This way lies madness I say to myself. After poring over Matter and Memory for years you have finally begun to see some light dawn .Themes emerge from the fog and shapes at last settle into an intelligible form. The next point of departure is to feel that nobody really understands Bergson but your own self. Nevertheless there are false steps or a characteristic misprision that arises when there is interference from an overweening conceptual schema so established that it ignores Bergson’s order of business. As I wrote previously the aporiai generated by the internal/external; idealist/materialist were considered insuperable by him. The alternative then is to move away from a subject/object schema to a plenum of consciousness in which the two are merged. It is the interaction that is being conscious in a state of pure perception. As the Vipassana Buddhist meditation instead of saying ‘I hear a song’ say ‘singing is singing’. Of course this is a limit experience, memory that is linked to a point of view and a history particularises the personal. Memory and perception work together but the fundamental ontology is of an immediacy that lays down experiences as they happen and is a permanent record. Forgetting is then a device that cuts out of this plenum what is needed to act efficiently. Its on a what we need to remember basis.
What then of interpretations that stay within the rubric of internal/external, qualia and the like conundrums generated by the standard epistemology? Whatever of my rough hewn farrago they are certainly straying from the master’s order of business.
I rise from my couch and resume a vacant and pensive mood.
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