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Matter and Memory
One of the major works of an important modern philosopher, Matter & Memory investigates the autonomous yet interconnected planes formed by matter & perception on the one hand & memory & time on the other. Henry Bergson (1859-1941) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1927. His works include Time & Free Will, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Creative Evolution & The Creative Mind.
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1896
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About the author
Henri Bergson
438books775followersPopular and accessible works of French philosopher and writer Henri Louis Bergson include
Creative Evolution
(1907) and
The Creative Mind
(1934) and largely concern the importance of intuition as a means of attaining knowledge and the élan vital present in all living things; he won the Nobel Prize of 1927 for literature.
Although international fame and influence of this late 19th century-early 20th century man reached heights like cult during his lifetime, after the Second World War, his influence decreased notably. Whereas such thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre, and éԲ explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought, Bergsonism of Gilles Deleuze in 1966 marked the reawakening of interest. Deleuze recognized his concept of multiplicity as his most enduring contribution to thinking. This concept attempts to unify heterogeneity and continuity, contradictory features, in a consistent way. This revolutionary multiplicity despite its difficulty opens the way to a re-conception of community, or so many today think.
Although international fame and influence of this late 19th century-early 20th century man reached heights like cult during his lifetime, after the Second World War, his influence decreased notably. Whereas such thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre, and éԲ explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought, Bergsonism of Gilles Deleuze in 1966 marked the reawakening of interest. Deleuze recognized his concept of multiplicity as his most enduring contribution to thinking. This concept attempts to unify heterogeneity and continuity, contradictory features, in a consistent way. This revolutionary multiplicity despite its difficulty opens the way to a re-conception of community, or so many today think.
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October 24, 2013
no one cares what I think
October 23, 2015
Read as part of my 2015 Modernists project.
"But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation." - Virginia Woolf - Orlando
I could have chosen countless other quotes to illustrate a point made by countless others: Bergson's philosopy was a vital influence upon, and is a vital tool for understanding, Modernist literature.
Memory and Time. Perception and Duration. The Body.
He says things like:
"we extend to the series of memories, in time, that obligation of containing and being contained which applies only to the collection of bodies instantaneously perceived in space. The fundamental illusion consists in transferring to duration itself, in its continuous flow, the form of the instantaneous sections which we make in it."
and
" In reality there is no one rhythm of duration ; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being. To conceive of durations of different tensions is perhaps both difficult and strange to our mind, because we have acquired the useful habit of substituting for the true duration, lived by consciousness, an homogeneous and independent Time ; but, in the first place, it is easy, as we have shown, to detect the illusion which renders such a thought foreign to us, and, secondly, this idea has in its favour, at bottom, the tacit agreement of our consciousness. Do we not sometimes perceive in ourselves, in sleep, two contemporaneous and distinct persons of whom one sleeps a few minutes, while the other's dream fills days and weeks ? And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution ? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.
To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself, although the material universe is not essentially different or distinct from the representation which we have of it. In one sense, my perception is indeed truly within me, since it contracts into a single moment of my duration that which, taken in itself, spreads over an incalculable number of moments. But, if you abolish my consciousness, the material universe subsists exactly as it was; only, since you have removed that particular rhythm of duration which was the condition of my action upon things, these things draw back into themselves, mark as many moments in their own existence as science distinguishes in it ; and sensible qualities, without vanishing, are spread and diluted in an incomparably more divided duration. Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body. In short, try first to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience ; then resolve the motionless continuity of their qualities into vibrations on the spot ; finally fix your attention on these movements, by abstracting from the divisible space which underlies them and considering only their mobility that undivided act which our consciousness becomes aware of in our own movements): you will thus obtain a vision of matter, fatiguing perhaps for your imagination, but pure, and freed from all that the exigencies of life compel you to add to it in external perception.-Now bring back consciousness, and with it the exigencies of life: at long, very long, intervals, and by as many leaps over enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which this time are bound to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colours will condense an infinity of elementary repetitions and changes. In just the same way the multitudinous successive positions of a runner are contracted into a single symbolic attitude, which our eyes perceive, which art reproduces, and which becomes for us all the image of a man running. The glance which falls at any moment on the things about us only takes in the effects of a multiplicity of inner repetitions and evolutions, effects which are, for that very reason, discontinuous, and into which we bring back continuity by the relative movements that we attribute to 'objects' in space. The change is everywhere, but inward; we localize it here and there, but outwardly; and thus we constitute bodies which are both stable as to their qualities and mobile as to their positions, a mere change of place summing up in itself, to our eyes, the universal transformation.�
Now, whether or not I think he is right is sort of beside the point here, what is interesting for me is how clearly all this provides a philosophical underpinning for what Woolf, Richardson, Joyce etc were trying to do.
"But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation." - Virginia Woolf - Orlando
I could have chosen countless other quotes to illustrate a point made by countless others: Bergson's philosopy was a vital influence upon, and is a vital tool for understanding, Modernist literature.
Memory and Time. Perception and Duration. The Body.
He says things like:
"we extend to the series of memories, in time, that obligation of containing and being contained which applies only to the collection of bodies instantaneously perceived in space. The fundamental illusion consists in transferring to duration itself, in its continuous flow, the form of the instantaneous sections which we make in it."
and
" In reality there is no one rhythm of duration ; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix their respective places in the scale of being. To conceive of durations of different tensions is perhaps both difficult and strange to our mind, because we have acquired the useful habit of substituting for the true duration, lived by consciousness, an homogeneous and independent Time ; but, in the first place, it is easy, as we have shown, to detect the illusion which renders such a thought foreign to us, and, secondly, this idea has in its favour, at bottom, the tacit agreement of our consciousness. Do we not sometimes perceive in ourselves, in sleep, two contemporaneous and distinct persons of whom one sleeps a few minutes, while the other's dream fills days and weeks ? And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution ? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.
To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself, although the material universe is not essentially different or distinct from the representation which we have of it. In one sense, my perception is indeed truly within me, since it contracts into a single moment of my duration that which, taken in itself, spreads over an incalculable number of moments. But, if you abolish my consciousness, the material universe subsists exactly as it was; only, since you have removed that particular rhythm of duration which was the condition of my action upon things, these things draw back into themselves, mark as many moments in their own existence as science distinguishes in it ; and sensible qualities, without vanishing, are spread and diluted in an incomparably more divided duration. Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body. In short, try first to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience ; then resolve the motionless continuity of their qualities into vibrations on the spot ; finally fix your attention on these movements, by abstracting from the divisible space which underlies them and considering only their mobility that undivided act which our consciousness becomes aware of in our own movements): you will thus obtain a vision of matter, fatiguing perhaps for your imagination, but pure, and freed from all that the exigencies of life compel you to add to it in external perception.-Now bring back consciousness, and with it the exigencies of life: at long, very long, intervals, and by as many leaps over enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which this time are bound to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colours will condense an infinity of elementary repetitions and changes. In just the same way the multitudinous successive positions of a runner are contracted into a single symbolic attitude, which our eyes perceive, which art reproduces, and which becomes for us all the image of a man running. The glance which falls at any moment on the things about us only takes in the effects of a multiplicity of inner repetitions and evolutions, effects which are, for that very reason, discontinuous, and into which we bring back continuity by the relative movements that we attribute to 'objects' in space. The change is everywhere, but inward; we localize it here and there, but outwardly; and thus we constitute bodies which are both stable as to their qualities and mobile as to their positions, a mere change of place summing up in itself, to our eyes, the universal transformation.�
Now, whether or not I think he is right is sort of beside the point here, what is interesting for me is how clearly all this provides a philosophical underpinning for what Woolf, Richardson, Joyce etc were trying to do.
June 29, 2024
if you like this review i now have website:
180914 this is a much later addition: rather than read this again, or read about it- i have decided to read the last of his big books. the u library does not have much bergson, as i think the teaching focus is here primarily analytic. such does not encourage me in thought as much as rereading the first chapter here�
030912 first review: this is 3rd book i have read by henri bergson, published first in 1896. i think it would be better as a study text rather than attempting to read it like any work of fiction because, of course, this is not fiction but philosophy. even in translation from french, this has some beautiful writing, and i can certainly see how it could be widely read, admired, worked on, and how it could have such affect on merleau-ponty for example. have not read it, but apparently deleuze wrote a book that started reappraisal of bergson, so something to get... (now read )�
yes beautiful writing, but it took me several readings to get through, rereading his longer sentences heavy with clauses and subclauses, with qualifications, with determinations not only negative but positive. the theme seems to be that scientific reasoning and ontology is not the best way to understand human experience of living, how materialism and idealism are both self-defeating, indeed contradicting themselves, and he does refer to some philosophers of common reading- berkeley, kant- but insists all their attempts to surpass the endemic problems are doomed to failure, simply because they operate of a metaphysics of space and not time...
yes beautiful writing, yes helpful i had read those several books on bergson before this- i had read the first 77 pages one long flight, but when i landed i did not read on and when i returned home i did not resume. so here, a year later, i reread the 77 pages, then went on. i do not know if this is the right way to read philosophy but it helped with bergson, because i could now sense how time is the nature of in-extensive thought, how memory works...
but this is all in subjective discovery, as i thought of time, thought of begson's arguments, how pure perception is misunderstood as being only a difference of degree, from memory, from thought, where the perceived is out in the objective world, how time is misunderstood on the common model of space, how time is heterogeneous and space, of any conception, is homogenous. he has answers for zeno's paradoxes of movement such as achilles and the turtle, such as the arrow in flight, for these are examples of misunderstanding time as a succession of infinitely divisible, atomistic, points, rather than of duration...
yes at the moment- at this duration- i am interested in time, and wonder how this might persist and change when no longer hostage to an essential dualism of physical and psychical, this third conception of the world that exceeds our physical perception but not therefore considered beyond reality because it is beyond that hill- so how can we say these moments- these durations- are not real also despite being beyond our perception? science gives us an infinite space, does this also mean infinite time? well this precedes einstein so i do not know...
yes there are questions- but do i read philosophy for something like answers complete or absolute, or answers leading to further questions? i think of my 3 times rule for all aesthetic experiences: 1- the first time any pleasure is heightened by novelty, 2- any pleasure pales in memory of the first time, 3- pleasure now abstracted from novelty or jadedness, now independent of time...
yes there is great thought in here. i think it would be easy to read, to understand, but then i have read a lot of philosophy and on him- bergson- in particular, so maybe i am wrong. maybe trying to write an essay might clarify my difficulties with full grasp of his arguments, but it is enough that i will go on to read more of bergson...
more
180914 this is a much later addition: rather than read this again, or read about it- i have decided to read the last of his big books. the u library does not have much bergson, as i think the teaching focus is here primarily analytic. such does not encourage me in thought as much as rereading the first chapter here�
030912 first review: this is 3rd book i have read by henri bergson, published first in 1896. i think it would be better as a study text rather than attempting to read it like any work of fiction because, of course, this is not fiction but philosophy. even in translation from french, this has some beautiful writing, and i can certainly see how it could be widely read, admired, worked on, and how it could have such affect on merleau-ponty for example. have not read it, but apparently deleuze wrote a book that started reappraisal of bergson, so something to get... (now read )�
yes beautiful writing, but it took me several readings to get through, rereading his longer sentences heavy with clauses and subclauses, with qualifications, with determinations not only negative but positive. the theme seems to be that scientific reasoning and ontology is not the best way to understand human experience of living, how materialism and idealism are both self-defeating, indeed contradicting themselves, and he does refer to some philosophers of common reading- berkeley, kant- but insists all their attempts to surpass the endemic problems are doomed to failure, simply because they operate of a metaphysics of space and not time...
yes beautiful writing, yes helpful i had read those several books on bergson before this- i had read the first 77 pages one long flight, but when i landed i did not read on and when i returned home i did not resume. so here, a year later, i reread the 77 pages, then went on. i do not know if this is the right way to read philosophy but it helped with bergson, because i could now sense how time is the nature of in-extensive thought, how memory works...
but this is all in subjective discovery, as i thought of time, thought of begson's arguments, how pure perception is misunderstood as being only a difference of degree, from memory, from thought, where the perceived is out in the objective world, how time is misunderstood on the common model of space, how time is heterogeneous and space, of any conception, is homogenous. he has answers for zeno's paradoxes of movement such as achilles and the turtle, such as the arrow in flight, for these are examples of misunderstanding time as a succession of infinitely divisible, atomistic, points, rather than of duration...
yes at the moment- at this duration- i am interested in time, and wonder how this might persist and change when no longer hostage to an essential dualism of physical and psychical, this third conception of the world that exceeds our physical perception but not therefore considered beyond reality because it is beyond that hill- so how can we say these moments- these durations- are not real also despite being beyond our perception? science gives us an infinite space, does this also mean infinite time? well this precedes einstein so i do not know...
yes there are questions- but do i read philosophy for something like answers complete or absolute, or answers leading to further questions? i think of my 3 times rule for all aesthetic experiences: 1- the first time any pleasure is heightened by novelty, 2- any pleasure pales in memory of the first time, 3- pleasure now abstracted from novelty or jadedness, now independent of time...
yes there is great thought in here. i think it would be easy to read, to understand, but then i have read a lot of philosophy and on him- bergson- in particular, so maybe i am wrong. maybe trying to write an essay might clarify my difficulties with full grasp of his arguments, but it is enough that i will go on to read more of bergson...
more
May 6, 2025
Reading Bergson's Matter And Memory
I have been fortunate to participate in an online philosophy reading group on Henri Bergson (1859 -- 1941). With the guidance of both an experienced scholar and teacher and a new PhD who wrote a dissertation on Bergson, our group read "Time and Free Will" (1889) followed by "Matter and Memory" (1896). Following a holiday break, we will study Bergson's most famous work, "Creative Evolution" (1907). Bergson was for a time a surprisingly popular, even faddish, philosopher but fell into obscurity even during the latter part of his life. He received the 1927 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"Matter and Memory" is an extraordinarily difficult book. It is in turn both beautifully written and insightful and maddingly opaque. Bergson states his them at the outset: "This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter and tries to determine the relationship of one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory." The broad goal of the book is to challenge the scientific, naturalistic worldview that was prevalent in Bergson's time and remains so today. He moved and impressed many readers from many walks of life but the difficulty is in the detail. Bergson proceeded by examining the realist -- idealist dichotomy in philosophy. He tried to find shared assumptions underlying both sides of this dichotomy and then to undermine these shared assumptions by taking a different path. The result was a process oriented philosophy with ties to the work of Bergson's friend, William James, and a little later to the work of Alfred North Whitehead.
The book consists of an Introduction, four lengthy chapters, and a Summary and Conclusion. The approach of the book is more concentric than linear. Each part says essentially the same thing but in different ways and with different levels of detail. It tries to explain the nature of reality and the relationship of mind and spirit. It examines and redefines the natures of perception and the nature of memory. Bergson vehemently denies that perception and memory are located "in" the brain and nervous system but sees instead the brain as part of a long processual chain. He distinguishes and relates "pure" perception and "pure memory" and how they work together and differ. He denies that memory is a weaker form of perception stored in and a function of the brain. He sees memory as part of a spiritual flow that informs and shapes perception. Perception is of images shaped by memory. It functions spatially through the body and is invariably directed to the solving of practical problems ranging from where to find food through the intricacies of science. Perception is goal-directed, active, and forward-looking and occurs in space. Memory is contemplative, reflective, and is within the continued durational flow of time. There is a tension of varying degrees between the two in every experience.
