Misuse of Mind

A Study of Bergson's Attack on Intellectualism

Karin Stephen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317830535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is Volume IV of five in a series on Epistemology and Metaphysics. Originally published in 1922, this study looks at Henri Bergson's (nineteenth century French Philosopher) attack on intellectualism and his aim to direct attention to the reality which he believes we all actually know already, but misinterpret and disregard because we are biased by preconceived ideas.

Chapter III
Matter and Memory

WE have seen that, according to the theory of change which is fundamental for Bergson’s philosophy, the changing fact which we know directly is described as a process of becoming which does not contain parts nor admit of repetitions. On the other hand this changing fact certainly does lend itself to analysis and classification and explanation and, at first sight at any rate, it is natural to suppose that whatever can be classified and explained must consist of qualities, that is distinct parts which can be repeated on different occasions. The problem for Bergson, if he is to establish his theory of change, is to show that the fact that a changing process can be analysed and classified does not necessarily imply that such a process must consist of distinct qualities which can be repeated. Bergson’s theory of the relation of matter to memory suggests a possible solution of this problem as to how it is possible to analyse and so apply general laws to and explain duration: it becomes necessary, therefore, to give some account of this theory.

Like all other descriptions and explanations, such an account must, of course, be expressed in terms of abstractions, and so is liable to be misunderstood unless the false implications of these abstractions are allowed for and discounted.

According to Bergson the only actual reality is the changing fact itself, everything else is abstraction: this reality however is not confined to the fragment called “our present experience” which is in the full focus of consciousness and is all that we usually suppose ourselves to know directly; it includes besides everything that we are in a sense aware of but do not pay attention to, together with our whole past: for Bergson, in fact, reality coincides with the field of virtual knowledge, anything short of this whole field is an abstraction and so falsified. Even to say “we know this fact” is unsatisfactory as implying ourselves and the fact as distinct things united by an external relation of knowing: to say “the fact is different from the abstraction by which it is explained” similarly implies logically distinct terms in an external relation of difference, and so on. If Bergson is right in claiming that the actual fact is non-logical then obviously all attempts to describe it, since they must be expressed in terms of abstractions, will teem with false implications which must be discounted if the description is to convey the meaning intended.

Bergson’s claim is that if we allow ourselves to attend to the changing fact with which we are actually acquainted we are driven to a theory of reality different from the theory of things and relations accepted by common sense. The two abstractions by means of which he attempts to express this new theory are matter and memory. In the actual fact Bergson would hold that both these notions are combined by synthesis in such a way as no longer to be distinct, or rather, for this implies that they started distinct and then became merged, it would perhaps be better to say that these two notions are abstractions from two tendencies which are present in the actual fact. In the actual fact they combine and, as it were, counteract one another and the result is something different from either taken alone, but when we abstract them we release them from each other’s modifying influence and the result is an exaggeration of one or other tendency which does not really represent anything which actually occurs but can be used, in combination with the contrary exaggeration, to explain the actual fact which may be described as being like what would result from a combination of these two abstractions.

We will take matter first.

Matter, for Bergson, is an exaggeration of the tendency in reality, (that is in the actualchanging fact directly known) towards logical distinctness, what he calls “spatiality.” His use of the word “matter” in this sense is again, perhaps, like his use of the word “space,” rather misleading. Actual reality, according to him, is never purely material, the only purely material things are abstractions, and these are not real at all but simply fictions. Bergson really means the same thing by “matter” as by “space” and that is simply mutual distinctness of parts and externality of relations, in a word logical complexity. Matter, according to this definition of the word, has no duration and so cannot last through any period of time or change: it simply is in the present, it does not endure but is perpetually destroyed and recreated.

The complementary exaggeration which, taken together with matter, completes Bergson’s explanation of reality, is memory. Just as matter is absolute logical complexity memory is absolute creative synthesis. Together they constitute the hybrid notion of creative duration whose “parts” inter penetrate which, according to Bergson, comes nearest to giving a satisfactory description of the actual fact directly known which is, for him, the whole reality.

The best way to accustom one’s mind to these two complementary exaggerations, matter and memory, and to see in moredetail the use that Bergson makes of them in explaining the actual facts, will be to examine his theory of sensible perception, since it is just in the act of sensible perception that memory comes in contact with matter.

The unsophisticated view is that in sensible perception we become acquainted with things which exist whether we perceive them or not, and these things, taken all together, are commonly called the material world. According to Bergson’s theory also sensible perception is direct acquaintance with matter. The unsophisticated view holds further, however, that this material world with which sensible perception acquaints us is the common sense world of solid tables, green grass, anger and other such states and things and qualities, but we have already seen that this common sense world is really itself only one among the various attempts which science and common sense are continually making to explain the facts in terms of abstractions. The worlds of electrons, vibrations, forces, and so on, constructed by physics, are other attempts to do the same thing and the common sense world of “real” things and qualities has no more claim to actual existence than have any of these scientific hypotheses. Bergson’s matter is not identified with any one of these constructions, it is that in the facts which they are all attempts to explain in terms of abstractions, the element in thefacts upon which abstractions are based and which makes facts classifiable and so explicable.

