Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

9. Movement

Liminal Section The Dynamism of Matter 8 8 The World “Out There” Playing with the Space In-Between Section 1 focuses on Time and Free Will, Bergson’s first book, a text which offers a relatively straightforward, more-or-less accessible account of the contrast between durée and space, inner versus outer, freedom versus determinism , and so on. In section 2, however, we will quite quickly leave behind the basically dualistic mindset of Time and Free Will and enter, almost abruptly, into a very different world—the dense, multilayered, highly abstract, almost visionary landscape of Bergson’s second major work, Matter and Memory. In Matter and Memory, without any warning or acknowledgment, Bergson lets go of what Milič Čapek calls the “untenable dualism of the temporal mind and timeless matter” and, instead, articulates a worldview in which durée is seen as the everchanging substance of not only our psychological experience, but also of the external material world.1 In Matter and Memory, therefore, Bergson essentially affirms a type of nondualism, albeit one that is highly unusual and difficult to grasp—a temporal, dynamic nondualism that ironically strongly affirms the reality of a functional dualism. However, before we plunge into the oceanic (and highly daunting) waters of Matter and Memory, I offer this liminal interlude as a way to start to imagine a world in which durée is, in Deleuze’s words, “the variable essence of things,” a world in which the fluidity, mutability, interpenetrability, and creativity of durée is found in the world of material objects as well.2 In this bridge between sections 1 and 2, I explore how things shift when we start to see the outer world through the lens of durée—when we start to see it less as a collection of static, discrete objects exchanging places in an immutable empty space and more as functional islands of semi-stability arising out of a highly mutable flux of becoming.3 71 Splitting Up the World From Bergson’s post–Time and Free Will perspective, the external world, if understood correctly, is not split up into parts. Rather, in a way that is similar to our consciousness, the material universe is an interconnected, flowing, everchanging , dynamic process. In both our inner and outer worlds, nothing is static, nothing is immutable. Instead, as Bergson succinctly states, “movement is reality itself” (CM 169). Bergson recognizes that, on a practical level, we need to think that we are stable subjects interacting with a world of equally stable objects and that we will therefore tend to minimize and overlook the constant change that surrounds us. However, even if we intellectually recognize that everything is constantly changing , nonetheless, on a deeper level, as human beings with certain deeply engrained tendencies, we prefer to overlook or ignore the extent and depth of the change that takes place in our lives. At best, while we might grudgingly acknowledge that change occurs, we still act as if it only affects the surface of things—that is, we are unconsciously wired with the conviction that, underneath it all, both we and the world are stable and dependably nonchanging. From the perspective of our day-to-day experience, it seems almost impossible to give anything more than a token nod to Bergson’s claim that “there do not exist things made, but only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in the process of change” (CM 222). We can be as Bergsonian (or for that matter as Taoist or Buddhist) as we like philosophically, but in our day-to-day experience we certainly do not act as if “things” do not exist. In order for us to survive, Bergson argues that we (both as a species and individually) have learned how to convert the ceaseless onrush of universal change into separate, relatively stable objects that “we” (as separate, relatively stable subjects) attempt to manipulate to our advantage. As Bergson puts it, our various needs and desires (e.g., to eat, to procreate, to relate to others) act as “so many searchlights” which shine upon the continuity of our sense experience and “single out in it distinct bodies. They cannot satisfy themselves except upon the condition that they carve out, within this continuity, a body which is to be their own and then delimit other bodies” which they can then interact with in practical ways (MM...