Bergson offers a variety of approaches in developing his position. These range from argument, analysis of experience, discussion of the scientific findings of his day, psychology, drawings and illustrations, metaphor, introspection, and intuition. The approaches are mixed together. It is easy to remember the eloquent, beautiful, lucid passages at the expense of the sections of the book that are difficult.
In the first part of the book, Bergson tries to get beyond idealism and realism by developing his philosophy of images and the basis for his discussion of the relationship between action and reflection. In the second and for me most difficult section of the book Bergson uses scientific findings of his day to argue against a materialistic, epiphenomenal understanding of thought and memory. The third part of the book was, for me, philosophically the most interesting and clearest written, difficult though it is. It discusses the nature of memory and perception, both "pure" -- for themselves and mixed with each other as they are in experience. It concerns the relationship and interweaving of spirit and body. An important part of this chapter is developed through Bergson's use and discussion of a figure of an inverted cone. We spent substantial time in our online class discussing this figure. The fourth part of the book draws broad philosophical conclusions about the nature of reality as continuous, flowing, temporal and interconnected, with perceptions of discrete objects in space only an limited and specialized part of this flow. Among other things, Bergson makes arguments founded upon and attempting to refute the famous paradoxes about space and motion of Zeno.
I read the book more than once, followed the discussions in our class and read some good secondary source material. There is some beautifully evocative material in "Matter and Memory" but I overall am confused about what to make of the book. It was valuable to study the book in the company of other interested readers. With all the popularity that Bergson once had, this is not a book for casual reading.
Robin Friedman
I have been fortunate to participate in an online philosophy reading group on Henri Bergson (1859 -- 1941). With the guidance of both an experienced scholar and teacher and a new PhD who wrote a dissertation on Bergson, our group read "Time and Free Will" (1889) followed by "Matter and Memory" (1896). Following a holiday break, we will study Bergson's most famous work, "Creative Evolution" (1907). Bergson was for a time a surprisingly popular, even faddish, philosopher but fell into obscurity even during the latter part of his life. He received the 1927 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"Matter and Memory" is an extraordinarily difficult book. It is in turn both beautifully written and insightful and maddingly opaque. Bergson states his them at the outset: "This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter and tries to determine the relationship of one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory." The broad goal of the book is to challenge the scientific, naturalistic worldview that was prevalent in Bergson's time and remains so today. He moved and impressed many readers from many walks of life but the difficulty is in the detail. Bergson proceeded by examining the realist -- idealist dichotomy in philosophy. He tried to find shared assumptions underlying both sides of this dichotomy and then to undermine these shared assumptions by taking a different path. The result was a process oriented philosophy with ties to the work of Bergson's friend, William James, and a little later to the work of Alfred North Whitehead.
The book consists of an Introduction, four lengthy chapters, and a Summary and Conclusion. The approach of the book is more concentric than linear. Each part says essentially the same thing but in different ways and with different levels of detail. It tries to explain the nature of reality and the relationship of mind and spirit. It examines and redefines the natures of perception and the nature of memory. Bergson vehemently denies that perception and memory are located "in" the brain and nervous system but sees instead the brain as part of a long processual chain. He distinguishes and relates "pure" perception and "pure memory" and how they work together and differ. He denies that memory is a weaker form of perception stored in and a function of the brain. He sees memory as part of a spiritual flow that informs and shapes perception. Perception is of images shaped by memory. It functions spatially through the body and is invariably directed to the solving of practical problems ranging from where to find food through the intricacies of science. Perception is goal-directed, active, and forward-looking and occurs in space. Memory is contemplative, reflective, and is within the continued durational flow of time. There is a tension of varying degrees between the two in every experience.
Bergson offers a variety of approaches in developing his position. These range from argument, analysis of experience, discussion of the scientific findings of his day, psychology, drawings and illustrations, metaphor, introspection, and intuition. The approaches are mixed together. It is easy to remember the eloquent, beautiful, lucid passages at the expense of the sections of the book that are difficult.
In the first part of the book, Bergson tries to get beyond idealism and realism by developing his philosophy of images and the basis for his discussion of the relationship between action and reflection. In the second and for me most difficult section of the book Bergson uses scientific findings of his day to argue against a materialistic, epiphenomenal understanding of thought and memory. The third part of the book was, for me, philosophically the most interesting and clearest written, difficult though it is. It discusses the nature of memory and perception, both "pure" -- for themselves and mixed with each other as they are in experience. It concerns the relationship and interweaving of spirit and body. An important part of this chapter is developed through Bergson's use and discussion of a figure of an inverted cone. We spent substantial time in our online class discussing this figure. The fourth part of the book draws broad philosophical conclusions about the nature of reality as continuous, flowing, temporal and interconnected, with perceptions of discrete objects in space only an limited and specialized part of this flow. Among other things, Bergson makes arguments founded upon and attempting to refute the famous paradoxes about space and motion of Zeno.
I read the book more than once, followed the discussions in our class and read some good secondary source material. There is some beautifully evocative material in "Matter and Memory" but I overall am confused about what to make of the book. It was valuable to study the book in the company of other interested readers. With all the popularity that Bergson once had, this is not a book for casual reading.
Robin Friedman
Read
July 25, 2019Okuması ve kavraması biraz güç olsa ve bazı noktalarda çok spesifik gelse de, zaman üzerine söyledikleri düşüncenin akışını değiştirecek ölçüde. Temel olarak geçmiş ve geleceğin şimdinin içinde barındığı fikrinden yola çıkarak lineer zaman algısına karşıt bir tez sunuyor Bergson. Postmodern edebiyatta zamanın çözünmesini, Bergson üzerinden düşününmek yeni bir kapı açıyor mesela.
April 25, 2014
Mnémosyne, la mère des Muses
Matière et Mémoire est un essai écrit par Henri Bergson un professeur de philosophie français de la troisième république. Il s'agit de trouver une explication vraisemblable à l'articulation entre le corps et l'esprit, dans l'hypothèse dualiste. Il écarte les visions monistes, qu'elles soient matérialistes ou idéalistes, comme celle de Berkeley ( , ). Pour ce faire, il problématise une fonction capitale de l'entendement, et que Kant avait un peu négligé dans ses critiques, la mémoire. Pour appuyer le plus fortement possible sa conviction dualiste, il va scinder la mémoire en deux types, l'une matérielle, mécanique, basée sur l'apprentissage, la répétition, et l'autre plus spirituelle, qui en le souvenir de chaque événement ponctuel de notre vie, et dont le retour à notre conscience n'intervient que par association. Il corrobore son système par des observations cliniques de troubles psychiques intrigants et remarquables, ce qui lui sert à montrer que la mémoire de ces événements ne se situe jamais en une zone précise du cerveau, et donc réside vraisemblablement hors du corps. Il établit donc une différence de nature entre les perceptions, venues du monde extérieur, et les affections, qui viennent de l'intérieur.
Cette partition des facultés de la mémoire en deux essences distinctes il faut les réconcilier en rendant notre perception dépendante de nos souvenirs par un processus d'actions réciproques et interdépendantes qu'il illustre par un joli schéma géométrique. En gros, après avoir identifié dans le monde matériel la mémoire mécanique et l'action réflexe, il identifie de la même manière la mémoire spirituelle et métaphysique comme une sorte d'entonnoir qui injecte la liberté (c'est à dire une perturbation des lois déterministes du monde matériel) par nos actions spontanées.
Il conclue ainsi par l'existence du libre-arbitre. Je suppose qu'il pense comme tant d'autres que sans lui, il n'y a point de morale. C'est un livre intéressant, même si comme tous les livres traitant de métaphysique, il est en quelque sorte contraint de poser des hypostases par-ci par-là, et pour les faire accepter plus aisément au lecteur engoncé dans la torpeur de ses certitudes, d'user des vieilles ficelles des philosophes: traiter de "vulgaire" les opinions contraires, jargonner par moment, écrire en italique, utiliser des néologismes, caricaturer deux extrêmes pour se poser en juste milieu, et enfin la plus efficace des figures rhétoriques: l'affirmation! Mais ces petites ruses inévitables restent toutefois assez discrètes, et la lecture en reste plaisante, et sa théorie vraisemblable. A défaut d'être plus instruit, on aura bien rêvé, et passé un bon moment à mettre sa cervelle à l'alambic. Il parait qu'il était lié avec Proust. Je me demande si ses ratiocinations ont influencé l'écrivain?
Henri Bergson
March 4, 2020
Note: this review is a combination of Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907). It also incorporates the main thesis of Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889). This, due to the overlap and continuity in all of these works.
Creative Evolution (1907) is arguably Henri Bergson’s most matured and comprehensive account of reality. In it, he draws heavily from his earlier works Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896), and intertwines his views on time, space, matter and mind with the (then new) evolutionary biology. The result is a very original framework with which to view the world.
Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, and this is a very important landmark. It shows Bergson’s artistic talents and his philosophical genius. But it is important in another sense: Bergson was no real philosopher � at least in the sense philosophy is usually understood � but more of an artist. Perhaps, some might even call him a secular theologian. Anyway, if you have to compare Bergson to some predecessor, Plotinus comes to mind. Why? Plotinus drew from Plato, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism and a myriad other source, and drew up a total worldview in which the concept of ‘immanence� was all-important.
Likewise, Bergson draws up a whole philosophy, borrowing ideas of Descartes, Kant, modern physics and modern biology to synthesize a grand worldview, ultimately based on the notion of ‘intuition�. Both Plotinus and Bergson place a high value on the immanence of the world � reality is that which immediately shows itself to us � intuitively, so to speak. All attempts to describe, explain or conceptualize reality leads to distorted, disfigured views of the world.
There are major differences between Plotinus and Bergson, though. The most important being that Plotinus � steeped as he was in Ancient philosophy � recognized the gradualness of reality. The Whole of reality � i.e. God � is perfectly immanent, but all of its parts partake in this whole, leading to a ladder of reality, on which mankind is placed somewhere between dead matter and God. We are gifted with mind, yet we also are partly material.
For Bergson, this gradualness of reality is the product of a habitual illusion. Most of the history of philosophy (and certainly all of the old debates) is riddled with this illusion of gradualness. Plato’s theory of Forms and Aristotle’s First Mover are postulates, necessary because reality is conceived to be immutable. Greek philosophy, as modern science, saw itself confronted with a world that is composed of moments, states and forms. These are simply parts � the mind immediately leads us to the concept of a whole � a series of moments, a sequence of states, an order of forms. It is these series that were (and are) conceptualized as eternal Forms, Prime Movers or mathematical equations.
All of the old philosophical debates are then reduced to mere pseudo-problems, as products of the habits of our mind. Understanding our mind properly would then lead to dissolving of all these problems. It is this that Bergson attempts in all of his works. Or rather: it is his main aim. It is in this domain that Bergson’s philosophy is truly unique, impressive and baffling.
With the risk of oversimplifying Bergson’s theories, this is Bergson’s account of the world.
Drawing on Descartes� dualism, Bergson claims there is matter and mind. Matter is the objective world that confronts us during our conscious life. Mind is our intuitive sense of reality. Usually, philosophers would attempt to place perception and/or intellect in the sphere of the mind. Not for Bergson. He claims perception is simply the prolongation of material movements � tendencies. Tendencies of what? Of our bodies. Our bodies are peculiar, in the sense that they are material objects, yet also are intrinsically connected to our inner consciousness. This is what distinguishes us from dead matter, plants, and animals.
Seeing as there are consciousness and physical bodies, our lives come with two aspects. Normally, most of the time, we are simply physical bodies, solely occupied with practical life. We perceive, we act. Scientists study the human body and can describe how physical movements transmit energies to our sense apparatus, which relates these impulses to our brains. Our brains then send out transmissions as a result of these movements. In short: our brain is the centre, receiving and sending messages to our peripheral bodily locations. For Bergson, the human body � as indeed the bodies of all living organisms � is nothing but a sensory-motor system.
But, as said, human beings have consciousness. That is, we are not simply machines operating on the principle of stimulus-response. And so it is with most ‘higher� animals. Apart from perception, we have intellect. This is the ability to deduce and induce new data from given data. Ultimately, these rest on geometrical and logical principles, which themselves are the foundation of both our common sense grasp of reality and our scientific theories (like the conceptions of space and time in physics). With Bergson, intellect is placed firmly in the bodily organism.
To explain both perception and intellect, Bergson draws on evolutionary biology � these faculties are adaptations of organisms that allow for goal-directed behaviour. In short, he uses a functionalist approach when explain both our perception and intellect.
So how does it answer the above mentioned philosophical problems? Well it doesn’t � yet. These philosophical debates and problems (mostly metaphysical) are the results of this biological way of thinking. We are animals, living social lives. We use language to communicate with others; language uses symbols that refer to particular objecting and things in the world; and this mechanism forces a particular, physical way of thinking on us. We conceptualize reality as a collection of parts (objects, things) and their relations, and express it to others. While this worldview has obvious evolutionary value � otherwise we wouldn’t think this way and hadn’t changed the world so profoundly � it is a distorted view of the world. It tricks us into believing we have perceived reality, yet the metaphysical implications of this worldview should warn us (or have warned us) about the illusoriness of this approach.
For Bergson, this material world is simply a natural product of evolution.
The task of the philosopher is to deconstruct it, and to unravel the true way of the world. When we talk about consciousness, or life, we are moving in a totally different region. We should un-learn the intellectual way of viewing the world � of chopping it up into infinite collections of moments, states, and forms. In Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson attempted to show that psychologists look at human consciousness as a collection of quantitative states, while it truly is a continuous flow of qualitative states. Measuring, or even conceptualizing any state artificially destroys the continuity, movement and quality of the very thing the psychologist tries to study. Consciousness is duration � a totally different region from the objective space-time in which the scientist (as well as the common sense person) operates. Or rather, all spatial and temporal ideas are intellectual constructs, attempts at intellectually grasping un-graspable intuitions. E.g. we imagine duration as moments, which can be pictured to ourselves as (an infinite collection of) points on a line. Yet this picture is a geometrical representation of an intuition � it quantifies a qualitative state.
Likewise, in Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson attempted to show that picturing the world as (infinite) collections of moments, states and forms, is simply the product of the correlation of our consciousness and the material world (including our brains). Scientists and philosophers have debated for ages (and still do) how physical brain states relate to conscious states. There seems to be an unbridgeable chasm between the objects of neuroscience and psychology. Bergson’s theory is that this is a pseudo-problem, the result of our intellectual way of viewing the world (including ourselves). Intuitively, we experience our body in the here and now. We are (paraphrasing him) a personal entity continuously eating our way into the future. We literally our only here and now, and our whole notion of past and future comes from our memory. That is, we are built to learn from past experiences. This means we adapt ourselves to our current situation based on prior events. Physically, this is simply the formation of tendencies in the brain.
Psychologically, this past does not exist. All we are, is our current (qualitative) state, which itself is a continuously moving intuition. Pure duration. That is, prior states are selected � based mostly on practical needs, sometimes on speculative desires � and are immediately fused with our present state. Even this way of putting it stunts the meaning of Bergson: he literally means there is no conscious past. All selected memories are not memories of events as they happened � they are intrinsically part of the present. The past never comes back, what we believe to be memories of the past, are our present states fusing (selectively) past states with current states, leading to totally new states. In short: consciousness continuously creates states out of current and past experiences.
Similarly, there is no future. Due to the workings of our memory, we form notions of a past, as distinguished from the present. Now, this seems to lead us also towards a future. If I was, and now am, during those past moments, the current ‘I� was part of the (‘my�) future. But this is an illusion. Just like there is no (conscious) past, there is no (conscious) future. There is simply me, as pure consciousness, experiencing a continuous flow of ever-changing states.
