Messay Kebede

This paper is about the Bergsonian synchronization of the perpetual present or memory with the passing present or the body. It shows how forgetting narrows and focuses consciousness on the needs of action and how motor memory allows the imagining of the useful side of memory. The paper highlights the strength of Bergson’s analysis by respectively confronting classical theories of memory, the highly regarded perspective of the phenomenological school, Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergsonism, and Sartre’s theory of mental imagery.

Regardless of the metaphysics that inspires them, theories of perception invariably end up in the trap of subjectivism. Thus, idealism argues that the world can be nothing more than a representation of the mind. As to dualism and materialism, despite fundamental differences, they share the common assumption that perception is a subjective replica of external objects. Opposed to these theories is common sense with its tenacious belief that an external world exists and that things are perceived where they are and as they are. This paper contends that Bergson’s theory of perception should be approached from the question of what the relationship between matter and mind must be for perception to retain an objective character. It shows that only its emergence from things themselves rather than from the subject can provide objectivity to perception. In thus grounding objectivity in the impersonal character of perception, whose implication is that it precedes the subject, which is then posteriorly formed, Bergson’s theory constitutes, so the paper argues, a radical reversal of the traditional position, including that of phenomenology.

Recourse to intuition to tackle philosophical issues brought the charge of irrationalism on Bergson. The charge overlooks that Bergsonian intuition has nothing to do with a sudden and mysterious illumination. Rather, it is a methodic procedure resulting in an outcome that it is effectively produced, and not a spark that falls from the sky. This paper shows that the misconception has its source in the neglect of two interrelated factors: (1) philosophical intuition is a method specifically invented to get past philosophical antinomies, as they are framed by Kant; and (2) the method is inseparable from the philosophy of duration, notably from the originality of a monism that generates differences in kind, thereby allowing the enactment of the various modes of being. So that, both the invented nature of philosophical intuition and the stratified attribute of duration combine to give intuition the character of a cognitive breakthrough that is not reducible to the old opposition between rationality and irrationality.