{"id":13649,"date":"2026-08-31T00:19:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T04:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/henri-bergson-on-how-to-see-reality-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T00:19:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T04:19:22","slug":"henri-bergson-on-how-to-see-reality-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/henri-bergson-on-how-to-see-reality-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Henri Bergson on How to See Reality \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Matter,<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1896, decades before Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal pioneered neuroscience<\/a>, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and us<\/a>, half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the polymathic French philosopher Henri Bergson<\/strong> (October 18, 1859\u2013January 4, 1941) aimed his uncommon mind at \u201cthe threefold problem of matter, consciousness, and their relation\u201d in what became Matter and Memory<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a> | public domain<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a pleasingly disorienting, because revelatory, investigation of the interplay between perception and memory in how we construct the cathedral of interpretation we call reality. <\/p>\n

Echoing Thoreau\u2019s observation that \u201cwe hear and apprehend only what we already half know,\u201d<\/a> Bergson writes:<\/p>\n

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There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as \u2018signs\u2019 that recall to us former images. The convenience and the rapidity of perception are bought at this price; but hence also springs every kind of illusion.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and inversely, a memory\u2026 only becomes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Violeta L\u00f3piz for At the Drop of a Cat<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Just as biological endosmosis moves fluid into and out of a cell through a permeable membrane, psychological endososis moves memory and perception across the permeable membrane of consciousness, the flux so fluid we cease being able to distinguish which is which. Bergson observes:<\/p>\n

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Memory\u2026 covering as it does with a cloak of recollections a core of immediate perception, and also contracting a number of external moments into a single internal moment, constitutes the principal share of individual consciousness in perception, the subjective side of the knowledge of thing.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

We imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception a photograph which would then be developed in the brain-matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space? No metaphysics, no physics even, can escape this conclusion. Build up the universe with atoms each of them is subject to the action, variable in quantity and quality according to the distance, exerted on it by all material atoms. Bring in Faraday\u2019s centres of force: the lines of force emitted in every direction from every centre bring, to bear upon each the influences of the whole material world. Call up the Leibnizian monads: each is the mirror of the universe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A century later, cognitive science has shown us just how powerfully expectation shapes experience<\/a>. But it is as radical today as it was in Bergson\u2019s time to consider how memory \u2014 the mirror-image of expectation, just as selectively choosing events but in hindsight rather than foresight \u2014 shapes what we perceive, shapes the attention-painted image that is the basis of all experience<\/a>. Bergson writes:<\/p>\n

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Every attentive perception truly involves a reflexion, in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mould itself\u2026 We are constantly creating or reconstructing. Our distinct perception is really comparable to a closed circle in which the perception-image, going towards the mind, and the memoryimage, launched into space, career the one behind the other.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We tend to think that dogma curtains truth with prescribed ideas about what is true, while experiment \u2014 the rigorous testing of our theoretical models against reality \u2014 is what parts the veil to bring us closer and closer to the true nature of things. But, Bergson cautions, our experiments are devised by a mind that is itself a veil, a mind that still suffers, in its understanding of itself, from the Cartesian dualism that has scarred our species with a cruel severance from the totality of things. He throws a gauntlet at this congenital blind spot of Western science:<\/p>\n

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Empiricism and dogmatism\u2026 differ only in that dogmatism attaches itself more particularly to the form and empiricism to the matter. Empiricism, feeling indeed, but feeling vaguely, the artificial character of the relations which unite the terms together, holds to the terms and neglects the relations. Its error is not that it sets too high a value on experience, but that it substitutes for true experience, that experience which arises from the immediate contact of the mind with its object, an experience which is disarticulated and therefore, most probably, disfigured, at any rate arranged for the greater facility of action and of language. Just because this parcelling of the real has been effected in view of the exigencies of practical life, it has not followed the internal lines of the structure of things: for that very reason empiricism cannot satisfy the mind in regard to any of the great problems and, indeed, whenever it becomes fully conscious of its own principle, it refrains from putting them. Dogmatism discovers and disengages the difficulties to which empiricism is blind; but it really seeks the solution along the very road that empiricism has marked out. It accepts, at the hands of empiricism, phenomena that are separate and discontinuous, and simply endeavours to effect a synthesis of them which, not having been given by intuition, cannot but be arbitrary.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a solo print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is but one solution to this double blind:<\/p>\n

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To give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is far from easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it is done, when w e have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn of experience, when we have profited by the faint light which, illuminating the passage from tile immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of our human experience, there still remains to be reconstituted, with the infinitely small elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them\u2026 The final effort\u2026 is a true work of integration.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is precisely such integration with what physicist David Bohm calls \u201cthe implicate order\u201d<\/a> that finally gives us a glimpse of pure perception, a way of looking at reality and actually seeing. Long before modern science revealed how we think not with the brain but with the world<\/a>, Bergson observes:<\/p>\n

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Our perception is supposed to translate or to picture the states of our nervous system. But is it possible to conceive the nervous system as living apart from the organism which nourishes it, from the atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere envelopes, from the sun round which the earth revolves? More generally, does not the fiction of an isolated material object imply a kind of absurdity, since this object borrows its physical properties from the relations which it maintains with all others, and owes each of its determinations, and consequently its very existence, to the place which it occupies in the universe as a whole? Let us no longer say, then, that our perceptions depend simply upon the molecular movements of the cerebral mass. We must say rather that they vary with them, but that these movements themselves remain inseparably bound up with the rest of the material world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Couple with Virginia Woolf on how we pattern reality<\/a>, then revisit Iain McGilchrist on attention as an instrument of love<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1896, decades before Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}