(I am aware of my creaky description of this mechanism � Bergson is already struggling to express it in a 300 page book, and given my very limited way of expression this only greatens the problem. Once you grasp it, is easy to see who he means�)
And now we have hit upon Bergson’s deepest insight. There is a dualism between inner consciousness and external materiality. The first is the real of pure duration, continuity, movement; the second is the realm of our brain, physical body, all of Nature. Due to language and social life, we express the second realm in terms of objects and their relations in space-time. Our intellect, so used in viewing the world in this way, internalizes this worldview and intellectualizes our intuitions, so to speak. We quantify qualitative states of consciousness; we transform movement into immobility; we represent time and movement as (infinite collections of) points in space-time.
So far, all we have dealt with are Bergson’s main theories from Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896). What does this have to do with Creative Evolution (1907)? Well, like I mentioned at the beginning of this review: it is his magnum opus. He takes all of his earlier ideas and synthesizes them with evolutionary biology.
The biologist � assuming the unprovable notion that he has the same intellectual and perceptive faculties as his fellow human beings � falls into the same trap as the physicist, psychologist and common sense person. He studies living organisms. Life is a central concept here: What distinguishes living organisms from dead matter? He will explain this in terms of biochemical processes, and trace this line of development back into the remote past. Really, life is nothing but the active collection of energy to transform it into something new.
The plant collects energy from the sun, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and water from the soil, in order to produce carbohydrates. It is nothing but a transformation (with an emphasis on form) of energies. This type of living is rather basic. In the past, certain organisms developed ways to outsource this type of living (to plants) and to eat the organisms (plants) that transform energies. So animals eat plants to collect energy, in order to produce movement (to collect energy, etc.). Now, this leads to organisms competing for resources � plants for sunlight and water, animals for plants or other animals � so an arms race of protective apparatus. And this leads to better weaponry to best these protections. Etc.
In short, we see life developing from stationary plant life to moving animal life. Sensory-motor systems become a necessity for animals, guided under the principle of natural selection. Now it starts to pay to interfere with goal-setting, flexibility becomes a premium, resulting ever higher specialization of intellectual capabilities. In short: life branches out, organisms find unique ways of adapting themselves to their ever-changing environment, and intellect becomes one of these adaptations. An ever expanding intellect, due to ever expanding cortical specialization, leads, ultimately, to man.
Bergson claims that man is unique, of a different kind, compared to all other organisms. While instinct, perception and intellect are gradual properties, possessed by many organisms in some way or other, it is only in man that life manifests itself, to itself. That is, man is himself a state of this ever-flowing, continuous line of development � a state of life � but at the same time he is able to grasp this way of being intuitively. Other animals, supposedly, lack this capacity. The horse might be intelligent in remembering his care taker and the times it is fed, but it doesn’t intuitively grasp that it’s alive. Man does.
Now, we can wrap up all of Bergson’s theories rather easily. Just like (pure) consciousness is a totally different region from the material world, so life is a totally different region from the natural world. For Bergson, life is a primordial impulsion, given to dead matter � enlivening matter, so to speak � which then sets of a continuous ever-flowing chain of explosions, moving endlessly in all directions. This leads to the endless tree of life, of which we are simply one state.
The biologist � still driven by the same sort of essentialist thinking of Aristotle or formalistic thinking of Plato � artificially chops up this tree of life in his pursuit of distinct varieties and species. He looks for essences and static forms in qualitative, ever-moving forms of life. What is a Siberian tiger? When does an organism qualify to be a Siberian tiger? What are the essential traits an organism has to have to qualify as a Siberian tiger? These questions, ultimately, are unanswerable, since they simply depend on our own linguistic conventions. Just like the quip that ‘IQ is what the IQ test measures� we can say ‘A Siberian tiger is what the biologist decides to measure�.
------------------------------------------------
(final paragraphs continue in comment section.)
Creative Evolution (1907) is arguably Henri Bergson’s most matured and comprehensive account of reality. In it, he draws heavily from his earlier works Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896), and intertwines his views on time, space, matter and mind with the (then new) evolutionary biology. The result is a very original framework with which to view the world.
Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, and this is a very important landmark. It shows Bergson’s artistic talents and his philosophical genius. But it is important in another sense: Bergson was no real philosopher � at least in the sense philosophy is usually understood � but more of an artist. Perhaps, some might even call him a secular theologian. Anyway, if you have to compare Bergson to some predecessor, Plotinus comes to mind. Why? Plotinus drew from Plato, Neo-Platonism, Stoicism and a myriad other source, and drew up a total worldview in which the concept of ‘immanence� was all-important.
Likewise, Bergson draws up a whole philosophy, borrowing ideas of Descartes, Kant, modern physics and modern biology to synthesize a grand worldview, ultimately based on the notion of ‘intuition�. Both Plotinus and Bergson place a high value on the immanence of the world � reality is that which immediately shows itself to us � intuitively, so to speak. All attempts to describe, explain or conceptualize reality leads to distorted, disfigured views of the world.
There are major differences between Plotinus and Bergson, though. The most important being that Plotinus � steeped as he was in Ancient philosophy � recognized the gradualness of reality. The Whole of reality � i.e. God � is perfectly immanent, but all of its parts partake in this whole, leading to a ladder of reality, on which mankind is placed somewhere between dead matter and God. We are gifted with mind, yet we also are partly material.
For Bergson, this gradualness of reality is the product of a habitual illusion. Most of the history of philosophy (and certainly all of the old debates) is riddled with this illusion of gradualness. Plato’s theory of Forms and Aristotle’s First Mover are postulates, necessary because reality is conceived to be immutable. Greek philosophy, as modern science, saw itself confronted with a world that is composed of moments, states and forms. These are simply parts � the mind immediately leads us to the concept of a whole � a series of moments, a sequence of states, an order of forms. It is these series that were (and are) conceptualized as eternal Forms, Prime Movers or mathematical equations.
All of the old philosophical debates are then reduced to mere pseudo-problems, as products of the habits of our mind. Understanding our mind properly would then lead to dissolving of all these problems. It is this that Bergson attempts in all of his works. Or rather: it is his main aim. It is in this domain that Bergson’s philosophy is truly unique, impressive and baffling.
With the risk of oversimplifying Bergson’s theories, this is Bergson’s account of the world.
Drawing on Descartes� dualism, Bergson claims there is matter and mind. Matter is the objective world that confronts us during our conscious life. Mind is our intuitive sense of reality. Usually, philosophers would attempt to place perception and/or intellect in the sphere of the mind. Not for Bergson. He claims perception is simply the prolongation of material movements � tendencies. Tendencies of what? Of our bodies. Our bodies are peculiar, in the sense that they are material objects, yet also are intrinsically connected to our inner consciousness. This is what distinguishes us from dead matter, plants, and animals.
Seeing as there are consciousness and physical bodies, our lives come with two aspects. Normally, most of the time, we are simply physical bodies, solely occupied with practical life. We perceive, we act. Scientists study the human body and can describe how physical movements transmit energies to our sense apparatus, which relates these impulses to our brains. Our brains then send out transmissions as a result of these movements. In short: our brain is the centre, receiving and sending messages to our peripheral bodily locations. For Bergson, the human body � as indeed the bodies of all living organisms � is nothing but a sensory-motor system.
But, as said, human beings have consciousness. That is, we are not simply machines operating on the principle of stimulus-response. And so it is with most ‘higher� animals. Apart from perception, we have intellect. This is the ability to deduce and induce new data from given data. Ultimately, these rest on geometrical and logical principles, which themselves are the foundation of both our common sense grasp of reality and our scientific theories (like the conceptions of space and time in physics). With Bergson, intellect is placed firmly in the bodily organism.
To explain both perception and intellect, Bergson draws on evolutionary biology � these faculties are adaptations of organisms that allow for goal-directed behaviour. In short, he uses a functionalist approach when explain both our perception and intellect.
So how does it answer the above mentioned philosophical problems? Well it doesn’t � yet. These philosophical debates and problems (mostly metaphysical) are the results of this biological way of thinking. We are animals, living social lives. We use language to communicate with others; language uses symbols that refer to particular objecting and things in the world; and this mechanism forces a particular, physical way of thinking on us. We conceptualize reality as a collection of parts (objects, things) and their relations, and express it to others. While this worldview has obvious evolutionary value � otherwise we wouldn’t think this way and hadn’t changed the world so profoundly � it is a distorted view of the world. It tricks us into believing we have perceived reality, yet the metaphysical implications of this worldview should warn us (or have warned us) about the illusoriness of this approach.
For Bergson, this material world is simply a natural product of evolution.
The task of the philosopher is to deconstruct it, and to unravel the true way of the world. When we talk about consciousness, or life, we are moving in a totally different region. We should un-learn the intellectual way of viewing the world � of chopping it up into infinite collections of moments, states, and forms. In Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson attempted to show that psychologists look at human consciousness as a collection of quantitative states, while it truly is a continuous flow of qualitative states. Measuring, or even conceptualizing any state artificially destroys the continuity, movement and quality of the very thing the psychologist tries to study. Consciousness is duration � a totally different region from the objective space-time in which the scientist (as well as the common sense person) operates. Or rather, all spatial and temporal ideas are intellectual constructs, attempts at intellectually grasping un-graspable intuitions. E.g. we imagine duration as moments, which can be pictured to ourselves as (an infinite collection of) points on a line. Yet this picture is a geometrical representation of an intuition � it quantifies a qualitative state.
Likewise, in Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson attempted to show that picturing the world as (infinite) collections of moments, states and forms, is simply the product of the correlation of our consciousness and the material world (including our brains). Scientists and philosophers have debated for ages (and still do) how physical brain states relate to conscious states. There seems to be an unbridgeable chasm between the objects of neuroscience and psychology. Bergson’s theory is that this is a pseudo-problem, the result of our intellectual way of viewing the world (including ourselves). Intuitively, we experience our body in the here and now. We are (paraphrasing him) a personal entity continuously eating our way into the future. We literally our only here and now, and our whole notion of past and future comes from our memory. That is, we are built to learn from past experiences. This means we adapt ourselves to our current situation based on prior events. Physically, this is simply the formation of tendencies in the brain.
Psychologically, this past does not exist. All we are, is our current (qualitative) state, which itself is a continuously moving intuition. Pure duration. That is, prior states are selected � based mostly on practical needs, sometimes on speculative desires � and are immediately fused with our present state. Even this way of putting it stunts the meaning of Bergson: he literally means there is no conscious past. All selected memories are not memories of events as they happened � they are intrinsically part of the present. The past never comes back, what we believe to be memories of the past, are our present states fusing (selectively) past states with current states, leading to totally new states. In short: consciousness continuously creates states out of current and past experiences.
Similarly, there is no future. Due to the workings of our memory, we form notions of a past, as distinguished from the present. Now, this seems to lead us also towards a future. If I was, and now am, during those past moments, the current ‘I� was part of the (‘my�) future. But this is an illusion. Just like there is no (conscious) past, there is no (conscious) future. There is simply me, as pure consciousness, experiencing a continuous flow of ever-changing states.
(I am aware of my creaky description of this mechanism � Bergson is already struggling to express it in a 300 page book, and given my very limited way of expression this only greatens the problem. Once you grasp it, is easy to see who he means�)
And now we have hit upon Bergson’s deepest insight. There is a dualism between inner consciousness and external materiality. The first is the real of pure duration, continuity, movement; the second is the realm of our brain, physical body, all of Nature. Due to language and social life, we express the second realm in terms of objects and their relations in space-time. Our intellect, so used in viewing the world in this way, internalizes this worldview and intellectualizes our intuitions, so to speak. We quantify qualitative states of consciousness; we transform movement into immobility; we represent time and movement as (infinite collections of) points in space-time.
So far, all we have dealt with are Bergson’s main theories from Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896). What does this have to do with Creative Evolution (1907)? Well, like I mentioned at the beginning of this review: it is his magnum opus. He takes all of his earlier ideas and synthesizes them with evolutionary biology.
The biologist � assuming the unprovable notion that he has the same intellectual and perceptive faculties as his fellow human beings � falls into the same trap as the physicist, psychologist and common sense person. He studies living organisms. Life is a central concept here: What distinguishes living organisms from dead matter? He will explain this in terms of biochemical processes, and trace this line of development back into the remote past. Really, life is nothing but the active collection of energy to transform it into something new.
The plant collects energy from the sun, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and water from the soil, in order to produce carbohydrates. It is nothing but a transformation (with an emphasis on form) of energies. This type of living is rather basic. In the past, certain organisms developed ways to outsource this type of living (to plants) and to eat the organisms (plants) that transform energies. So animals eat plants to collect energy, in order to produce movement (to collect energy, etc.). Now, this leads to organisms competing for resources � plants for sunlight and water, animals for plants or other animals � so an arms race of protective apparatus. And this leads to better weaponry to best these protections. Etc.
In short, we see life developing from stationary plant life to moving animal life. Sensory-motor systems become a necessity for animals, guided under the principle of natural selection. Now it starts to pay to interfere with goal-setting, flexibility becomes a premium, resulting ever higher specialization of intellectual capabilities. In short: life branches out, organisms find unique ways of adapting themselves to their ever-changing environment, and intellect becomes one of these adaptations. An ever expanding intellect, due to ever expanding cortical specialization, leads, ultimately, to man.
Bergson claims that man is unique, of a different kind, compared to all other organisms. While instinct, perception and intellect are gradual properties, possessed by many organisms in some way or other, it is only in man that life manifests itself, to itself. That is, man is himself a state of this ever-flowing, continuous line of development � a state of life � but at the same time he is able to grasp this way of being intuitively. Other animals, supposedly, lack this capacity. The horse might be intelligent in remembering his care taker and the times it is fed, but it doesn’t intuitively grasp that it’s alive. Man does.
Now, we can wrap up all of Bergson’s theories rather easily. Just like (pure) consciousness is a totally different region from the material world, so life is a totally different region from the natural world. For Bergson, life is a primordial impulsion, given to dead matter � enlivening matter, so to speak � which then sets of a continuous ever-flowing chain of explosions, moving endlessly in all directions. This leads to the endless tree of life, of which we are simply one state.
The biologist � still driven by the same sort of essentialist thinking of Aristotle or formalistic thinking of Plato � artificially chops up this tree of life in his pursuit of distinct varieties and species. He looks for essences and static forms in qualitative, ever-moving forms of life. What is a Siberian tiger? When does an organism qualify to be a Siberian tiger? What are the essential traits an organism has to have to qualify as a Siberian tiger? These questions, ultimately, are unanswerable, since they simply depend on our own linguistic conventions. Just like the quip that ‘IQ is what the IQ test measures� we can say ‘A Siberian tiger is what the biologist decides to measure�.
------------------------------------------------
(final paragraphs continue in comment section.)
December 2, 2008
William james, the most darling of men, wrote that bergson was "for me, a magician. Whereas, when I open most philosophical books, I get nothing but a sort of marking time, champing of the jaws, pawing the ground, and resettling into the same attitude like a weary horse in his stall, turning over the same few threadbare categories, applying the same solutions and the same objections, here on every page new horizons open. It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. And to me it tells of reality itself and note merely of what previous dusty-minded professors have written about what other still more previous professors have thought about reality. Nothing in Bergson is shop-worn or second-hand" (in Richardson's William james: in the maelstrom of American modernism, 427). For James it took a second reading of matter and memory to excite such gushing praise. I suppose it will take at least that for me.
