.g., terms that confuse the more and the less) and badly stated questions (e.g., a badly analyzed composite). Upon closer inspection, though, the first kind is a special case of the second and more basic illusion: assuming differences in degree rather than kind. Intuition is the method by which we are able to dispel this illusion and rediscover differences in kind.

Second Rule: The intuitive method proceeds by division. That is because reality is presented as a mixture of composites. “The composite must therefore be divided according to qualitative and qualified tendencies. If the composite represents the fact, it must be divided into tendencies or pure preferences that only exist in principle. We go beyond experience, toward the conditions of experience.”

Example of method: “First, there is affectivity (a modification, variation, augmentation, or diminution of a body or its ability to act) which assumes that the body is something other than a mathematical point, and which gives it volume in space. Next, it is the recollections of memory that link the instants to each other and interpolate the past in the present. Finally, it is memory again in another form, in the form of a contraction of matter that makes the quality appear. (It is therefore memory that makes the body something other than instantaneous and gives it a duration and time).

Thus, “intuition leads us to go beyond the state of experience towards the conditions of experience.”

Third rule: problems are solved in terms of time. The duration (time + consciousness) is intuitively grasped as pure mobility and incompleteness. “Intuition is the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm, and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations, above or below us.” Duration is not a psychological state but a complex ontology. Duration is not merely a lived experience but a condition of experience, a continuity and a heterogeneity, a passage through differences. Duration is a qualitative multiplicity.