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10. An Atomistic Understanding of Reality
- State University of New York Press
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or invariable object which moves” (CM 173; Bergson’s emphasis). Understood correctly , change is itself “the very substance of things” (CM 184).1 Moving from One Point to Another As we have seen, Bergson’s claim that change is the most basic stuff of the universe relies heavily on his subtle and insightful analysis of movement. What Bergson attempts to do is to argue that motion is not something that occurs when unchanging “atom-like” particles move about in space. Instead, according to Bergson, movement itself is what is primary. However, as we saw in section 1, human beings resist recognizing the primacy of change and motion, even within our own consciousness. Instead, we prefer to take a “cinematographic” view of durée in which we “freeze frame” the ceaseless flux of our consciousness into a successive series of immobile pictures. What Bergson does, after Time and Free Will, is to take this “cinematographic” understanding of consciousness as a paradigm for understanding how we perceive all of reality. In this way, he is able to claim that we continually “take snapshots , as it were, of the passing reality” and then string these “snapshots” together to form the “film” of our day-to-day experience (CE 306). Another metaphorical way to understand our inherent and deeply human attempt to “freeze” reality is to imagine a gushing fountain of water. Let’s say that we are constantly attempting to reach out and grab at this water so that we can contain it and measure it, but it keeps slipping through our fingers. Therefore , in order to get a “handle” on all of this ceaseless change, we turn the water into pellets of ice by blasting the streaming water with a jet of super-cooled air. The problem, however, is that by “pelletizing” the water we lose the very essence of what water is—we lose its flowing nature—especially when we attempt to line these pellets next to each other to count, weigh, and measure them. Furthermore , because we have created separate units where there was once fluid wholeness , we are forced to artificially “recompose” the fragments that we have created in order to patch together a meaningful pattern and purpose to it all. Similarly, Bergson claims that, in our attempts to piece together some coherence from the frozen fragments of life, we overlook the ever-changing organic order and interconnectedness of what was always there: the underlying, fundamental reality of movement itself (CE 306). To further illustrate Bergson’s “cinematographic” view of reality, this time using an example that is explicitly Bergson’s, let’s examine a common understanding of what happens if a person’s hand moves from one point in space to another. (Notice how language itself continually reinforces the notions that Bergson is disputing—the notion of fixed points and an empty, container-like space.) Bergson claims that instead of limiting our perception to the actual 74 LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS movement of the hand, what commonly occurs is that we tacitly superimpose a type of mathematical abstraction upon our immediate perception. We do this by imagining that the hand’s movement is taking place in a line that could, theoretically , be plotted from, let’s say, point A to point B. However, there is a problem with our superimposition of this imaginary line: a line is mathematically understood to consist of a series of static, motionless points. How can motion possibly come from something that is, by definition , frozen? What happens, therefore, is that in our attempts to analyze the movement of the person’s hand, we miss the point; we have frozen motion itself. We might well be able to divide up the abstract trajectory of the person’s hand into a multitude of fixed points on an imaginary line, but the actual movement of his/her hand can never arise out of these static points. As Bergson notes, “multiply the number of them as you will, let the interval between two consecutive [points] be infinitely small: before the intervening movement you will always experience the disappointment of the child who tries by clapping his hands together to crush the smoke. The movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to reconstitute change out of [immobile points] implies the absurd proposition, that movement is made of immobilities” (CE 308). However, in science’s attempt to measure movement, it acts as if motion actually is the sum total of the static positions in space occupied by a moving body...