Bergson and the Sensorimotor Stage

 

Bergson’s theory of the move from the aggregate of images, what I have called the monistic cluster or that booming, blooming buzzing confusion of William James was an anticipation of the sensorimotor stage of development in early childhood  as understood by Piaget.  Here the child through single touch and double touch begins to discover where the world and himself begin to part company. Me/Not-Me stage takes two years so it’s not an immediate thing to grasp.  As the Subject/Object divide becomes established it seems to the individual knower to be a fundamental feature of reality.  It is not and again with Bergson’s  understanding of memory as not missing anything, as having all experience available for present use if the need arises certain reversions to that state can occur.  These can be like mystic states akin to a dissolution of the personality. Tennyson on the saying of his own name would lapse into such a condition:

. . . a kind of waking trance — this for lack of a better word — I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. . . . All at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest . . . utterly beyond words — where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. . . .

The savikalpa samadhi is somewhat like this from the accounts of yogis but they would probably reserve complete realisation as a gnosis that is an everyday thing, the sahaj samadhi.  Here in all states of mind the unity of being is never lost and even while in the subject/object mode of awareness realisation remains intact.  Ken Wilber who has reflected deeply on the nature of consciousness rejects the regression to the sensorimotor stage as a false samadhi.

Many theorists, following Jung, maintained that since mysticism is a subject/object union, then this early undifferentiated fusion state must be what is somehow recaptured in mystical unity. Being an earlier follower of Jung, I had agreed with that position, and had indeed written several essays explaining it. But as with much of Jung, it was now a position I found untenable. And more than that, annoying, because it unmistakably meant that mysticism is a regressive state of some sort of another. This was, as they say, a real sore spot with me.

I speculate that if the journals and notes of Bergson were available to us which they are not having been destroyed on his instructions, we might find evidence of odd and uncanny states of mind and experiences which led him later on to give credence to E.S.P.  It is likely that he destroyed his papers in order to not distract from his published works.

Bergson and the Aggregate of Images

 

Everything becomes clearer, on the other hand, (pg 64) if we start from representation itself, that is to say from the totality of perceived images. My perception, in its pure state, isolated from memory, does not go on from my body to other bodies; it is, to begin with, in the aggregate of bodies, then gradually limits itself and adopts my body as a centre. And it is led to do so precisely by experience of the double faculty, which this body possesses, of performing actions and feeling affections; in a word, by experience of the sensori-motor power of a certain image, privileged among other images. For, on the one hand, this image always occupies the centre of representation, so that the other images range themselves round it in the very order in which they might be subject to its action; on the other hand, I know it from within, by sensations which I term affective, instead of knowing only, as in the case of the other images, its outer skin. There is then, in the aggregate of images, a privileged image, perceived in its depths and no longer only on the surface - the seat of affection and, at the same time, the source of action: it is this particular image which I adopt as the centre of my universe and as the physical basis of my personality.”

(Matter and Memory)

 Ariel archeology can discern features which are not apparent when on the ground but can be picked up ghosting through the land when the angle of the sun is low.  Reading Bergson flying in my Ariel Advaita machine non-dual features can be discerned.  At the same time the pull towards the dualistic interpretation are obviated. 

John Mullarkey, whose book on Bergson (Bergson and Philosophy) I have been dipping into, in his remarks on the passage above holds that there is quite clearly a deviation from monism.

Yet this return to a monistic purity is shown to fail almost immediately, for within this world of indiscriminate images there is said to be always one that can be immediately distinguished from the others: the image of my body.  An immediately given dualism is reinscribed within the realm of images, in that the body alone is known in two distinct manners: through the perception of its objective form  as just one body amongst others and through the 

affective experience of being incarnated within and possessing this body; the perspectival feeling that ‘it is my body’.

Is that a ‘gotcha’? Probably not if we consider that Bergson would hardly have fallen so easily into a retorsion. Scrolling back from the projection into the body as a center we come to what I have been calling the plenum viz.the aggregate of images. Here from my advaitic  perspective  I can discern an analogue of  the mechanism of superimposition is at work. 

The Bhagavad Gita  13:14 expresses it thus:

Shining through the functions of all the organs, (yet) devoid of all the organs; unattached, and verily the supporter of all; without quality, and the perceiver of qualities.

The aggregate of images is the device that Bergson uses to surpass the demands of both Idealism and Realism or internal and external views of knowledge. The primal state is one of self-luminous monism or an enclosed world of being which has not yet bifurcated. 

Everything becomes clearer, on the other hand, (pg 64) if we start from representation itself, that is to say from the totality of perceived images. My perception, in its pure state, isolated from memory, does not go on from my body to other bodies; it is, to begin with, in the aggregate of bodies, then gradually limits itself and adopts my body as a centre.

Note that he uses the term ‘aggregate of bodies’ as an alternative to ‘aggregate of images’ because body and image denote the same experience which is between a representation and a material object in his ontology. Presumably he wishes to point to the monistic cluster in which there is as yet no separation.