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.
No comments:
Post a Comment