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?

What its like to be a sage

 What its like to be a sage is a riff on what its like to be a bat.  It controverts it with irony because the bat is not an idealist.  The bat if anything is a non-dualist.  If the bat had it’s own very own special bat feelings, inscrutable and mysterious to the non-bat world then the existence of an external world that was congruent with those feeling would arise.  Of course the bat is a non theoretic creature; the problem of an external world does not arise, there is simply a consciousness and action without a second thought.  Humans do take thought when not immediately pressed by the exigencies of survival and navigation around the furniture of this world.  The human being is a theoretic creature who examines his own reactions and places them within the boundary of an entity called the person.  In essence that is a naturally occurring theory which may be useful for navigational purposes, indeed essential yet as Bergson and the Advaitins hold the forked consciousness is parasitic on a non-dual plenum.  Bergson calls it ‘pure perception’  and allies it to Memory the significant element of Consciousness.  Getting to that state is for the Eastern sage a letting go and letting be, expressed by Ramana Maharshi as ‘effortless effort’.  The Master enjoins ‘Show me the face you had before you were born’ or ‘the sound of one hand clapping’.  There is consciousness in that state but it has not yet migrated per ur-theory to a person.  It is the natural state.  

Janaka in the Ashtavakra Gita explains it thus:

"Janaka said:

I became intolerant first of physical action, then of extensive speech, and then of thought. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.

Having no attachment for sound and other sense objects, and the Self not being an object of perception, my mind is freed from distraction and is one-pointed. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.

An effort has to be made for concentration when there is distraction of mind owing to superimposition etc. Seeing this to be the rule, thus do I firmly abide.

Having nothing to accept and nothing to reject, and having neither joy nor sorrow, thus, sir, do I now firmly abide.

A stage of life or no stage of life, meditation, control of mental functions - finding that these cause distraction to me, thus verily do I firmly abide.

Abstention from action is as much the outcome of ignorance as the performance of action. Knowing this truth fully well, thus do I firmly abide.

Thinking on the Unthinkable One, one only has recourse to a form of thought. Therefore giving up that thought, thus do I firmly abide.

Blessed is the man who has accomplished this. Blessed is he who is such by nature."

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's Qualia

So creeping alone the vast noetic continent of Matter and Mind accompanied by that man in the bowler hat whose piercing dark eyes have looked in things and felt the enigmatic gaze of silent objects.  Are they emanating their own qualia. Joel Dolbeault thinks so:

From the point of view of contemporary panpsychism, one can ask the following question: for Bergson, does matter have perceptions in the phenomenal sense of the term? The answer is positive because, for Bergson, qualia (i.e., phenomenal qualities) have an objective reality. By contracting the elementary material vibrations, the human perception does not make the qualia, appear, it only intensifies them (Bergson 1991, 182-183, 202-204). (Bergsoniana: https://journals.openedition.org/bergsoniana/884 )

Can this be right going by the normal acceptation of qualia as how things feel to us?  It seems an impoverishment of the personal and moreover contrary to cher maitre’s sense of memory as a personal hue that objects reflect even though we might think of our perceptions as entirely objective.  We live our own worlds and that is another name for soul.  What pops out or what is salient tells us what we are: for him who wears shoes the world is covered in leather.  

 

Henri Bergson on Recognition

 I am creeping along following  my reading plan for Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson.  No more that 3 or 4 pages at a time writing notes as I read as if each observation was a nail to hold it down.  I can see how this dilatory notation could have exasperated Samuel Johnson during his tour of the Hebrides but for a work like Bergson’s it induces the stasis that allows some of the profound insights to penetrate.  Like recognition as a foundational native power.  How do you know that this perception is similar to another that occurred in the past.  Looking for evidence for this knowledge is the reflex of empiricism but looked at closely it chases its own tail.  We can only recognise similarity if we already have it and in many cases familiarity precedes the memory of our previous encounter.

The advaitin Dharmaraja Adhvarindra writing on the Pramanas (means of valid knowledge)  devotes his shortest chapter to upamana  or comparison - “The instrument of the valid knowledge of similarity is comparison”.  Even those astute observers of the furniture of the mind did not see the difficulty involved in the comparison of what is a present experience with an experience which is past and thereby judge their congruence or not or slight resemblance etc.  Here epistemology trumps neuroscience’s engrams.