A different methodological plod than the ones I’ve been dimly trailing. The short of it is something like this:
Pure perception, as less than the image and arising from without, fixes matter for the purposes of practical destinations; discernment, in its necessary poverty, is such as a result of the utility-oriented demands of the body. The body--the surface of which is carved out as the common limit of the external and internal-- prepares pragmatically, situating a temporal horizon as a place of passage, for action, for the present. Perception meets memory in this active plane—the plane in which our body condenses its past unconsciously as motor habits, associated with the nerves, and as images, a pure memory consisting of independent recollections. This pure memory is a virtual representation of an absent object, and as such, is something different in kind (implicitly targeting psychophysical parallelism) from perception. Memory exists in different tones, appearing in dream tones of psychic life, states not regulated towards action. Our fugitive memories 'borrow warmth which gives it life' from perception, continuing and retaining the past with a view to needs, and they intertwine resulting in alternating currents: as both a centripetal force arising from the external object and a centrifugal force, an eddy of pure memory, pure virtuality, in the current that flows back towards engagement and actualization through the body and perception.
It seems important to wonder why I read this. As I work on answering that, I'll leave here a remnant of what has been initially promising in bergson's work: the articulation of duration, his focus on needs, his unwillingness to separate subject and object for too long, the weaving back and forth from dualism to monism and back again (detailed in delueze's book), and the glimmers of infinity in the fabric of reality.
Also, this is the second book to inform me, in not so many words, that neurology is something i might begrudgingly have to confront, some distant day.
A different methodological plod than the ones I’ve been dimly trailing. The short of it is something like this:
Pure perception, as less than the image and arising from without, fixes matter for the purposes of practical destinations; discernment, in its necessary poverty, is such as a result of the utility-oriented demands of the body. The body--the surface of which is carved out as the common limit of the external and internal-- prepares pragmatically, situating a temporal horizon as a place of passage, for action, for the present. Perception meets memory in this active plane—the plane in which our body condenses its past unconsciously as motor habits, associated with the nerves, and as images, a pure memory consisting of independent recollections. This pure memory is a virtual representation of an absent object, and as such, is something different in kind (implicitly targeting psychophysical parallelism) from perception. Memory exists in different tones, appearing in dream tones of psychic life, states not regulated towards action. Our fugitive memories 'borrow warmth which gives it life' from perception, continuing and retaining the past with a view to needs, and they intertwine resulting in alternating currents: as both a centripetal force arising from the external object and a centrifugal force, an eddy of pure memory, pure virtuality, in the current that flows back towards engagement and actualization through the body and perception.
It seems important to wonder why I read this. As I work on answering that, I'll leave here a remnant of what has been initially promising in bergson's work: the articulation of duration, his focus on needs, his unwillingness to separate subject and object for too long, the weaving back and forth from dualism to monism and back again (detailed in delueze's book), and the glimmers of infinity in the fabric of reality.
Also, this is the second book to inform me, in not so many words, that neurology is something i might begrudgingly have to confront, some distant day.
February 16, 2009
like a ceiling fan loaded with cauliflower on meat hooks
Read
December 18, 2023Boy, this was a tough climb. Matter = perception, I think? Memory as habit, cognition as embodied. William James took a similar vibe and made it gruff and plainspoken and Amurrican, and his writing is all the stronger for it, and his philosophy can be engaged with more readily as philosophy. Bergson made it dense and Frenchy, and while there’s a lot to unpack here, a lot of it seemed valuable, even if it was tough to parse. This is something I should come back to later before I make a more definitive assertion as to its value.
March 24, 2022
One of the most important books i have ever read
So Bergson literally blew my mind by his destructive way of analysing the reality of matter,memory, perception and body. I mean it was just too great! What he thought or explored in this book seemed at first sight quite commonsensical, yet at the same time how far away from the modern way of scientific thinking! Maybe we could grasp it in a moment of pure intuition,but lost it again while we were immersed in our dualistic way of interpreting the reality. So what Bergson claimed in this book was a huge blow to the whole school of realists and idealists. As well as an earth shattering blow to the materialists! So what did Bergson really talk about in this book which really disrupted the notion of our reality?
Bergson starts the book by describing the points which the idealist and the realist take and how do they differ from each other and how their origin is from the same soil of logical fallacy. While idealism dissociates the mind from the external objects by positing the mind as the real illusion or the only possible source of reality, the realist has the same tendency, thought quite opposite, to dissociate mind and objects by positing the reality of everything whereas the mind is in the privileged position to reflect. So these too are in the same ground where they impresses too heavily on the mind,viewing the universe only as the necessary byproduct of the mind. And this way of extreme cartesian interpretation started from Descartes. But rather than elaborating his complex ideas more,we can understand his point or how he differs from them when he says:
“The brain is part of the material world;the material world is not part of the brain.�
What he exactly means by it is that we always have the tendency to think of our brain as something like a container in which are contained our memories. But Bergson says,it is not possible. Because our body is also an image amongst so many images. Like so many objects around us which we perceive as an image our body or brain is also an image. So how can within an image there can be another image? But comparing to other images it is a distinct or special image,because it is my body,which is in the centre of every action. Where he clearly he says:
� All seems to take place as if,in this aggregate of images which i call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images,the type of which us furnished me by my body.�
So here the point would become more clear why idealism isn’t possible when we would take again what he says in the next page:
“My body,an object destined to move other objects, is then, a centre of action;it cannot give birth to a representation.�
Without making this review into a long essay,what can we say if we want to explain Bergson's own philosophical vision in some few lines? At the end, what and how Bergson really concluded this book was sublimely beautiful and intellectually vibrating. If i want to simplify his basic thoughts in my own words,i would describe it like these:
“Pure memory� and “Pure perception� are extremely different. Memory can never be the weakened form of perception. While perception is concerned with material world, where our body is being affected by other bodies and affecting upon other bodies. It is related to our sensori-motor faculty, where only our body act for its own necessity. So perception is all about action. Though memory is created by perception, it is instantly separated by it. Memory mightn't concern the necessity of our body or material life,its movement just goes on in a dreamy way until the present situation or pure perception doesn’t necessitates it or rejects it. So our past memories are necessary as long as they serve the position of the present situation, otherwise they just goes on in our mind like some unnecessary, random thoughts. And that's how it is concerned only in the domain of spirit. And now we can draw a conclusion of our review by some more of Bergson's beautiful lines regarding the nature of spirit:
“The first gleams which are thrown upon it by an individual consciousness do not therefore shine on it with an unheralded light: this consciousnesses does but remove an obstacle;it extracts from the whole that is real a part that is virtual, chooses and finally disengages that which interests it; and although, by that intelligent choice,it indeed manifests that it owes to spirit its form,it assuredly takes from nature its matter.�
Or more beautifully:
“Spirit borrows from matter the perception on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.�
So Bergson literally blew my mind by his destructive way of analysing the reality of matter,memory, perception and body. I mean it was just too great! What he thought or explored in this book seemed at first sight quite commonsensical, yet at the same time how far away from the modern way of scientific thinking! Maybe we could grasp it in a moment of pure intuition,but lost it again while we were immersed in our dualistic way of interpreting the reality. So what Bergson claimed in this book was a huge blow to the whole school of realists and idealists. As well as an earth shattering blow to the materialists! So what did Bergson really talk about in this book which really disrupted the notion of our reality?
Bergson starts the book by describing the points which the idealist and the realist take and how do they differ from each other and how their origin is from the same soil of logical fallacy. While idealism dissociates the mind from the external objects by positing the mind as the real illusion or the only possible source of reality, the realist has the same tendency, thought quite opposite, to dissociate mind and objects by positing the reality of everything whereas the mind is in the privileged position to reflect. So these too are in the same ground where they impresses too heavily on the mind,viewing the universe only as the necessary byproduct of the mind. And this way of extreme cartesian interpretation started from Descartes. But rather than elaborating his complex ideas more,we can understand his point or how he differs from them when he says:
“The brain is part of the material world;the material world is not part of the brain.�
What he exactly means by it is that we always have the tendency to think of our brain as something like a container in which are contained our memories. But Bergson says,it is not possible. Because our body is also an image amongst so many images. Like so many objects around us which we perceive as an image our body or brain is also an image. So how can within an image there can be another image? But comparing to other images it is a distinct or special image,because it is my body,which is in the centre of every action. Where he clearly he says:
� All seems to take place as if,in this aggregate of images which i call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images,the type of which us furnished me by my body.�
So here the point would become more clear why idealism isn’t possible when we would take again what he says in the next page:
“My body,an object destined to move other objects, is then, a centre of action;it cannot give birth to a representation.�
Without making this review into a long essay,what can we say if we want to explain Bergson's own philosophical vision in some few lines? At the end, what and how Bergson really concluded this book was sublimely beautiful and intellectually vibrating. If i want to simplify his basic thoughts in my own words,i would describe it like these:
“Pure memory� and “Pure perception� are extremely different. Memory can never be the weakened form of perception. While perception is concerned with material world, where our body is being affected by other bodies and affecting upon other bodies. It is related to our sensori-motor faculty, where only our body act for its own necessity. So perception is all about action. Though memory is created by perception, it is instantly separated by it. Memory mightn't concern the necessity of our body or material life,its movement just goes on in a dreamy way until the present situation or pure perception doesn’t necessitates it or rejects it. So our past memories are necessary as long as they serve the position of the present situation, otherwise they just goes on in our mind like some unnecessary, random thoughts. And that's how it is concerned only in the domain of spirit. And now we can draw a conclusion of our review by some more of Bergson's beautiful lines regarding the nature of spirit:
“The first gleams which are thrown upon it by an individual consciousness do not therefore shine on it with an unheralded light: this consciousnesses does but remove an obstacle;it extracts from the whole that is real a part that is virtual, chooses and finally disengages that which interests it; and although, by that intelligent choice,it indeed manifests that it owes to spirit its form,it assuredly takes from nature its matter.�
Or more beautifully:
“Spirit borrows from matter the perception on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.�
February 25, 2017
Dualism
Bergson is a dualist, and he spends a large portion of this book reconciling traditionally opposed dichotomies like matter and mind, quantity and quality, necessity and freedom. Memory is the bridge that makes this all possible; it's “the intersection of mind and matter� (13).
Perception and Recollection
Bergson argues against the idea that recollection is just a weakened repetition of a past perception, or that there is only a difference of intensity between the two. Their fundamental difference becomes quite clear when he tries to imagine the point at which they become one another. He writes that if the recollection of a perception is just a weakened version of that perception, then “it might make us, for instance, take the perception of a slight sound for the recollection of a loud noise� (239). A dull perception might imprint a memory, but it does not reduce to one. In itself, it is a dull perception, and it’s absurd to suggest that its lack of intensity means that it doesn’t just create a memory in the act of being remembered, but that it is already a recollection from the moment of its initial experience.
Bergson also questions how recollection could be a weakened perception on the basis that the latter presupposes a perceived object, but the former does not. He concedes that in pure perception, there seems to be a more or less one-to-one relationship between the external object and cerebral states, with the perceived object causing a specific state of the brain that is essentially its continuation. This cerebral activity causes certain perceptions, and the brain can prolong them in the form of a recollection: “It is true that, from the moment when the recollection actualises itself in this manner, it ceases to be a recollection and becomes once more a perception� (240). But it’s not clear exactly what causes these recollections; without an external stimulus they would seem arbitrary. How is it possible that we can represent things to ourselves which aren’t actually present to the organs of sense, if the cerebral states that correspond with perception are just a continuation things that are actually present to us? This suggests that there is something besides perception which allows us to recall things that are not actually present: As “our perception of the present object is something of that object itself, our representation of the absent object [in recollection] must be a phenomenon of quite another order than perception […]� (236). Perception and recollection are thus qualitatively different things, and the latter isn’t just a weakened version of the former. Pure perception has a one-to-one correspondence with external material objects, but memory � which gives birth to recollection � is something else entirely, and occupies the place of spirit in Bergson’s dualism, as against matter:
Bergson argues that the brain doesn’t “imprison […] recollections in cells� (237) as precisely localised deposits; there is no physical “reservoir of images� (237). The brain is not a jailer. Instead, its role is to facilitate the process of recognition by bringing past perceptions into contact with present ones, creating new possibilities for action. It does this in two ways. Most commonly, recollection is passive and habitual; acted rather than thought. When you put your hand on a hot stove, the brain automatically causes the body to respond, acting out a simple causative relation in which freedom is minimal. The brain can also facilitate behaviour which is active rather than passive by sending memory-images to meet pure perception and mingle with it. This makes actual perception something between the image and the memory-image, or between the present and the past.
Sorry, Kaufman
So how does the brain mix the present with the past? As I’ve said, the memory-images are not stored as specific deposits in the physical structure of the brain, so there can't be the sort of selective brain damage seen in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but only a general diminution of faculties. For Bergson, the memory-images which go out to meet the pure perception arise from the interaction between pure memories and the present perception. Bergson is pretty vague about the exact nature of these pure memories, and I’m not sure if they correspond with specific structures in the brain or they’re completely spiritual. In any case, there would be less of them than there would be with specific memory-images, because they’re more like schemas or general concepts that only become specific memory images in response to external objects. My take on this difficult concept is that a pure memory corresponds with a “virtual state� (239) of the potential relation of the subject’s body to other bodies. It’s a past perception reduced to an abstract relation of bodies rather than a specific sensory image. It becomes a memory-image that can mingle with pure perception by interacting with an internal, virtual version of the sense organ. So past spatial relations give rise to memory-images by interacting with virtual organs of the sense, in the same way that present spatial relations give rise to pure perceptions by interacting with actual sensory organs.
Freedom and Necessity
According to Bergson, “The state of the brain exactly corresponds to the perception. It is neither its cause, nor its effect, nor in any sense its duplicate: it simply continues it, the perception being our virtual action and the cerebral state our action already begun� (233). This was really hard for me to get my head around because I tend to see "continue" as a synonym for "cause". He explicitly acknowledges that “we cannot substantiate [this] by facts, since on our hypothesis everything is bound to happen as if perception were a consequence of the state of the brain� (235). He asks us to suspend disbelief and allow him verify his theory of pure perception by his theory of memory - which was derived from it in the first place.
Bergson uses the word "tension" to denote the degree of pure perception and pure memory in perception. Our freedom seems to consist in adjusting this tension between the plane of action, which constitutes little more than the present relation of bodies, and the plane of dream which constitutes our whole past. According to Bergson, we are able to summon pure memories from the past and mix them with pure perceptions in the present, creating new potential actions besides those which are offered by external circumstance alone. At one extreme of tension, our entire past is packed into the present perception. At the other extreme, we exist only in the moment. Simpler organisms are less capable of shifting tension in order to detach themselves from the present. Bergson writes that as an organism becomes more complex, we see “an ever greater latitude left to movement in space� (248). But we also see “the growing and accompanying tension of consciousness in time� (248):
Planes of Consciousness
Bergson imagines consciousness as an upside-down funnel, the point of which connects to a plane symbolising pure perception. Adjusting tension involves sliding up and down the funnel, to let more or less of the past enter the present.
On the plane of action, consciousness exists almost entirely in the present perception. It is an automatic and sensori-motor way of being where the body is of prime importance. At the plane of dream, on the other hand, consciousness packs as much of the past into the present as it can, and the body is much less important. In dreams, there is a disconnect between sensation and potential action; something unbalances “the sensori-motor equilibrium of the body� (174). Recollections are called up almost arbitrarily, without reference to external objects. Bergson suggests that this may also explain near death experiences where someone's body fails and their entire life flashes before their eyes.
