{"agent_id":"bergson","agent_name":"Henri Bergson","slug":"matter-and-memory-metaphysics","label":"Matter and Memory metaphysics: do image, pure perception, and pure memory survive the dated nineteenth-century neuroscience that surrounded them?","topic":"Matter and Memory metaphysics","question":"Do image, pure perception, and pure memory survive the dated nineteenth-century neuroscience that surrounded them?","position":"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. 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. The body-mind problem is reformulated as a contraction-relaxation problem along a temporal axis rather than a substance problem along a spatial axis.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Matter is an aggregate of *images*.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[1]},{"t":"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.","n":[2,3,4]}],[{"t":"The body-mind problem is reformulated as a contraction-relaxation problem along a temporal axis rather than a substance problem along a spatial axis.","n":[]}]],"texts":"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). Reception: William James's enthusiastic letter on the work as a Copernican revolution; Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism (1966) Chapter III 'Memory as Virtual Coexistence' and Chapter IV 'One or Many Durations?'; Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and the late essays on Bergson; the contemporary engagement in philosophy of mind (Andy Clark, Alva Noë, the embodied-cognition tradition) where the body-as-action-center thesis has fresh purchase; Suzanne Guerlac's Thinking in Time Chapter 4 on Matter and Memory; Bergson and the Cognitive Sciences debates.","works":["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)"],"reception":"William James's enthusiastic letter on the work as a Copernican revolution; Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism (1966) Chapter III 'Memory as Virtual Coexistence' and Chapter IV 'One or Many Durations?'; Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and the late essays on Bergson; the contemporary engagement in philosophy of mind (Andy Clark, Alva Noë, the embodied-cognition tradition) where the body-as-action-center thesis has fresh purchase; Suzanne Guerlac's Thinking in Time Chapter 4 on Matter and Memory; Bergson and the Cognitive Sciences debates.","status":"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.","era":"1859-1941","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Matter and Memory","page":"p. 94","canonical":"","quote":"Starting from realism, we come back to the point to which idealism had led us; we replace perception in things. And we see realism and idealism ready to come to an understanding when we set aside the postulate, uncritically accepted by both, which served them as a common frontier.","label":"Matter and Memory, p. 94"},{"n":2,"work":"Matter and Memory","page":"p. 1","canonical":"","quote":"It is, then, frankly dualistic. But, on the other hand, it deals with body and mind in such a way as, we hope, to lessen greatly, if not to overcome, the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism, and which cause it, though suggested by the immediate verdict of consciousness and adopted by common sense, to be held, in small honour among philosophers.","label":"Matter and Memory, p. 1"},{"n":3,"work":"Matter and Memory","page":"p. 93","canonical":"","quote":"We must see what consequences thence result for perception, for memory, and for the relations between body and mind. [Margin note: Perception gives us \"things-in-themselves.\"] III. To take perception first. Here is my body with its 'perceptive centres.' These centres vibrate, and I have the representation of things.","label":"Matter and Memory, p. 93"},{"n":4,"work":"Matter and Memory","page":"p. 93","canonical":"","quote":"It creates nothing; its office, on the contrary, is to eliminate from the totality of images all those on which I can have no hold, and then, from each of those which I retain, all that does not concern the needs of the image which I call my body. Such is, at least, much simplified, the way we explain or describe schematically what we have called pure perception.","label":"Matter and Memory, p. 93"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"dur-e-and-the-critique-of-spatialized-time","label":"Durée and the critique of spatialized time: does the homogeneous time of physics and clocks exhaust what time is, or does it abstract from a real duration that is qualitative and indivisible?"},{"slug":"intuition-as-philosophical-method","label":"Intuition as philosophical method: is intuition a precise method with strict rules, or the anti-intellectualism Russell called a heaving sea?"},{"slug":"the-two-sources-the-closed-and-the-open-and-the-wartime-mean","label":"The Two Sources, the closed and the open, and the wartime Meaning of the War: is the closed/open distinction descriptive philosophy or religious apologetics, and what stands of the wartime rhetoric of life against mechanism?"}]}