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1 18 Moving from Perception to Memory The Differences between Memory and Perception At first glance, it might appear that Bergson would claim that memories and perceptions are simply two different forms of the same “stuff” (since they blend together so seamlessly in each moment of concrete perception). In reality, however, until the very end of Matter and Memory, Bergson fights hard to separate (at least analytically) perception and memory. Bergson stresses the radical difference between memory and perception at least in part because he wants to emphasize that perception is not a subjective “internal state,” but rather is an activity that contacts an objective reality, an activity “whereby we place ourselves in the very heart of things” (MM 67). For Bergson, pure perception “plunges roots deep into the real; and . . . once perception is seen to be radically distinct from recollection, the reality of things is no more constructed or reconstructed, but touched, penetrated, lived” (MM 69). Bergson also argues that memory and perception are radically different realities in order to underscore the distinctive “spiritual” qualities of memory, a distinctiveness that allows him to argue that memory, per se, is independent of physical processes (e.g., the neurochemical activity of the brain and nervous system). While Bergson’s emphasis on the radical distinction between memory and perception is understandable and convincing (up to a point), I would argue that in the end the difference between memory and perception is not quite as radical as Bergson, at least initially, seems to want to claim. For instance, if perception and memory are indeed utterly and completely different substances, then it would be very difficult to explain how they so easily and completely fuse with each other in every moment of concrete perception. Furthermore, Bergson himself seems to acknowledge the link between perception and memory when he 151 claims that memory is “the survival of past images” (i.e., that memory is the survival of the very stuff of perception: images) (MM 66). There may be, indeed, crucial and significant differences between perception and memory, but I would suggest that it is difficult to argue in the end that this difference is utterly radical. I would suggest that Bergson’s attempt to claim that perception and memory are different in kind from one another is one of many examples of a rhetorical process in Bergson’s work in which he begins by analytically separating out two “components” of reality that have previously been (to his mind) illegitimately confused, only in the end to reunite them in a manner that is radically different from the previous, and pernicious, conflation. In this case, for instance, Bergson needs to advocate a fairly severe form of dualism between perception and memory (or between matter and spirit, respectively ) in order to refute materialism, which claims that everything, even our conscious experience, can be in the end reduced to the calculable, predetermined interactions of inert bits of matter. In order to combat this physicalistic monism, it is understandable that Bergson argues strenuously and at length for the independence of perception and memory in Matter and Memory. However, this rather strident dualism (I would argue) is primarily rhetorical and strategic in nature. While it is crucial for us, for example, to become disabused of the idea that our consciousness is the slavish product of material objects mindlessly bumping up against each other, nonetheless, if Bergson stopped merely there, we would be left with all of the dilemmas and problems inherent in a Cartesian dualism. Therefore, it is important to remember that the most strongly dualistic statements in Matter and Memory (e.g., Bergson’s claim that perception and memory differ in kind, not in degree) are ultimately reconciled. While Matter and Memory emphasizes the functional and practical differences between mind and matter, in the final analysis, Bergson asks us to conceive that both mind and matter are simply differing manifestations of a unified (albeit continually changing and intrinsically pluralistic) reality: durée—the dynamic flow of consciousness writ large, or expressed in different terms, the ongoing flux of time. In this temporal nondualism, both matter and mind, in the final analysis, are two ends of a single interactive spectrum of temporal becoming and the “stuff” of existence is the creative unfolding, on all levels, of the oneness/manyness of durée. Two Types of Memories We have seen how Bergson analytically separates our experience into two distinct , yet interactive, components: perception and memory. He also (as was briefly mentioned earlier...

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