Latent Consciousness
The idea that consciousness exists on a spectrum leads to a sort of panpsychism where inert matter responds unthinkingly and automatically to the effects of other bodies on its own, just like organisms at a certain degree of tension:
The Image
Bergson starts from a deliberately naïve perspective when it comes to the relation between mind and body. Quite simply, there doesn’t need to be a sharp distinction between them. Everything comes to us as an image, and our consciousness is just a collection of images pertaining to the virtual or potential action of our body - which is another image. There doesn’t need to be a perceiving subject if the percepts are the subject. Perception therefore exists in the perceived object rather than the perceiving subject: “It is not true that consciousness, turned round on itself, is confronted with a merely internal procession of inextensive perceptions. It is inside the very things perceived that you put back pure perception� (246). So there is no difference between phenomena and noumena, but this does not mean appearance is without independent reality. Perception is like a surgeon's blade, cutting away every image that doesn't pertain to the potential action of one privileged image, the body. Consequently, “The relation of “phenomenon� to “thing� is not that of appearance to reality, but merely that of the part to the whole� (230).
The Illusion of Multiplicity
This brings us to another parallel with Leibniz’s Monadology, which is the idea that every individual thing expresses every other thing in some sense: “Science […] by an evermore complete demonstration of the reciprocal action of all material points upon each other, returns, in spite of appearances, to the idea of universal continuity� (197). This seems particularly tenable if we consider the fact that every body exists in a gravitational relation with every other body in the universe. Leibniz writes that there is an “interconnection, relationship, or […] adaptation of all things to each particular one, and of each one to all the rest� (The Rationalists 464). This “brings it about that every simple substance [monad] has relations which express all the others and that it is consequently a perpetual living mirror of the universe� (The Rationalists 464). According to both authors, every individual thing participates in the entire universe at once, but only experiences something distinctly if it pertains directly to its body in space and time:
Bergson sees atomistic conceptions of matter as a mere convenience of thought. He is opposed to the idea of a hidden realm of extended corpuscles which obey the laws of necessity according to accidental interactions. We only make space homogenous and infinitely divisible to help organise the potential action of our bodies:
Intuition
Bergson believes that many philosophical “difficulties, contradictions and problems are mainly the result of the symbolic diagrams which cover […] up [immediate knowledge], diagrams which for us have become reality itself, and beyond which only an intense and unusual effort can succeed in penetrating� (187). So it's possible to dispel ourselves of these convenient illusions by immersing ourselves in experience, and intuiting images in a continual flow. He uses this method to tackle Zeno’s paradox of motion and finds that it's based on a faulty analogy between movement and its trajectory; between motion and the inert line it traces; between something that occurs in time and something that occurs in space:
Bergson is a dualist, and he spends a large portion of this book reconciling traditionally opposed dichotomies like matter and mind, quantity and quality, necessity and freedom. Memory is the bridge that makes this all possible; it's “the intersection of mind and matter� (13).
Perception and Recollection
Bergson argues against the idea that recollection is just a weakened repetition of a past perception, or that there is only a difference of intensity between the two. Their fundamental difference becomes quite clear when he tries to imagine the point at which they become one another. He writes that if the recollection of a perception is just a weakened version of that perception, then “it might make us, for instance, take the perception of a slight sound for the recollection of a loud noise� (239). A dull perception might imprint a memory, but it does not reduce to one. In itself, it is a dull perception, and it’s absurd to suggest that its lack of intensity means that it doesn’t just create a memory in the act of being remembered, but that it is already a recollection from the moment of its initial experience.
Bergson also questions how recollection could be a weakened perception on the basis that the latter presupposes a perceived object, but the former does not. He concedes that in pure perception, there seems to be a more or less one-to-one relationship between the external object and cerebral states, with the perceived object causing a specific state of the brain that is essentially its continuation. This cerebral activity causes certain perceptions, and the brain can prolong them in the form of a recollection: “It is true that, from the moment when the recollection actualises itself in this manner, it ceases to be a recollection and becomes once more a perception� (240). But it’s not clear exactly what causes these recollections; without an external stimulus they would seem arbitrary. How is it possible that we can represent things to ourselves which aren’t actually present to the organs of sense, if the cerebral states that correspond with perception are just a continuation things that are actually present to us? This suggests that there is something besides perception which allows us to recall things that are not actually present: As “our perception of the present object is something of that object itself, our representation of the absent object [in recollection] must be a phenomenon of quite another order than perception […]� (236). Perception and recollection are thus qualitatively different things, and the latter isn’t just a weakened version of the former. Pure perception has a one-to-one correspondence with external material objects, but memory � which gives birth to recollection � is something else entirely, and occupies the place of spirit in Bergson’s dualism, as against matter:
We understand then why a remembrance cannot be the result of a state of the brain. The state of the brain continues the remembrance; it gives it a hold on the present by the materiality which it confers upon it: but pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With memory we are, in truth, in the domain of spirit (240).Memory Prisons
Bergson argues that the brain doesn’t “imprison […] recollections in cells� (237) as precisely localised deposits; there is no physical “reservoir of images� (237). The brain is not a jailer. Instead, its role is to facilitate the process of recognition by bringing past perceptions into contact with present ones, creating new possibilities for action. It does this in two ways. Most commonly, recollection is passive and habitual; acted rather than thought. When you put your hand on a hot stove, the brain automatically causes the body to respond, acting out a simple causative relation in which freedom is minimal. The brain can also facilitate behaviour which is active rather than passive by sending memory-images to meet pure perception and mingle with it. This makes actual perception something between the image and the memory-image, or between the present and the past.
Sorry, Kaufman
So how does the brain mix the present with the past? As I’ve said, the memory-images are not stored as specific deposits in the physical structure of the brain, so there can't be the sort of selective brain damage seen in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but only a general diminution of faculties. For Bergson, the memory-images which go out to meet the pure perception arise from the interaction between pure memories and the present perception. Bergson is pretty vague about the exact nature of these pure memories, and I’m not sure if they correspond with specific structures in the brain or they’re completely spiritual. In any case, there would be less of them than there would be with specific memory-images, because they’re more like schemas or general concepts that only become specific memory images in response to external objects. My take on this difficult concept is that a pure memory corresponds with a “virtual state� (239) of the potential relation of the subject’s body to other bodies. It’s a past perception reduced to an abstract relation of bodies rather than a specific sensory image. It becomes a memory-image that can mingle with pure perception by interacting with an internal, virtual version of the sense organ. So past spatial relations give rise to memory-images by interacting with virtual organs of the sense, in the same way that present spatial relations give rise to pure perceptions by interacting with actual sensory organs.
Freedom and Necessity
According to Bergson, “The state of the brain exactly corresponds to the perception. It is neither its cause, nor its effect, nor in any sense its duplicate: it simply continues it, the perception being our virtual action and the cerebral state our action already begun� (233). This was really hard for me to get my head around because I tend to see "continue" as a synonym for "cause". He explicitly acknowledges that “we cannot substantiate [this] by facts, since on our hypothesis everything is bound to happen as if perception were a consequence of the state of the brain� (235). He asks us to suspend disbelief and allow him verify his theory of pure perception by his theory of memory - which was derived from it in the first place.
Bergson uses the word "tension" to denote the degree of pure perception and pure memory in perception. Our freedom seems to consist in adjusting this tension between the plane of action, which constitutes little more than the present relation of bodies, and the plane of dream which constitutes our whole past. According to Bergson, we are able to summon pure memories from the past and mix them with pure perceptions in the present, creating new potential actions besides those which are offered by external circumstance alone. At one extreme of tension, our entire past is packed into the present perception. At the other extreme, we exist only in the moment. Simpler organisms are less capable of shifting tension in order to detach themselves from the present. Bergson writes that as an organism becomes more complex, we see “an ever greater latitude left to movement in space� (248). But we also see “the growing and accompanying tension of consciousness in time� (248):
Not only, by its memory of former experience, does this consciousness retain the past better and better, so as to organise it with the present in a newer and richer decision; but, living with an intenser life, contracting, by its memory of the immediate experience, a growing number of external moments in its present duration, it becomes more capable of creating acts of which the inner determination, spread over as large a multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please, will pass the more easily through the meshes of necessity (248).So memory is a form of power, parallel to physical mobility, that enables us to transcend physical causality; to detach ourselves from the contingencies of the present moment. In this way, our bodies are temporal, but our minds are atemporal. If we base our actions primarily on perception, our freedom is diminished and we become subject to the relentless flow of duration. If we base our actions on recollection, however, we are free: “By allowing us to grasp in a single intuition multiple moments of duration, [memory] frees us from the movement of the flow of things, that is to say, from the rhythm of necessity� (228).
Planes of Consciousness
Bergson imagines consciousness as an upside-down funnel, the point of which connects to a plane symbolising pure perception. Adjusting tension involves sliding up and down the funnel, to let more or less of the past enter the present.
On the plane of action, consciousness exists almost entirely in the present perception. It is an automatic and sensori-motor way of being where the body is of prime importance. At the plane of dream, on the other hand, consciousness packs as much of the past into the present as it can, and the body is much less important. In dreams, there is a disconnect between sensation and potential action; something unbalances “the sensori-motor equilibrium of the body� (174). Recollections are called up almost arbitrarily, without reference to external objects. Bergson suggests that this may also explain near death experiences where someone's body fails and their entire life flashes before their eyes.
Latent Consciousness
The idea that consciousness exists on a spectrum leads to a sort of panpsychism where inert matter responds unthinkingly and automatically to the effects of other bodies on its own, just like organisms at a certain degree of tension:
The material universe itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness, a consciousness in which everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder each other from standing out (235).This reminds me of Leibniz’s monads which are the simple, unextended building blocks of the universe. Even in matter, they have vague, muddled perceptions and desires which enable them to respond mechanically, but they aren’t soul or spirit because they don’t have memory or feelings; they exist as if in a “profound, dreamless sleep� (The Rationalists 458). The distinction between animate and inanimate objects is very similar for Bergson; one has memory and the other does not. As an aside, I’ll note that strictly speaking, monads are "windowless" and can’t interact with one another directly, but God moves them according to a “pre-established harmony� that makes it seem as if they are moving one another.
The Image
Bergson starts from a deliberately naïve perspective when it comes to the relation between mind and body. Quite simply, there doesn’t need to be a sharp distinction between them. Everything comes to us as an image, and our consciousness is just a collection of images pertaining to the virtual or potential action of our body - which is another image. There doesn’t need to be a perceiving subject if the percepts are the subject. Perception therefore exists in the perceived object rather than the perceiving subject: “It is not true that consciousness, turned round on itself, is confronted with a merely internal procession of inextensive perceptions. It is inside the very things perceived that you put back pure perception� (246). So there is no difference between phenomena and noumena, but this does not mean appearance is without independent reality. Perception is like a surgeon's blade, cutting away every image that doesn't pertain to the potential action of one privileged image, the body. Consequently, “The relation of “phenomenon� to “thing� is not that of appearance to reality, but merely that of the part to the whole� (230).
The Illusion of Multiplicity
This brings us to another parallel with Leibniz’s Monadology, which is the idea that every individual thing expresses every other thing in some sense: “Science […] by an evermore complete demonstration of the reciprocal action of all material points upon each other, returns, in spite of appearances, to the idea of universal continuity� (197). This seems particularly tenable if we consider the fact that every body exists in a gravitational relation with every other body in the universe. Leibniz writes that there is an “interconnection, relationship, or […] adaptation of all things to each particular one, and of each one to all the rest� (The Rationalists 464). This “brings it about that every simple substance [monad] has relations which express all the others and that it is consequently a perpetual living mirror of the universe� (The Rationalists 464). According to both authors, every individual thing participates in the entire universe at once, but only experiences something distinctly if it pertains directly to its body in space and time:
God, in ordering the whole, has had regard to every part and in particular to each monad; and since each monad is by its very nature representative, nothing can limit it to represent merely a part of things. It is nevertheless true that this representation is, as regards the details of the whole universe, only a confused representation, and is distinct only as regards a small part of them, that is to say, as regards those things which are nearest or greatest in relation to each monad […] In a confused way, they reach out to infinity or to the whole, but are limited and differentiated in the degree of their distinct perceptions […] Although each created monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which specially pertains to it and of which it constitutes the entelechy (The Rationalists 465).Bergson's view is strikingly similar: “Science […] shows us each thing exercising an influence on all the others and, consequently, occupying, in a certain sense, the whole of the extended (although we perceive of this thing only its center and mark its limits at the point where our body ceases to have any hold upon it)� (231).
Bergson sees atomistic conceptions of matter as a mere convenience of thought. He is opposed to the idea of a hidden realm of extended corpuscles which obey the laws of necessity according to accidental interactions. We only make space homogenous and infinitely divisible to help organise the potential action of our bodies:
In regard to concrete extension, continuous, diversified and at the same time organized, we do not see why it should be bound up with the amorphous and inert space which subtends it � a space which we divide indefinitely, out of which we carve figures arbitrarily, and in which movement itself […] can only appear as a multiplicity of instantaneous positions, since nothing there can ensure the coherence of past with present (187).Space is therefore a kind of schematic or overlay that helps us arrange our bodies in relation to other bodies. It serves a similar role in Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, but Bergson proposes it as an avoidable tendency rather than a fundamental prerequisite for experience, and it doesn't hide an inaccessible realm of things-in-themselves.
Intuition
Bergson believes that many philosophical “difficulties, contradictions and problems are mainly the result of the symbolic diagrams which cover […] up [immediate knowledge], diagrams which for us have become reality itself, and beyond which only an intense and unusual effort can succeed in penetrating� (187). So it's possible to dispel ourselves of these convenient illusions by immersing ourselves in experience, and intuiting images in a continual flow. He uses this method to tackle Zeno’s paradox of motion and finds that it's based on a faulty analogy between movement and its trajectory; between motion and the inert line it traces; between something that occurs in time and something that occurs in space:
When I put aside all preconceived ideas, I soon perceive that […] even my sight takes in the movement from A to B as an indivisible whole, and that if it divides anything, it is the line supposed to have been traversed, and not the movement traversing it. It is indeed true that my hand does not go from A to B without passing through the intermediate positions, and that these intermediate points resemble stages, as numerous as you please, along the route; but there is, between the divisions so marked out and stages properly so-called, this capital difference, that at a stage we halt, whereas at these points the moving body passes. Now a passage is a movement and a halt is an immobility. The halt interrupts the movement; the passage is one with the movement itself. When I see the moving body pass any point, I conceive, no doubt, that it might stop there; even when it does not stop there, I incline to consider its passage as an arrest, though infinitely short, because I must have at least the time to think of it; yet it is only my imagination which stops there, and what the moving body has to do is, on the contrary, to move. As every point of space necessarily appears to me fixed, I find it extremely difficult not to attribute to the moving body itself the immobility of the point with which, for a moment, I make it coincide; it seems to me, then, when I reconstitute the total movement, that the moving body has stayed an infinitely short time at every point of its trajectory. But we must not confound the data of the senses, which perceive the movement, with the artifice of the mind, which recomposes it. The senses, left to themselves, present to us the real movement, between two halts, as a solid and undivided whole. The division is the work of our imagination, of which indeed the office is to fix the moving images of our ordinary experience, like the instantaneous flash which illuminates a stormy landscape by night (189).So we think habitually in things which our bodies can act upon, and we have a great deal of trouble imagining continuity. As soon as we endeavour to think of something, it's frozen and sealed off from everything else. We even understand movement and duration in terms of space. That is, language and common sense use spatial metaphors to describe time, even though it’s fundamentally different.
