Bergson's Key Insights in 'Matter and Memory'

 I finished Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson recently reading only a few pages at a time, that immersive sort of reading as though I was writing it. Nice idea but unlikely with this author who can turn a few millimetres of definitional space into a football pitch.  You become acquainted with the truth of his description of the difference between the amateur and the philosopher as demonstrated through the approach to a problem field.  The amateur takes the topic as found in the history, 6 reasons for, 6 against and the path through the middle.  The philosopher hears his own Socratic daimon saying ‘don’t go there’, uh uh; maybe the problem is not as posed and the oppositional poles as in the internal/external, idealism/realism dyads are merely a continuously morphing mistake.  I’m probably completely wrong in thinking that this is the key insight in his first chapter.  Broadly stated the internal demands the presence of the external to be itself.  

“The realist starts, in fact, from the universe, that is to say from an aggregate of images governed, as to their mutual

relations, by fixed laws, in which effects are in strict proportion to their causes, and of which the character is an

absence of centre, all the images unfolding on one and the same plane indefinitely prolonged. But he is at once

bound to recognize that, besides this system, there are perceptions that is to say, systems in which these same

images seem to depend on a single one among them, around which they range themselves on different planes, so as

to be wholly transformed by the slightest modification of this central image. Now this perception is just what the

idealist starts from: in the system of images which he adopts there is a privileged image, his body, by which the

other images are conditioned. But as soon as he attempts to connect the present with the past and to foretell the

future, he is obliged to abandon this central position, to replace (pg 15) all the images on the same plane, to suppose

that they no longer vary for him, but for themselves; and to treat them as though they made part of a system in

which every change gives the exact measure of its cause. On this condition alone a science of the universe becomes

possible; and, since this science exists, since it succeeds in foreseeing the future, its fundamental hypothesis cannot

be arbitrary. The first system alone is given to present experience; but we believe in the second, if only because we

affirm the continuity of the past, present, and future. Thus in idealism, as in realism, we posit one of the two

systems and seek to deduce the other from it.”

Staying at that level of analysis leads to a constant oscillation, the result of the apparently inescapable dualism between me and my world.  Here the philosopher says no, perhaps there is a path to non-duality in which there is what Bergson calls ‘pure perception’. 

If that isn’t knowledge as we know it Henri then what is it, a transcendental swiss penknife or something?  What would make you think it exists unless it evinces itself in some manner. And are you cher Maitre Bergson really saying that we perceive our perceptions?