Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson by G. William Barnard (review)

Focusing on Bergson’s first two books, Living Consciousness is well written and highly pedagogical. G. William Barnard, an associate professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University whose area of specialization lies in the comparative study of the philosophy and psychology of mysticism and non-ordinary states of consciousness, helps his readers to experience alongside Bergson how to effectively overcome the matter/spirit dualism. The tone of this book is very personal, the scholarly exposition being punctuated with narrations of personal experiences exemplifying the concepts explained throughout the corresponding chapters.

The first section of Living Consciousness is devoted to the exposition of the main argument of Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will, which, according to Barnard, consists in the demonstration of the irreducibility of consciousness to inert matter. Barnard, following Bergson, argues that human consciousness, unlike objective reality, instantiates a pure form of becoming, that is, a type of movement indivisible in both space and time and deprived of substrate. Pure becoming can be apprehended integrally only by prereflexive, experiential intuition and cannot be divided into more fundamental elements. Explanations based solely on measurable neuronal structures or patterns of activity cannot produce exhaustive accounts of conscious experiences. Thus, for Barnard (following Bergson), human consciousness is a spiritual form of life that, characterized by spontaneous creativity and dynamism, can never be identified with inert matter or quantity, the proper objects of scientific reason. Time and Free Will ends with the clear affirmation of a quasi-ontological, metaphysical matter/spirit dualism.

The liminal and second sections of Living Consciousness attempt to establish that Bergson, in Matter and Memory, building on the foundations already laid in Time and Free Will, develops a model for the interpretation of nature that integrates matter and spirit. Barnard sees Bergson, in this second book, arguing for a multilevel understanding of reality where all natural entities, even elementary particles, atoms, and molecules, enjoy a certain level of (proto-) consciousness. Barnard finds objective support for Bergson’s pan-psychism in contemporary physics, especially quantum mechanics and relativity theory. As the latter superseded the classical theories of the atom and gravitation, physical reality came to be understood as aggregates of energy packets instead of hard, undivided grains of matter. Delocalized, dynamic, and constantly changing in form and state, matter cannot be described accurately by static systems of coordinates and models. Contemporary physics has shown, argues Barnard, that Bergson rightly made use of the concepts of life and spirit to describe reality, for non-locality and sheer dynamicity—characteristic attributes of life and spirit—define matter in its most elementary expressions. Empirical evidence, philosophy, and science all tend to show that matter and consciousness share essential attributes. Barnard subsequently claims, again following Bergson, that the mind-body problem is not a real, but only an apparent philosophical issue, which results from the incapacity of abstract scientific explanations to account for pure becoming.

Besides, Barnard finds in Matter and Memory a theory of consciousness explaining a series of neglected limit experiences (dreams, mysticism, intuition, clairvoyance, and post-mortem survival). Bergson argues that consciousness immerses the individual in the fundamental activity that defines reality as such. The individual is thereby subjected to a continual influx of affects and experiences of manifold qualitative range and variety. In fact, each individual’s experience of reality is so rich that it must be filtered constantly and be narrowed dynamically to what is of immediate practical use, serving the individual’s survival and well-being. The brain, claims Bergson, is not the source of these experiences, but the organ effecting the selection, among all experiences affecting the individual, of those worthy to enter the narrow field of explicit perception. Consciousness, distinct from and more comprehensive than perception, transcends the confines and limitations of physical reality. Barnard then takes a much more speculative step. He asserts that if...