January 30, 2025
Bergson finds a ground for existence by reformatting our pure experiences into durations. ‘Thoughts without content are empty� according to Kant, Bergson provides content to our thoughts and he’ll say he resolves the mind/body dichotomy in the process. Kant made space, time, and reason instinctual providing a content through creating his ‘Copernican revolution of the mind.� Bergson takes a different path.
Bergson will say the idea comes from our integration of our senses and that developing a concept through a notion requires a spirit outside of us to avoid being just an empty thought. Kant prioritized Hume’s experiences over Berkeley’s idealism while Bergson prioritizes Berkeley over Hume. Bergson goes even further and will say the brain is not the world creator but is in the world by knowing the world and participating in the world. There is a spiritualism of some kind within Bergson that is more than Hegel’s spirit and for Hegel spirit is that which knows itself, and for Bergson spirit mystically provides duration through the brain's participation in the world.
Bergson will later say for Einstein time presupposes Einstein’s relativity and that means time has no ground or equivalently relativity presupposes time and it has no ground. Heidegger in his “Being and Time� cites Bergson’s duration as a real time, and the themes in this Bergson book never go out of fashion.
Our mind has its imagination, intelligence, and memory. Bergson will say we have our past recollections filtered by our immediate projecting to a future thus deriving imagination (projecting to the future from our past), intelligence (creating order of the immediate) and the memories (our database). Hume makes all experiences relative to other experiences, and Bergson steps away from that by giving our experiences a ground of some kind by using his peculiar solution to the mind body dichotomy problem.
Bergson will say the idea comes from our integration of our senses and that developing a concept through a notion requires a spirit outside of us to avoid being just an empty thought. Kant prioritized Hume’s experiences over Berkeley’s idealism while Bergson prioritizes Berkeley over Hume. Bergson goes even further and will say the brain is not the world creator but is in the world by knowing the world and participating in the world. There is a spiritualism of some kind within Bergson that is more than Hegel’s spirit and for Hegel spirit is that which knows itself, and for Bergson spirit mystically provides duration through the brain's participation in the world.
Bergson will later say for Einstein time presupposes Einstein’s relativity and that means time has no ground or equivalently relativity presupposes time and it has no ground. Heidegger in his “Being and Time� cites Bergson’s duration as a real time, and the themes in this Bergson book never go out of fashion.
Our mind has its imagination, intelligence, and memory. Bergson will say we have our past recollections filtered by our immediate projecting to a future thus deriving imagination (projecting to the future from our past), intelligence (creating order of the immediate) and the memories (our database). Hume makes all experiences relative to other experiences, and Bergson steps away from that by giving our experiences a ground of some kind by using his peculiar solution to the mind body dichotomy problem.
March 28, 2022
Great thing about Bergson, is that he's one of the few philosophers I've read and thought "yes, excellent, this man has cracked it" despite being a little dated. This treatise will show you how your perception works, how memory and time are filtered through your brain and interpreted via everything from your identity and social mores. I've always known I can't really trust my own perceptions, but reading this kind of thing gives me an insight into how I CAN trust them if I just understand their limits.
April 24, 2018
As part of the books I'm reading to get me ready to tackle Difference and Repetition, I was taken aback at just how much of Deleuze's ideas harken back to Bergson. Deceptively simple, yet very accessible.
July 19, 2022
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November 22, 2019„Materie și memorie� de Henri Bergson este un frumos poem hasidic.
March 1, 2020
I sorta loved and hated this book at the same time. I don't like dualism at all but this was in certain senses pretty good even for a dualist account. I'm torn I guess! I really hated how he separates memory from matter though I think that's real nonsense. Memory simply must have an ontogenesis in and through or at the very least (!) contemporaneously with a certain arrangement of matter and inextricably bound up with it—if not, then how the hell are you going to account for evolution and different tensions of consciousness and whatnot? It seems obvious to me that before anything remotely close to human "spiritual" memory arose there must have been a sort of primordial material-organic reproductive process such as an RNA molecule capable of reproducing itself through using its own structure as a "function" of sorts—an original "organism" of sorts utilizing a certain kind of "information" or "logic". Gotta mull this one over I guess? Well in the meantime I ain't buyin' it
April 17, 2013
Excellent, lucid, insightful, thought-provoking, delightful... a great work by Henri Bergson!
January 16, 2019
Henri Bergson é um dos, senão o pioneiro, dos estudos da memória. E sempre é bom ler esses "textos fundadores", principalmente deste campo que eu estudo. Bergson foi primeiro a dizer que a memória não está localizada no cérebro, mas no corpo todo: em cada gesto, ato e movimento. Tudo isso é memória. Ele também diferenciou a memória fraca da memória forte, em que uma evocada e a outra faz parte do nosso dia a dia e nem percebemos que a estamos utilizando. Também diferenciou a memória-imagem, vaga, especular, impressa, da memória-hábito, presente, clara, e utilitária. A partir dele, outros teóricos da memória como Maurice Halbwachs e Joël Candau, descreveram impressionantes pressupostos sobre a memória coletiva e a identidade. Se formos analisar por um instante, até mesmo Judith Butler e suas teorias da performatividade de gênero nos gestos e fala do sujeito, podem ter pego uma carona inconsciente nas teorias de Bergson. Existe muita coisa que pode ser aproveitada à luz de novas teorias nas velhas teorias de Bergson a respeitos de nossos hábitos e nossa memória. Por isso, ele é considerado um dos grandes filósofos da contemporaneidade.
March 22, 2025
li até o final do segundo capítulo. muito bom! uma das melhores coisas que ja li
March 27, 2020
Memory does not reside in the brain. There is no store of memory in any matter; the matter of the brain is but the material means for actualizing the pure memory which remains as a virtual element of affectation upon every perception. This "virtual element" is absolutely amaterial - rather than a memory-bank, it is more a reserve of forgetting, to borrow Paul Ricoeur's phrase - akin to the unconscious of psychoanalysis which forgets nothing, yet retains every memory under the guise of forgetting or the inacessible, the concealed, lethe.
Bergson confounds the traditional metaphysical binary of materialism and idealism in noting that perception engages with what it is that is perceived, though this act is never unmediated. But it is not thought that mediates this relation, not the idea, but rather memory. Every perception is tonally resonant with the virtual affections of the entirety of our past, which durationally wells up in the perception of the present. This "welling up" of the virtual multiplicity of mnemonic affects alters the potential for acting in the present of bodily perception, and it is this opening of or onto the future which Bergson considers freedom.
As expressed a moment ago, Bergson makes the evasion of the dualistic problematic of metaphysics seem graceful, if not easy. But this movement is not without its faults. For though he opens a means for twisting free from the metaphysical aporias, he (as ever) falls back in his attempts to reinscribe or translate metaphysical thinking, in the endeavor to reappropriate such thoughts as spirit and matter in the name of duration and vibration. Unable to muster the vitality to destroy the very substance which gives his thought its life, to deal its own death so as to transform itself radically from what shall come after the sacrifice, his thought, in the end, is clawed back into the problematic domain of metaphysics which it sought to escape.
Fear of a radical negation, of any negation at all, ends up as Bergson's undoing. His will to life signs its own death certificate.
Bergson confounds the traditional metaphysical binary of materialism and idealism in noting that perception engages with what it is that is perceived, though this act is never unmediated. But it is not thought that mediates this relation, not the idea, but rather memory. Every perception is tonally resonant with the virtual affections of the entirety of our past, which durationally wells up in the perception of the present. This "welling up" of the virtual multiplicity of mnemonic affects alters the potential for acting in the present of bodily perception, and it is this opening of or onto the future which Bergson considers freedom.
As expressed a moment ago, Bergson makes the evasion of the dualistic problematic of metaphysics seem graceful, if not easy. But this movement is not without its faults. For though he opens a means for twisting free from the metaphysical aporias, he (as ever) falls back in his attempts to reinscribe or translate metaphysical thinking, in the endeavor to reappropriate such thoughts as spirit and matter in the name of duration and vibration. Unable to muster the vitality to destroy the very substance which gives his thought its life, to deal its own death so as to transform itself radically from what shall come after the sacrifice, his thought, in the end, is clawed back into the problematic domain of metaphysics which it sought to escape.
Fear of a radical negation, of any negation at all, ends up as Bergson's undoing. His will to life signs its own death certificate.
June 16, 2018
I read 'Matter and Memory' in relation to my work on Deleuze. It's required reading if you want to get the most of his 'Difference and Repetition', not to mention Deleuze's work on Bergson. Unlike Deleuze, Bergson wrote with great clarity. Even if you're not convinced by his conclusions, you have to admire his knack for communicating complex ideas concretely and with great aplomb.
January 27, 2013
One of the best books in my life.
May 8, 2022
In this book Bergson presents a theory not so different of that in his previous Time And Free Will, but this time with regards to the famous Mind-Body problem. He begins by reflecting on the main pillars of that debate in his time - materialism, which sees mind as an epiphenomenon of physical processes, and idealism, which sees the mind as an abstract and independent spirit. Bergson feels that both are too capricious and suggests instead that 'direct realism', with its presumption that we see directly reality, is essentially correct, with the idealist twist that our direct realism takes place in an undiluted and purely mental experience of the world. Our mind, through various lenses, chops up this pure and mystical experience of reality into various perspectives, which are not the involuntary Kantian apperceptions but rather a more fluid and variable set of perspectives, voluntary and involuntary, determined by our bodily interactions with the world (in something of an anticipation of Merleau-Ponty's body-centric phenomenology) and then by our emotions, associations, and abstract intellect - of which our mathematico-physical perspective of quantifiable space is but one of many, and itself only pragmatically artificial.
From there Bergson is able to infer a unique theory of memory. Idealist psychologies cannot seem to explain the novelty of perception and materialist psychologies cannot explain our ability to generate the unique categories our perceptions immediately recognize, but this 'Bergsonist' psychology can bypass this by showing that our perception of reality is immediately pure and then chopped into collected 'mental images' that approximate experience in pure terms. Memory and perception, then, are qualitatively different experiences, the former the imagistic approximation of the latter. Our mind holds onto these memories as a building network of imagistic associations, which serve as a bank of knowledge to help determine our present perceptions as references. His ultimate conclusion is mankind existing as a gyrating cylinder moving across a plane, like a tornado, where the pure spirit cycles through these interwoven web of memories, applying them variously to new experiences, constantly revising the past, constantly in motion. Bergson then concludes on a lengthy reiteration of Time And Free Will, with its anti-stratified theory of reality and the resulting implications that humans have free will and that reality is more fluid and indeterminate than any geometric scaffolding could ever suggest.
This book is pretty much an extension of Time And Free Will, as evidenced by those arguments' reprise in chapter 4, and whatever sinks or swims of his theories there sink or swim here. The problems innate to this variant of idealist epistemology (since while Bergson differentiates himself very distinctly, his arguments are essentially a more emotive-mystic revision of Kant) aren't very much resolved here, and his arguments against materialism may (or may not, I'm a bit rusty-hazy on this stuff) collapse after a wee bit of linguistic sophistry. More exciting about this book is the implications for the continental philosophies to come: Bergson's image of man as a poetico-fluxom spirit filtering through arbitrary filters and lenses serves naturally as a basis for all the existential analyses of phenomenological chains to come in the 30s and 40s, and thereafter to the schizo-structuralist distortions of mankind of the deconstructionists and post-modernists. As for its own merit as a book, this like Time And Free Will is a bit of a skeleton key to decoding the content of the epiphanies common throughout modernist literature, and indeed is essentially the working theory behind the structure of Proust's entire novel . . . . for whatever that's worth to you.
From there Bergson is able to infer a unique theory of memory. Idealist psychologies cannot seem to explain the novelty of perception and materialist psychologies cannot explain our ability to generate the unique categories our perceptions immediately recognize, but this 'Bergsonist' psychology can bypass this by showing that our perception of reality is immediately pure and then chopped into collected 'mental images' that approximate experience in pure terms. Memory and perception, then, are qualitatively different experiences, the former the imagistic approximation of the latter. Our mind holds onto these memories as a building network of imagistic associations, which serve as a bank of knowledge to help determine our present perceptions as references. His ultimate conclusion is mankind existing as a gyrating cylinder moving across a plane, like a tornado, where the pure spirit cycles through these interwoven web of memories, applying them variously to new experiences, constantly revising the past, constantly in motion. Bergson then concludes on a lengthy reiteration of Time And Free Will, with its anti-stratified theory of reality and the resulting implications that humans have free will and that reality is more fluid and indeterminate than any geometric scaffolding could ever suggest.
This book is pretty much an extension of Time And Free Will, as evidenced by those arguments' reprise in chapter 4, and whatever sinks or swims of his theories there sink or swim here. The problems innate to this variant of idealist epistemology (since while Bergson differentiates himself very distinctly, his arguments are essentially a more emotive-mystic revision of Kant) aren't very much resolved here, and his arguments against materialism may (or may not, I'm a bit rusty-hazy on this stuff) collapse after a wee bit of linguistic sophistry. More exciting about this book is the implications for the continental philosophies to come: Bergson's image of man as a poetico-fluxom spirit filtering through arbitrary filters and lenses serves naturally as a basis for all the existential analyses of phenomenological chains to come in the 30s and 40s, and thereafter to the schizo-structuralist distortions of mankind of the deconstructionists and post-modernists. As for its own merit as a book, this like Time And Free Will is a bit of a skeleton key to decoding the content of the epiphanies common throughout modernist literature, and indeed is essentially the working theory behind the structure of Proust's entire novel . . . . for whatever that's worth to you.
December 15, 2022
Bergson has some very astute observations regarding memory, habit, and perception. In particular he talks the interplay between these as we learn to make refined distinctions in our perceptions, eg. our perception of speech is colored by our knowledge, or lack thereof, of the language.
Unfortunately, these observations are put to work on a dubious metaphysical project. His proposed metaphysics is wildly incomprehensible: the brain can't house memories because the brain is an image and images can't contain bigger images, therefore image and memory (i.e. matter and soul) are irreconcilable, except maybe they are united in perception?
Other notable aspects: His talk about the difference between rationalized linear time and the way the past actually accumulates within us as memory clearly influenced Walter Benjamin's more radical conceptions of "messianic time". I suspect his non-linear interpretations of time and space also influenced critical geographers like Henri Lefebvre (googling this I see that others make this connection, see "Toward a Philosophy of the Urban: Henri Lefebvre's Uncomfortable Application of Bergsonism") His attempts to bridge Kant's divide between perception and representation through an "organic" unity of human capabilities are well-aimed, although probably not as original as when similar attempts were made by Jacobi and Hamann in the 1780s.
Unfortunately, these observations are put to work on a dubious metaphysical project. His proposed metaphysics is wildly incomprehensible: the brain can't house memories because the brain is an image and images can't contain bigger images, therefore image and memory (i.e. matter and soul) are irreconcilable, except maybe they are united in perception?
Other notable aspects: His talk about the difference between rationalized linear time and the way the past actually accumulates within us as memory clearly influenced Walter Benjamin's more radical conceptions of "messianic time". I suspect his non-linear interpretations of time and space also influenced critical geographers like Henri Lefebvre (googling this I see that others make this connection, see "Toward a Philosophy of the Urban: Henri Lefebvre's Uncomfortable Application of Bergsonism") His attempts to bridge Kant's divide between perception and representation through an "organic" unity of human capabilities are well-aimed, although probably not as original as when similar attempts were made by Jacobi and Hamann in the 1780s.
