Matter and Memory metaphysics: do image, pure perception, and pure memory survive the dated nineteenth-century neuroscience that surrounded them?

Henri Bergson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Matter is an aggregate of images. By "image" I mean an existence placed half-way between the thing of common-sense realism and the representation of common-sense idealism — what is given to perception just as it is given, before realism and idealism have done their characteristic violence to common experience.12 The body is one image among others, distinguished by the interval (écart) it inserts between received movement and executed movement: the body is an action-center, not a representation-producer. Pure perception coincides with the perceived object: we perceive things where they are, in matter itself, not as copies in the head, and what perception adds to matter is nothing — perception subtracts what does not interest the body's possible action. Pure memory is virtual: the past coexists with the present rather than being stored as encoded copies, and the brain does not produce recollections but selects from the virtual past for the action at hand.3

The body-mind problem is reformulated as a contraction-relaxation problem along a temporal axis rather than a substance problem along a spatial axis.45

Sources

  1. The aim of our first chapter is to show that realism and idealism both go too far, that it is a mistake to reduce matter to the perception which we have of it, a mistake also to make of it a thing able to produce in us perceptions, but in itself of another nature than they. Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ' images.
    Matter and Memory, p. 10
  2. This is just the sense in which we use the word image in our first chapter. We place ourselves at the point of view of a mind unaware of the disputes between philosophers. Such a mind would naturally believe that matter exists just as it is perceived; and, since it is perceived as an image, the mind would make of it, in itself, an image.
    Matter and Memory, p. 11
  3. But what is it exactly within them? I see that my perception appears to follow all the vibratory detail of the socalled sensitive nerves; and on the other hand I know that the rôle of their vibrations is solely to prepare the reaction of my body on neighbouring bodies, to sketch out my virtual actions.
    Matter and Memory, pp. 304–305
  4. MATTER AND M EMORY By HENRI BERGSON MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE Authorized Translation by NANCY MARGARET PAUL and W. SCOTT PALMER LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LTM New York: THE MACMILLAN CO. INTRODUCTION This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory.
    Matter and Memory, pp. 5–9
  5. No difference but that of mere degree will remain between perception and memory; and neither in the one nor in the other will the subject be acknowledged to pass beyond himself.
    Matter and Memory, pp. 75–76

Where the argument is made

  • Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire, 1896) — the founding work, especially Chapter I on the body and image, Chapter II on perception and habit-memory, Chapter III on the cone of memory and pure memory, Chapter IV on the dualism reformulated
  • 'Memory of the Present and False Recognition' (1908, in Mind-Energy 1919)

How the argument was received

The standard charge that Matter and Memory rests on outdated neuroscience is correct about the neuroscience and wrong about what the philosophical thesis depends on. The 1896 brain physiology is dated; the telephone-exchange image is a 1890s analogy and nothing more. What endures is the metaphysics of perception and memory: that perception is selective and action-oriented rather than representational; that memory is virtual coexistence rather than stored copies; that the brain is a switching-station in the service of action rather than a representation-producing organ. These theses survive the neuroscience update and are reinforced by every demonstration that the brain does not contain little pictures of the world. Deleuze's reading of memory as virtual coexistence (Bergsonism Chapters III and IV) recovers what is durable in the work and gives it a contemporary metaphysical idiom. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception developed in directions that engaged Matter and Memory closely, though it took the body in directions Bergson did not fully own — toward a pre-personal lived body that retains an existential intentionality I would have located instead in the dynamic interpenetration of perception, affection, and memory that is consciousness in time.