“But, along with this definite and perceived resemblance which (pg 107) consists in the common element seized and disengaged by the mind, there is a vague and in some sort objective resemblance, spread over the surface of the images themselves, which might act perhaps like a physical cause of reciprocal attraction.[13] And should we ask how it is, then, that we often recognize an object without being able to identify it with a former image, refuge is sought in the convenient hypothesis of cerebral tracks which coincide with each other, of cerebral movements made easier by practice,[14] or of perceptive cells communicating with cells where memories are stored.[15] In truth, all such theories of recognition are bound to melt away, in the end, into physiological hypotheses of this kind. What they were aiming at, first, was to make all recognition issue from a bringing together of perception and memory; but experience stands over against them, testifying that in most cases recollection emerges only after the perception is recognized.” Matter and Memory

Admit it: the ball joint of the philosopher’s neck is made wry by this confounding of the intuitive question - how do we know?  We just know.  A vertiginous prospect rejected by right thinking empiricists.

Bergson and Irrationalism/Irrealism

 

“There would still remain this second conclusion, which is of a more metaphysical order,—viz. : that in pure perception we are actually placed outside ourselves, we touch the reality of the object in an immediate intuition. “(Matter and Memory pg.84)

This is a very powerful assertion not lightly made and he hopes that in subsequent chapters of his book ‘Matter and Memory’ that he will be able to advance empirical justification.  Read in cool blood it is the sort of position that furnished evidence for the common judgment of Bergson as a thinker immersed in irrationalism.  From a logical point of view either Materialism or Idealism would give you a more likely position.  As I wrote in recent posts  his philosophy has points of similarity with those of yoga and Vedanta namely ‘samprajnata’ and ‘adhyasa’ (superimposition) so it is not so startling to me.

In the first chapter he laid out the grounds for his rejection of epistemological Realism and Idealism and we know that he spent years reading up on lesion and aphasia studies which are commonly assumed to establish brain/mind parallelism/identity and so forth.  This time by my new rubric I will be reading ‘Matter and Mind’ very slowly as though I had written it myself and attempt an alignment with his thinking.   He doesn’t positively controvert other philosophers by name.  A possible influence might be Plotinus who he lectured on frequently.  ‘Time and Eternity’ in the Enneads might be a point of entry into his mind.

Bergson and Advaitic Superimposition (adhyasa)

 

Matthew Arnold reminded himself somewhere that he ought not to find himself everywhere.  That is a  perfectly sound stricture but here I am going to set it aside and indulge my synthesizing and syncretizing habit.  Neither Bergson nor Sankara came from Mars to astound the Earth with some utterly novel doctrine beyond anything which Earthlings could fathom.  That the lineaments of my assimilation be perfectly clear I will go briskly through what I think are interesting parallels.  In the samprajnata samadhi there is a resemblance to the pure perception of Bergson. Refer to my previous post. 

In those rare states of consciousness there is seeing but nobody sees, hearing but nobody hears etc.  or at least the identification with a jiva or person is exiguous.  This is practically next door to the pure asamprajnata or nirvikalpa samadhi in which there is just absorption into pure consciousness.  However as Sankara says the natural, ordinary, unreconstructed state is one in which there is full identification of the jiva and his states of mind.  What Bergson would say is that there is an element of pure perception in all our conscious states but that memory binds us to a personal history.  It is as though through memory a superimposition takes place.  The need to react to present demands brings the person down into a history.

"But inversely,, if recollection is regarded as a weakened perception, perception must be regarded as a stronger recollection. We are driven to argue as though it was given to us after the manner of a memory, as an internal state, a mere modification of our personality; and our eyes are closed to the primordial and fundamental act of perception, the act, constituting pure perception, whereby we place ourselves in the very heart of things. And thus the same error, which manifests itself in psychology by a radical incapacity to explain the mechanism of memory, will in metaphysics profoundly influence the idealistic and realistic conceptions of matter." (Matter and Memory pg.73)

You can discern here I think the suggestion that the condition of pure perception is primordial.  It is what the aggregate of images or the plenum of awareness that has as yet no personal centre implies.  The next step is the placing of all this or more correctly an edited version of this on a central ego This is the natural state.  This placing is what Sankara would call adhyasa.

  We never leave our total nature behind or otherwise enlightenment would be a mirage.