May 1, 2024
„Ale już teraz możemy mówić o ciele jako o jakiejś granicy poruszającej się między przyszłością i przeszłością, jako o ruchomym ostrzu, które popychałoby wciąż naszą przeszłość w naszą przyszłość� (62)
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December 30, 2021review hidden because of explicit language:
oh goddamn hell fuckin shit yeah
oh goddamn hell fuckin shit yeah
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 19, 2022
Matter and Memory by the French philosopher Henri Bergson is a seminal text in memory studies, the philosophy of mind, and metaphysics more broadly. It has exercised immense influence on the likes of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze. William James even said its publication amounted to a Copernican revolution in philosophy comparable to the critical turn made in the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. The acclaim heaped upon Matter and Memory is attributable to the innovative solutions Bergson proposes to classical philosophical problems such as the relationship between spirit and matter, past and present, and perception and memory. Bergson articulates his thesis as follows: “This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory� (9). Memory, then, provides the clue to the problem of how spirit relates to matter and vice-versa; it allows us to see that while spirit and matter are distinct, they are nevertheless related, albeit not in the problematic ways that dualistic metaphysical theories most often claim. While Bergson admits that his account is dualistic, even radically so, he insists that to whatever extent he accentuates this classical dichotomy, he does so in order to lessen, if not overcome, “the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism� (ibid.). To this end, Bergson situates his theory in between, or even beyond, realism and idealism, both of which he rejects, and each of which he thinks inevitably leads to the other in a kind of vicious circle.
While the principal thesis of Matter and Memory is that memory provides the clue to the relationship between spirit and matter, a secondary thesis that helps bolster this claim is that there is a crucial difference between perception and memory. Memory is not, in other words, an attenuated perception that recedes from the present moment and thereby loses its vitality; it is, rather, an autonomous and dynamic process in which the past that is preserved in itself can come to present consciousness in an infinite number of different and creative ways. Memory is not, then, so much a faculty of reproduction or repetition as one of synthesis; in fact, for Bergson, it is what makes consciousness possible in a duration that links the past and present. Related to this secondary thesis is yet another central claim: while matter, specifically the brain and the wider nervous system, may be necessary in order to actualize memories in consciousness, memories are not stored in the brain as if the brain were a container. In this sense, memories are not “in� the brain, but rather “in� time, i.e. in the past as part of the unconscious. Bergson therefore defends an anti-reductionist position that maintains a clear distinction between spirit and matter which parallels the distinction between memory and perception: in both cases, the former is not reducible to the latter.
To make his case about the difference between memory and perception and, more broadly, about the centrality of memory to the problem of spirit and matter, Bergson articulates a theory of pure perception in contrast to pure memory. Both pure perception and pure memory represent ideal types, extremes between which consciousness typically operates. As Bergson stresses, “there is no perception which is not full of memories� (33). Hence the ideal of pure perception intentionally brackets memory from its concept so as to render salient what perception, in and of itself, really is. For Bergson, pure perception relies on the concept of the image, which is neither an entity as it exists in itself as presupposed by realism nor a mere representation as presupposed by idealism. Images, Bergson claims, are all that we sense: “images [are] perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed.� Yet there is one image that “is distinct from all the others, in that I do not know it only from without by perceptions, but from within by affections: it is my body� (17). On the one hand, then, there is the totality of images that comprise the material universe or matter, while on the other hand, there is the specific image that is my body. For Bergson, perception is simply the referral of some portion of the images that comprise matter to the eventual action of one particular image, my body (22). In this sense, my body is but one image amidst other images, albeit a unique one that marks the center of my possible action. As Bergson explains this point, “as my body moves in space, all the other images vary, while that image, my body, remains invariable. I must, therefore, make it a center, to which I refer all the other images� (46).
My body is therefore the locus and source of perception—or, more precisely, perception just is the referral of images that are not my body to the image that is my body. Yet because my body is merely another image that demarcates the center of my possible action in relation to other images, perception is “part of [the objects perceived] themselves; it is in them rather than they in it� (228-29). In other words, just as the brain is not a container for memories, the mind is not a container for perceptions; perception simply relates some set of images to the image that is my body, on account of which it has unmediated access to the images (i.e. the objects perceived) themselves. This means that the traditional distinction between objects that are outside the mind and representations of those objects inside the mind breaks down; or rather, this distinction is more appropriately conceived as “a distinction between the part and the whole,� where the part refers to the image that is my body, the locus of my perception, and the whole refers to the totality of all the other images that comprise the material universe (47). Bergson’s theory of pure perception is therefore not reducible to either realism or idealism: contra realism, matter “outside� the mind does not have the mysterious ability to produce representations “inside� the mind; and contra idealism, our perception of matter is not relative, mediated by mind-dependent structures universal to all humans. On Bergson’s theory of pure perception, there is no distinction between the phenomenon and the noumenon, between appearance and reality, but only, as we have seen, between the part and the whole (230).
Perception therefore has access to material objects as they exist “in themselves,� as Kant would put it, but this does not entail that it has access to the whole of the material universe. As Bergson frequently maintains, perception is limited in its scope, and this is because it is “entirely directed toward action� (31). That is, perception for Bergson is fundamentally vital and not speculative, a crucial point that both idealism and realism miss and that leads both theories into errors and contradictions. Because perception is ordered toward action in accordance with what interests bodily functions, it not only does not add to the image it perceives, but in fact subtracts from it, since it detaches “from the totality of objects the possible action of my body upon them.� Put differently, its function “is to eliminate from the totality of images all those on which I can have no hold, and then, from each of those which I retain, all that does not concern the needs of the image which I call my body� (229). For this reason, Bergson claims that perception exhibits a “necessary poverty� (38).
Pure perception is impoverished in that it only concerns itself with the needs of the image that is my body. Yet it is also impoverished in that it is an ideal type with which we have no actual familiarity. As noted earlier, pure perception never exists on its own in lived experience; it is always already complemented by memory, which when combined with perception constitutes what Bergson calls “my concrete and complex perception� (34). Unlike concrete perception, pure perception is entirely absorbed in the present and with matter—that is, it exclusively concerns my body in relation to the images upon which my body can act. Conversely, concrete perception is informed by memory, on account of which it “offers always a certain breadth of duration,� a plurality of moments that extend into the past (ibid.). Parallel to and concomitant with the distinction between pure perception and concrete perception is one between the present simply (another ideal type, a kind of analytical fiction) and the “real, concrete, live present,� the present that “necessarily occupies a duration� and hence “must be both a perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future� (137-38). It is at this point, with the influential idea of Bergsonian duration in view, that we can turn to memory, the lynchpin concept of the entire book.
One of the several ways that Matter and Memory is so influential has to do with its treatment of memory and its many forms. Bergson identifies at least four, perhaps even five, forms of memory (there is some debate as to whether pure memory is equivalent to recollection memory, as the latter is contrasted with habit memory in the second chapter). In the first chapter, Bergson differentiates between what Trevor Perri calls “contraction memory� and “perception memory,� where the former refers to the contraction of a number of independent moments into one, internal moment or duration that constitutes the lived present, and the latter refers to “a cloak of recollections� that covers over “a core of immediate perception� (34). One could perhaps say that contraction memory provides the form of consciousness whereas perception memory provides consciousness with its content (combined with the content provided by perception). In the second chapter of Matter and Memory, Bergson makes yet another distinction between two types of memory, one which Gilles Deleuze stresses we should not conflate with the distinction between contraction and perception memory. On the one hand there is “habit memory,� or what contemporary theorists would call procedural memory, while on the other hand there is “recollection memory,� now known as episodic memory. Habit memory is a non-representational “motor memory� of the body that, as Perri observes, “manifests itself as a disposition to react in a more or less fixed way� to one’s environment (Perri, 511). Recollection memory is the representation of some past event in one’s life; it has a place and date and by nature cannot be repeated, unlike habit memory (81). Bergson considers recollection memory as “memory par excellence,� the true form of memory, whereas habit memory is �habit interpreted by memory rather than memory itself� (84). This seems to be because Bergson thinks that habit memory is closely related to perception; while it has to do with the acquisition of sensorimotor habits over time, and in this sense has some kind of relation to the past, it is actualized in relation to the present needs or interests of the body.
This leaves “pure memory� as the final form or aspect of memory, which several commentators associate with recollection memory. The two concepts are, I think, ultimately different, if nevertheless closely related. As far as I can tell, recollection memory is to pure memory as the part is to the whole; pure memory, in other words, is comprised of recollection memories, each of which refers to some past event or episode. Pure memory therefore refers to the totality of one’s past experience virtually preserved in the unconscious; it is the source of what is actualized in perception memory and the recollection of what Bergson calls “memory-images,� from which it is nevertheless distinct. “From the moment that it becomes image, the past leaves the state of pure memory and coincides with a certain part of my present,� Bergson explains. “Memory actualized in an image differs, then, profoundly from pure memory� (140). For Bergson, the relationship between pure memory and the unconscious is especially important. While memories are not “stored� in the brain, they are in some sense “housed� in the unconscious, with the crucial caveat that this spatial metaphor is not exactly appropriate to how Bergson understands the unconscious. This is because the unconscious for Bergson is not a spatial entity or container, but more like the past itself, the whole of which influences, if not in a deterministic way, our present experience in consciousness. As Bergson puts it, “the whole of our past psychical life conditions our present state; . . . whole, also, it reveals itself in our character� (148). Of course, the vast majority of our past psychical life is inaccessible to us; we only ever perceive a small part of it in the present, and it sometimes seems that our past recollections have either disappeared or only reappear at random. “But this semblance of complete destruction or of capricious revival,� Bergson contends, “is due merely to the fact that actual consciousness accepts at each moment the useful and rejects in the same breath the superfluous� (146).
Pure memory, then, includes all one’s past memories preserved in an unconscious state out of which certain memories come to the fore of consciousness based on the demands imposed by the present in concrete perception. To demonstrate this relationship between pure memory and perception, and also the relationship between recollection and habit memory, Bergson utilizes the famous image of the “cone of memory.� He describes an inverted cone whose apex intersects with plane P at point S and whose base is marked with points A and B, one on each side of its diameter. AB represents pure memory, the entirety of my past experience as preserved in the unconscious; S represents the sum of the present and the habit memory inscribed upon and within my body; and P represents the totality of the material universe within my field of present perception. On the one hand, this “cone of memory� indicates that pure memory and perception, recollection and habit memory, are distinct and of separate natures: habit memory is represented by point S that intersects with the field of perception, whereas pure memory, comprised of recollection memories, is represented by the base of the cone on a separate plane from plane P. On the other hand, the cone SAB underscores that the two forms of memory in conjunction with pure memory and perception are unified and “lend each other a mutual support� (152). As Bergson explains, pure memory offers to the sensorimotor mechanisms of habit memory the recollections needed to help them with their task, while the sensorimotor apparatus in turn provides the unconscious memories of pure memory the means to actualize themselves in present action (152-53). Moreover, the continuity of the cone, the fact that it unifies its base with its apex, accentuates that between the plane of perception and that of pure memory there are an infinite number of planes that correspond to what Bergson describes as the different “tones of mental life� (14). As Bergson makes this point, which he claims is one of the central claims of the book, “between the plane of action—the plane in which our body has condensed its past into motor habits—and the plane of pure memory, where our mind retains in all its details the picture of our past life, we believe that we can discover thousands of different planes of consciousness,� each of which constitutes a unique repetition of the whole of our lived experience (241).
From the above, we see how body and mind, matter and spirit are related. In fact, the cone of memory represents how these two sets of ostensibly opposed terms relate to each other as part of one continuous whole. Pure memory, which Bergson associates with the mind and spirit insofar as it is not “housed� in the brain and, as constitutive of the unconscious, is distinct from the images that comprise the material universe, conditions present perception and manifests in material “memory-images� conducive to action. Conversely, habit memory and perception, which Bergson associates with the body and matter insofar as the former refers to the sensorimotor apparatus of the body and the latter apprehends images that comprise matter, draw on the content of pure memory in order to perform actions that satisfy the needs and interests of the body. In ordinary life, we are almost always in between the base and apex of the cone, between the “plane of action� and the “plane of pure memory.� Typically, we are neither entirely impulsive, utterly absorbed with present needs, nor oblivious dreamers, hopelessly lost in past recollection, and this is because the two planes consistently interpenetrate, “so that each has to abandon some part of its original purity� (155). For Bergson, then, we are not so much composed of mind and body (as many of the ancients maintained) as we live between these two extremes, which are mixed in different proportions that correspond to different tones of mental life. Likewise, to the extent that mind and body are distinct, it is not in terms of space, with extended matter (like the body) outside the mind and unextended consciousness inside the mind, but in terms of time, with a past preserved in memory that bears upon the lived present of concrete perception (220). Hence time, just as it provides a principle of distinction between mind and body, also accounts for their intimate relation: the mind (i.e. pure memory, spirit) relates to the body (i.e. perception, matter) as the past relates to the present, and vice-versa.
Perri, Trevor. “Henri Bergson.� In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory. Edited by Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian. New York: Routledge, 2017: 510-18.
While the principal thesis of Matter and Memory is that memory provides the clue to the relationship between spirit and matter, a secondary thesis that helps bolster this claim is that there is a crucial difference between perception and memory. Memory is not, in other words, an attenuated perception that recedes from the present moment and thereby loses its vitality; it is, rather, an autonomous and dynamic process in which the past that is preserved in itself can come to present consciousness in an infinite number of different and creative ways. Memory is not, then, so much a faculty of reproduction or repetition as one of synthesis; in fact, for Bergson, it is what makes consciousness possible in a duration that links the past and present. Related to this secondary thesis is yet another central claim: while matter, specifically the brain and the wider nervous system, may be necessary in order to actualize memories in consciousness, memories are not stored in the brain as if the brain were a container. In this sense, memories are not “in� the brain, but rather “in� time, i.e. in the past as part of the unconscious. Bergson therefore defends an anti-reductionist position that maintains a clear distinction between spirit and matter which parallels the distinction between memory and perception: in both cases, the former is not reducible to the latter.
To make his case about the difference between memory and perception and, more broadly, about the centrality of memory to the problem of spirit and matter, Bergson articulates a theory of pure perception in contrast to pure memory. Both pure perception and pure memory represent ideal types, extremes between which consciousness typically operates. As Bergson stresses, “there is no perception which is not full of memories� (33). Hence the ideal of pure perception intentionally brackets memory from its concept so as to render salient what perception, in and of itself, really is. For Bergson, pure perception relies on the concept of the image, which is neither an entity as it exists in itself as presupposed by realism nor a mere representation as presupposed by idealism. Images, Bergson claims, are all that we sense: “images [are] perceived when my senses are opened to them, unperceived when they are closed.� Yet there is one image that “is distinct from all the others, in that I do not know it only from without by perceptions, but from within by affections: it is my body� (17). On the one hand, then, there is the totality of images that comprise the material universe or matter, while on the other hand, there is the specific image that is my body. For Bergson, perception is simply the referral of some portion of the images that comprise matter to the eventual action of one particular image, my body (22). In this sense, my body is but one image amidst other images, albeit a unique one that marks the center of my possible action. As Bergson explains this point, “as my body moves in space, all the other images vary, while that image, my body, remains invariable. I must, therefore, make it a center, to which I refer all the other images� (46).