The words by which we describe and explain the material element in the facts in terms of series of distinct stages or events in external relations would leave out change if their implications were followed out consistently, but it is only a few “intellectuals” who have ever been able to bring themselves to follow out this implication to the bitter end and accept the conclusion, however absurd. Since it is obvious that the facts do change the usual way of getting round the difficulty is to say that some of these stages are “past” and some “present,” and then, not clearly realizing that the explanations we construct are not really facts at all, to take it for granted that a transition between past and present, though there is no room for it in the logical form of the explanation, yet somehow manages actually to take place. Bergson agrees that change does actually take place but not as a transition between abstractions such as “past” and “present.” We think that “past” and “present” must be real facts because we do not realize clearly how these notions have been arrived at. Once we have grasped the idea that these notions, and indeed all clear concepts, are only abstractions, we see that it is not necessary to suppose that these abstractions reallychange at all. Between the abstractions “the past” and “the present” there is no transition, and it is the same with events and things and qualities: all these, being nothing but convenient fictions, stand outside the stream of actual fact which is what really changes and endures.

Matter, then, is the name which Bergson gives to that element in the fact upon which the purely logical form appropriate to abstractions is based. The actual facts are not purely logical but neither are they completely interpenetrated since they lend themselves to classification: they tend to logical form on the one hand and to complete interpenetration on the other without going the whole way in either direction. What Bergson does in the description of the facts which he offers is to isolate each of these tendencies making them into two separate distinct abstractions, one called matter and the other mind. Isolated, what in the actual fact was blended becomes incompatible. Matter and mind, the clear cut abstractions, are mutually contradictory and it becomes at once a pseudo-problem to see how they ever could combine to constitute the actual fact.

The matter which Bergson talks about, being what would be left of the facts if memory were abstracted, has no past: it simply is in the present moment. If there is any memory which can retain previous momentsthen this memory may compare these previous moments with the present moment and call them the past of matter, but in itself, apart from memory, (and so isolated in a way in which this tendency in the actual fact never could be isolated) matter has no past.

Noticing how very different the actual facts which we know directly are from any of the material worlds by which we explain them, each of which lays claim to being “the reality with which sensible perception acquaints us,” some philosophers have put forward the view that in sensible perception we become acquainted, not with matter itself, but with signs which stand for a material world which exists altogether outside perception. This view Bergson rejects. He says that in sensible perception we are not acquainted with mere signs but, in so far as there is any matter at all, what we know in sensible perception is that matter itself. The facts which we know directly are matter itself and would be nothing but matter if they were instantaneous. For Bergson, however, an instantaneous fact is out of the question: every fact contains more than the mere matter presented at the moment of perception. Facts are distinguished from matter by lasting through a period of duration, this is what makes the difference between the actual fact and any of the material worlds in terms of which we describe them: matter, is, as we have said, only an abstractionof one element or tendency in the changing fact which is the sole reality: memory is the complementary abstraction. Apart from the actual fact neither matter nor memory have independent existence. This is where Bergson disagrees with the philosophers who regard the facts as signs of an independent material world, or as phenomena which mis-represent some “thing’in “itself” which is what really exists but which is not known directly but only inferred from the phenomena. For Bergson it is the fact directly known that really exists, and matter and memory, solid tables, green grass, electrons, forces, the absolute, and all the other abstract ideas by which we explain it are misrepresentations of it, not it of them.

Even Bergson, however, does not get away from the distinction between appearance and reality. The fact is for him the reality, the abstraction the appearance. But then the fact which is the reality is not the fact which we ordinarily suppose ourselves to know, the little fragment which constitutes “our experience at the present moment.” This is itself an abstraction from the vastly wider fact of our virtual knowledge, and it is this wider field of knowledge which is the reality. Abstraction involves falsification and so the little fragment of fact to which our attention is usually confined is not, as it stands, reality: it is appearance. We should only knowreality as it is if we could replace this fragment in its proper context in the whole field of virtual knowledge (or reality) where it belongs. What we should then know would not be appearance but reality itself. It is at this knowledge, according to Bergson, that philosophy aims. Philosophy is a reversal of our ordinary intellectual habits: ordinarily thought progresses from abstraction to abstraction steadily getting further from concrete facts: according to Bergson the task of philosophy should be to put abstractions back again into their context so as to obtain the fullest possible knowledge of actual fact.

In order to describe and explain this fact, however, we have to make use of abstractions. Bergson describes the fact known directly by sensible perception as a contraction of a period of the duration of matter in which the “past” states of matter are preserved along with the “present” and form a single whole with it. It is memory which makes this difference between matter and the actual facts by preserving “past” matter and combining it with “the present.” A single perceived fact, however, does not contain memories as distinct from present material: the distinction between “past” and “present” does not hold inside facts whose duration forms a creative whole and not a logical series. Of course it is incorrect to describe facts as “containing past and presentmatter,” but, as we have often pointed out, misleading though their logical implications are, we are obliged to replace facts by abstractions when we want to describe them.

An example may perhaps convey what is meant by saying that a fact is a contraction of a period of the duration of matter. Consider red, bearing in mind that, when we are speaking of the fact actually perc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Prefatory Note
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• I. Explanation
• II. Fact
• III. Matter and Memory