Bergson Stirring a Cup of Coffee by Stephen E. Robbins

 

Stephen E. Robbins' interpretation of Bergson uses the concept of the holograph to delineate how the brain modulates the vastness of Memory.  Bergson himself writes of the brain as being like a valve.  Everything that you have ever experienced is out there laid down in temporal order compressed into the single plane of duration.  Nothing is missing but not everything is to the point so the brain as an organ of action extracts that which is germane.   The vastness of the totality of experience could not be stored in the brain.  Events are stored in their fullness in memory and it is only on analysis that we can separate out all the physics.  An example that Robbins gives is the stirring of a cup of coffee as an experimental event that is such that if something untoward or unexpected were to happen we would immediately spot it.  So we therefore have it all in memory otherwise it would pass unnoticed.   Robbins throws all his esoteric, to me, knowledge of physics at this event.  Adiabatics, vectors, rate of turn etc, etc.  But apply to the man himself:

Robbins

Bergson 'Explaining' Religion

Some would regard Bergson’s explaining of the sources of religion the explaining away of religion. That is certainly not correct. As stated in the Wikipedia article on Bergson:



Bergson inclined to convert to Catholicism, writing in his will on 7 February 1937: My thinking has always brought me nearer to Catholicism, in which I saw the perfect complement to Judaism.Though wishing to convert to Catholicism, as stated in his will, he did not convert in view of the travails inflicted on the Jewish people by the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s; he did not want to appear to want to leave the persecuted. On 3 January 1941 Bergson died in occupied Paris from bronchitis. A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request.

The sources of religion are found because they are there to be found. What could be simpler? There is no invention involved but the evolution towards monotheism that he traces is moulded by the matrix of the culture.

The truth is that religion, being co-extensive with our species must be an effect of our structure. We have just now connected it with a fundamental experience; but that experience was such that we had an inkling of it before encountering it; in any case it is quite easily explained when it has been encountered....

The inkling, that’s the thing, the high at the tip of your mind that we are perfectly at home with because it is part of the structure of human existence. The advaitins would have it that consciousness with its immediate self awareness is the present link, the yoga or yoke or ‘religio’. It’s not that we invent Santa God and then find him and begin to bother him with lists. The power of reflection itself is the gateway:

You bring reflexion into play, however, and this conviction will vanish; man will perceive himself, will think of himself as a speck in the immensity of the universe. He would feel lost, if the effort to live did not at once project into his intelligence, into the very place that this perception and this reflexion were about to occupy, the opposing image of things and events turning towards man; whether well or ill disposed, a certain intention of his environment follows him then everywhere, just as the moon seems to run with him when he runs. If it be good, he will rely on it. If it bodes harm, he will try to avert its effects. In any case, it means that he has been taken into account. Here is no theory, no room for the arbitrary. This conviction is forced upon him, there being no philosophy about it, but a vital impulsion.

(from The Two Sources of Morality and Religion)

Bergson's Nobel Prize

Henri Bergson won the Nobel prize for literature in 1927 for the brilliant skill with which he presented his ideas. Arguably his closest connection to literature as such was when Marcel Proust acted as best man at his wedding. The concept of duration influenced Proust of course and I have in past posts mentioned T.S.Eliot and Louis MacNeice in relation to ‘duree’. If he had turned his attention to literature as usually conceived then I have no doubt that his fertile imagination would have thrown up luxuriant scenarios. Here is a quick sketch during a discussion on primitive culture and curious tribal customs:

We have all come across one of those very united, self-satisfied families, who keep themselves to themselves, because they are shy or supercilious. It is not unusual to notice certain quaint habits among them, aversions or superstitions, which might become serious if they were to go on fermenting in a closed vessel. Each one of these singularities has its particular origin. It was some idea which occurred to one or another of the family, and which the others have taken on trust. It may be a walk they took one Sunday and took again the next Sunday, and which then became a settled thing every Sunday of the year: if they should have the misfortune to miss it once, goodness knows what would happen. In order to repeat, to imitate, to follow blindly, we have only to relax; it is criticism that demands an effort. Now take a few hundred centuries instead of a few years; magnify enormously all the little foibles of a family living in isolation: you will have no difficulty in imagining what must have occurred in primitive societies which have remained self-centred and self-satisfied, instead of opening windows on to the outside world, of dispersing the foul vapours as they gathered about them, and of making a constant effort to broaden their horizon.

(fromThe Two Sources of Morality and Religion