My body is therefore the locus and source of perception—or, more precisely, perception just is the referral of images that are not my body to the image that is my body. Yet because my body is merely another image that demarcates the center of my possible action in relation to other images, perception is “part of [the objects perceived] themselves; it is in them rather than they in it� (228-29). In other words, just as the brain is not a container for memories, the mind is not a container for perceptions; perception simply relates some set of images to the image that is my body, on account of which it has unmediated access to the images (i.e. the objects perceived) themselves. This means that the traditional distinction between objects that are outside the mind and representations of those objects inside the mind breaks down; or rather, this distinction is more appropriately conceived as “a distinction between the part and the whole,� where the part refers to the image that is my body, the locus of my perception, and the whole refers to the totality of all the other images that comprise the material universe (47). Bergson’s theory of pure perception is therefore not reducible to either realism or idealism: contra realism, matter “outside� the mind does not have the mysterious ability to produce representations “inside� the mind; and contra idealism, our perception of matter is not relative, mediated by mind-dependent structures universal to all humans. On Bergson’s theory of pure perception, there is no distinction between the phenomenon and the noumenon, between appearance and reality, but only, as we have seen, between the part and the whole (230).
Perception therefore has access to material objects as they exist “in themselves,� as Kant would put it, but this does not entail that it has access to the whole of the material universe. As Bergson frequently maintains, perception is limited in its scope, and this is because it is “entirely directed toward action� (31). That is, perception for Bergson is fundamentally vital and not speculative, a crucial point that both idealism and realism miss and that leads both theories into errors and contradictions. Because perception is ordered toward action in accordance with what interests bodily functions, it not only does not add to the image it perceives, but in fact subtracts from it, since it detaches “from the totality of objects the possible action of my body upon them.� Put differently, its function “is to eliminate from the totality of images all those on which I can have no hold, and then, from each of those which I retain, all that does not concern the needs of the image which I call my body� (229). For this reason, Bergson claims that perception exhibits a “necessary poverty� (38).
Pure perception is impoverished in that it only concerns itself with the needs of the image that is my body. Yet it is also impoverished in that it is an ideal type with which we have no actual familiarity. As noted earlier, pure perception never exists on its own in lived experience; it is always already complemented by memory, which when combined with perception constitutes what Bergson calls “my concrete and complex perception� (34). Unlike concrete perception, pure perception is entirely absorbed in the present and with matter—that is, it exclusively concerns my body in relation to the images upon which my body can act. Conversely, concrete perception is informed by memory, on account of which it “offers always a certain breadth of duration,� a plurality of moments that extend into the past (ibid.). Parallel to and concomitant with the distinction between pure perception and concrete perception is one between the present simply (another ideal type, a kind of analytical fiction) and the “real, concrete, live present,� the present that “necessarily occupies a duration� and hence “must be both a perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future� (137-38). It is at this point, with the influential idea of Bergsonian duration in view, that we can turn to memory, the lynchpin concept of the entire book.
One of the several ways that Matter and Memory is so influential has to do with its treatment of memory and its many forms. Bergson identifies at least four, perhaps even five, forms of memory (there is some debate as to whether pure memory is equivalent to recollection memory, as the latter is contrasted with habit memory in the second chapter). In the first chapter, Bergson differentiates between what Trevor Perri calls “contraction memory� and “perception memory,� where the former refers to the contraction of a number of independent moments into one, internal moment or duration that constitutes the lived present, and the latter refers to “a cloak of recollections� that covers over “a core of immediate perception� (34). One could perhaps say that contraction memory provides the form of consciousness whereas perception memory provides consciousness with its content (combined with the content provided by perception). In the second chapter of Matter and Memory, Bergson makes yet another distinction between two types of memory, one which Gilles Deleuze stresses we should not conflate with the distinction between contraction and perception memory. On the one hand there is “habit memory,� or what contemporary theorists would call procedural memory, while on the other hand there is “recollection memory,� now known as episodic memory. Habit memory is a non-representational “motor memory� of the body that, as Perri observes, “manifests itself as a disposition to react in a more or less fixed way� to one’s environment (Perri, 511). Recollection memory is the representation of some past event in one’s life; it has a place and date and by nature cannot be repeated, unlike habit memory (81). Bergson considers recollection memory as “memory par excellence,� the true form of memory, whereas habit memory is �habit interpreted by memory rather than memory itself� (84). This seems to be because Bergson thinks that habit memory is closely related to perception; while it has to do with the acquisition of sensorimotor habits over time, and in this sense has some kind of relation to the past, it is actualized in relation to the present needs or interests of the body.
This leaves “pure memory� as the final form or aspect of memory, which several commentators associate with recollection memory. The two concepts are, I think, ultimately different, if nevertheless closely related. As far as I can tell, recollection memory is to pure memory as the part is to the whole; pure memory, in other words, is comprised of recollection memories, each of which refers to some past event or episode. Pure memory therefore refers to the totality of one’s past experience virtually preserved in the unconscious; it is the source of what is actualized in perception memory and the recollection of what Bergson calls “memory-images,� from which it is nevertheless distinct. “From the moment that it becomes image, the past leaves the state of pure memory and coincides with a certain part of my present,� Bergson explains. “Memory actualized in an image differs, then, profoundly from pure memory� (140). For Bergson, the relationship between pure memory and the unconscious is especially important. While memories are not “stored� in the brain, they are in some sense “housed� in the unconscious, with the crucial caveat that this spatial metaphor is not exactly appropriate to how Bergson understands the unconscious. This is because the unconscious for Bergson is not a spatial entity or container, but more like the past itself, the whole of which influences, if not in a deterministic way, our present experience in consciousness. As Bergson puts it, “the whole of our past psychical life conditions our present state; . . . whole, also, it reveals itself in our character� (148). Of course, the vast majority of our past psychical life is inaccessible to us; we only ever perceive a small part of it in the present, and it sometimes seems that our past recollections have either disappeared or only reappear at random. “But this semblance of complete destruction or of capricious revival,� Bergson contends, “is due merely to the fact that actual consciousness accepts at each moment the useful and rejects in the same breath the superfluous� (146).
Pure memory, then, includes all one’s past memories preserved in an unconscious state out of which certain memories come to the fore of consciousness based on the demands imposed by the present in concrete perception. To demonstrate this relationship between pure memory and perception, and also the relationship between recollection and habit memory, Bergson utilizes the famous image of the “cone of memory.� He describes an inverted cone whose apex intersects with plane P at point S and whose base is marked with points A and B, one on each side of its diameter. AB represents pure memory, the entirety of my past experience as preserved in the unconscious; S represents the sum of the present and the habit memory inscribed upon and within my body; and P represents the totality of the material universe within my field of present perception. On the one hand, this “cone of memory� indicates that pure memory and perception, recollection and habit memory, are distinct and of separate natures: habit memory is represented by point S that intersects with the field of perception, whereas pure memory, comprised of recollection memories, is represented by the base of the cone on a separate plane from plane P. On the other hand, the cone SAB underscores that the two forms of memory in conjunction with pure memory and perception are unified and “lend each other a mutual support� (152). As Bergson explains, pure memory offers to the sensorimotor mechanisms of habit memory the recollections needed to help them with their task, while the sensorimotor apparatus in turn provides the unconscious memories of pure memory the means to actualize themselves in present action (152-53). Moreover, the continuity of the cone, the fact that it unifies its base with its apex, accentuates that between the plane of perception and that of pure memory there are an infinite number of planes that correspond to what Bergson describes as the different “tones of mental life� (14). As Bergson makes this point, which he claims is one of the central claims of the book, “between the plane of action—the plane in which our body has condensed its past into motor habits—and the plane of pure memory, where our mind retains in all its details the picture of our past life, we believe that we can discover thousands of different planes of consciousness,� each of which constitutes a unique repetition of the whole of our lived experience (241).
From the above, we see how body and mind, matter and spirit are related. In fact, the cone of memory represents how these two sets of ostensibly opposed terms relate to each other as part of one continuous whole. Pure memory, which Bergson associates with the mind and spirit insofar as it is not “housed� in the brain and, as constitutive of the unconscious, is distinct from the images that comprise the material universe, conditions present perception and manifests in material “memory-images� conducive to action. Conversely, habit memory and perception, which Bergson associates with the body and matter insofar as the former refers to the sensorimotor apparatus of the body and the latter apprehends images that comprise matter, draw on the content of pure memory in order to perform actions that satisfy the needs and interests of the body. In ordinary life, we are almost always in between the base and apex of the cone, between the “plane of action� and the “plane of pure memory.� Typically, we are neither entirely impulsive, utterly absorbed with present needs, nor oblivious dreamers, hopelessly lost in past recollection, and this is because the two planes consistently interpenetrate, “so that each has to abandon some part of its original purity� (155). For Bergson, then, we are not so much composed of mind and body (as many of the ancients maintained) as we live between these two extremes, which are mixed in different proportions that correspond to different tones of mental life. Likewise, to the extent that mind and body are distinct, it is not in terms of space, with extended matter (like the body) outside the mind and unextended consciousness inside the mind, but in terms of time, with a past preserved in memory that bears upon the lived present of concrete perception (220). Hence time, just as it provides a principle of distinction between mind and body, also accounts for their intimate relation: the mind (i.e. pure memory, spirit) relates to the body (i.e. perception, matter) as the past relates to the present, and vice-versa.
Perri, Trevor. “Henri Bergson.� In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory. Edited by Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian. New York: Routledge, 2017: 510-18.
March 17, 2020
ONLY CONNECT?
An attempt to recall the wisdom of Bergson. All hinges on his notion of image as a kind of metaphysical monadic constituent of reality. Image is his means to get out of the realism/idealism dichotomy.
Realists are those who ascribe reality to the objective scientific description of the world. The realists� problem comes in explaining the emergent phenomena of consciousness, with its thickening memories, sensations and perceptions from otherwise mechanical matter. That is, qualia. Consciousness is a problem for realists because physical theories cannot adequately account for its emergence because it is unnecessary from the point of view of evolution, and there’s as yet no convincing means of connecting the laws of matter with qualic experience.
Idealists, on the other hand, are those who claim that matter cannot be understood in itself (viz the Kantian proscription against direct access to the noumenal realm) but only via our way of conceptualising it through, well, ideas. Idealists claim that reality is always-already shaped by our limited cognitive faculties, but they run into the problem of explaining why matter has the property of generating these ideal conceptions within our brains.
For Bergson, the idea that our brain is not actually interacting with something that is ‘real� is implausible. Bergson’s images, despite their strangeness for us, are for Bergson commonsensical: he assumes that the things we perceive are where they are and are ‘real�, just as our thoughts and conscious states are also real.
Consider your coffee-cup. You have an image of it in front of you. Its presence is affecting you. Naturally, you are wondering whether it’s time for another slurp of the black stuff before it gets too cold. Now, to what extent does your image of the coffee-cup exist? You see it because you recognise it, and have some practical relation to it. The cup itself is the colour of ivory and there are dark brown smears of coffee on its side, you know the kind. From a scientific perspective, you know these colours are how they appear, according to how your eyes register frequencies of light. To the fly that buzzes by the cup, it will appear differently, but be no less real. Your perception of the cup’s image, in all its sensuous detail, is a relation of part (the part your cognitive apparatus can process) to whole (all possible appearances of the cup), and not an idealist distinction between matter as it is in itself and its phenomenal appearance for you.
The things we perceive are determined by the body, insofar as we can close our eyes and make everything ‘disappear�. From pure virtual perception, that is, of all the things that we could see were we not by physiology and habit trained into identifying only useful images, our bodies select those images which it believes it needs. Memory, for Bergson, is not the recollection of something passively stored in our cupboards at the back of our brains, but something which requires active production. We produce a channel to an image which is no longer of immediate use and push it into the present.
By treating images, and their constant interaction, as real, the images of consciousness also become real, hence the spirit will also be seen as real, like memory. If memory occurs when we connect something perceived in the present with an associated event in the past, then the more we remember the richer we are in spirit.
Why can a stone see more than us? Because it is not affected by anything and can behold the world in cool mossy detachment. Just as someone with obsessive compulsive disorder suffers from a surplus of connection. If I asked you to walk along a narrow path, say, half a metre wide, without stepping off it, you’d likely have little problem with the task. But if that self-same path was a 1000 metres off the ground, chances are you wouldn’t do it or at best crawl along it on your hands and knees. Your fear of death, manifested in irrepressible images of falling, would make you shakey. Someone suffering obsessive compulsive disorder is riddled with these fearful images always, whether it’s falling off their bike, or leaving the house with the gas on, or being struck by random plane debris. This indicates the central challenge of the Bergsonian ontology. If more is not always best, then by what means can we judge harmful images of the past or future?
An attempt to recall the wisdom of Bergson. All hinges on his notion of image as a kind of metaphysical monadic constituent of reality. Image is his means to get out of the realism/idealism dichotomy.
Realists are those who ascribe reality to the objective scientific description of the world. The realists� problem comes in explaining the emergent phenomena of consciousness, with its thickening memories, sensations and perceptions from otherwise mechanical matter. That is, qualia. Consciousness is a problem for realists because physical theories cannot adequately account for its emergence because it is unnecessary from the point of view of evolution, and there’s as yet no convincing means of connecting the laws of matter with qualic experience.
Idealists, on the other hand, are those who claim that matter cannot be understood in itself (viz the Kantian proscription against direct access to the noumenal realm) but only via our way of conceptualising it through, well, ideas. Idealists claim that reality is always-already shaped by our limited cognitive faculties, but they run into the problem of explaining why matter has the property of generating these ideal conceptions within our brains.
For Bergson, the idea that our brain is not actually interacting with something that is ‘real� is implausible. Bergson’s images, despite their strangeness for us, are for Bergson commonsensical: he assumes that the things we perceive are where they are and are ‘real�, just as our thoughts and conscious states are also real.
Consider your coffee-cup. You have an image of it in front of you. Its presence is affecting you. Naturally, you are wondering whether it’s time for another slurp of the black stuff before it gets too cold. Now, to what extent does your image of the coffee-cup exist? You see it because you recognise it, and have some practical relation to it. The cup itself is the colour of ivory and there are dark brown smears of coffee on its side, you know the kind. From a scientific perspective, you know these colours are how they appear, according to how your eyes register frequencies of light. To the fly that buzzes by the cup, it will appear differently, but be no less real. Your perception of the cup’s image, in all its sensuous detail, is a relation of part (the part your cognitive apparatus can process) to whole (all possible appearances of the cup), and not an idealist distinction between matter as it is in itself and its phenomenal appearance for you.
The things we perceive are determined by the body, insofar as we can close our eyes and make everything ‘disappear�. From pure virtual perception, that is, of all the things that we could see were we not by physiology and habit trained into identifying only useful images, our bodies select those images which it believes it needs. Memory, for Bergson, is not the recollection of something passively stored in our cupboards at the back of our brains, but something which requires active production. We produce a channel to an image which is no longer of immediate use and push it into the present.
By treating images, and their constant interaction, as real, the images of consciousness also become real, hence the spirit will also be seen as real, like memory. If memory occurs when we connect something perceived in the present with an associated event in the past, then the more we remember the richer we are in spirit.
Why can a stone see more than us? Because it is not affected by anything and can behold the world in cool mossy detachment. Just as someone with obsessive compulsive disorder suffers from a surplus of connection. If I asked you to walk along a narrow path, say, half a metre wide, without stepping off it, you’d likely have little problem with the task. But if that self-same path was a 1000 metres off the ground, chances are you wouldn’t do it or at best crawl along it on your hands and knees. Your fear of death, manifested in irrepressible images of falling, would make you shakey. Someone suffering obsessive compulsive disorder is riddled with these fearful images always, whether it’s falling off their bike, or leaving the house with the gas on, or being struck by random plane debris. This indicates the central challenge of the Bergsonian ontology. If more is not always best, then by what means can we judge harmful images of the past or future?
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