Bergsonism, On Intuition - Part 2

Process Philosophy

This is a continuation and completion of analysis of the first chapter in Deleuze’s Bergsonism Chapter 1. In that, we find Bergson’s method of intuition comes in three acts (or three/five rules): Problematizing, or a critique of false problems (nonexistent or badly stated) and the creative invention of a genuine statement that in it will contain a proper solution; Differentiating, or conducting a search for genuine differences in kind through a carving out of intersections between converging and diverging series; and finally, Temporalizing, or an apprehension of real time by thinking in terms of duration. In fact, intuition as a method presupposes duration through a type of precision unlocked through a broadening effort on our limited thinking of space and time, in terms of extensity as well as intensity. Chapter 2 of Bergsonism gets further into how intuition presupposes duration, and how it also gives duration a new extension from that point of view of being and knowledge. The first rule of Bergsonism’s Intuition as Method that we explored previously in part 1, begins with the declaration:

1st Rule, Problematizing False Problems 

“First Rule: Apply the test of true and false to problems themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems.” Bergsonism

We must first state the problem, and in doing so we engage in a creative process of invention – not discovery in this first stage – and this creative invention gives being to something that previously did not exist. In metaphysics, the effort of invention consists most often in raising the problem or in creating the terms in which it will be stated, but this has a double fold nature in that the formulation of the statement of the problem has a close equivalency of the solving of the problem. “The truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved.” We must be careful here not to define the truth of falsity of a problem by its possibility or impossibility of it being solved. We wish to get an intrinsic determination of falsity in the expression of the problem. Here we get a complementary rule to the First Rule:

Complementary Rule to the 1st Rule

“Complementary Rule: False problems are of two sorts, ‘nonexistent problems’, defined as problems whose very terms contain a confusion of the ‘more’ and ‘less’; and ‘badly stated’ questions, so defined because their terms represent badly analyzed composites.” Bergsonism

We wish to actualize the virtual, not realize the possible, and by doing so we sidestep the issue of nonexistent problems. Nonexistent problems contain confusion with the more and less, in a few different ways, and Bergson is famous for his analyses here. “There is not less, but more in the idea of nonbeing than that of being, in disorder than in order, in the possible than in the real.” In the idea of nonbeing there is the idea of being, plus a generalized negation (in the form of a logical operation), plus the particular psychological motive for that operation. That is three different things in the idea of nonbeing, on top of the idea of being as well, therefore nonbeing must be more than being, if we keep our analysis as simple as possible here. There is a curious mental operation to note here, when a ‘being’ does not correspond to our expectation, and we grasp it purely as lack, the lack is the novelty in that it points to an absence in that which interests us. “For the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind that throws its image back into the past once it has been enacted.” The subjective-aim or motive of that act of mind we do, is a type of confusion we retroactively perform in which we confuse the ‘upsurge of reality’ in the universe with a succession of states in a closed system. In this retroactive confusion, an act of the mind, we fall into an error in which we mistake the more for the less – in this we behave as if nonbeing existed before being, or the possible before existence. As if being itself had come to fill in a void, or the real to realize a primary possibility. Being, or the existent are truth itself, but when we get confused with false problems we find ourselves in the presence of a fundamental illusion, a “retrograde movement of the true”. According to which, being and the existent are supposed to precede themselves somehow, or to precede the very creative act that constitutes them, by projecting an image of themselves back into a possibility, or a nonbeing which are supposed to be primordial. There is a curious tangent to be had here with Debord and myths with the Society of the Spectacle where I believe some Bergson influence found its way down that path, maybe in the future we will explore that flow further. 

This nonexistent problem that we illustrated above is the confusion with the more for the less but Bergson also speaks of a similar confusion with the less for the more. Doubt about an action only adds to the action, and indicates a half-willing or a non-fully actualized desire. In this, negation is not added to what it denies, but only indicates a weakness in the person who denies. 

“For we feel a divinely created will or thought is too full of itself, in the immensity of its reality, to have the slightest idea of a lack of order or lack of being. To imagine the possibility of absolute disorder, all the more the possibility of nothingness, would be for it to say to itself that it might not have existed at all, and that would be a weakness incompatible with its nature, which is force. It is not something more but something less; it is a deficit of the will.” Bergsonism

Bergson equally condemns both forms of this nonexistent problems, confusing the more for the less and confusing the less for the more. The idea of the possible appears when, instead of grasping each existent in its novelty, the whole of existence is related to a preformed element, from which everything is supposed to emerge by simple ‘realization’. By thinking in terms of more or less, and confusing them, we are disregarding differences in kind between the two orders/beings/existents. In this way we stumble upon a curious double-fold nature in the false problems: the first type of false problem, rest in the final analysis on the second. The idea of possibility emerges from a general idea of the real or existent, and disorder emerges from a general idea of order – both though critically as badly analyze composites. We must be careful not to disregard differences in kind, conflate that and disregard as well differences in degree (which are differences in intensity), and not to conceive of everything in terms of more and less. These actions would be to engage in a form of the second false problem, that of a badly stated problem.

Badly stated problems have deep in them a sinister mechanism, that of badly analyzed composites using this to arbitrarily group things that differ in kind. Bergson’s famous analysis here is that he condemns intensity as a badly analyzed composite. In our perception of intensities (on the plane of immanence) is a sensation that we confuse with the muscular space that corresponds to it, or we confuse it with the quantity of the physical cause that produces it. It is in this way that the notion of intensity involves an impure mixture between determinations that differ in kind. Bergson also uses this same notion when speaking about freedom, for him freedom is pure mobility, so the problem of freedom is where two types of multiplicity are confused: such as terms juxtaposed in space; and states that merge together in duration. Through freedom and its pure mobility though, we can watch out for a kind of illusion that appears, that of illusory images of motionless or blocking static-ness, where we get a kind of illusion or mirage.   

The Kantian mirage is what Bergson is invoking here, a projection backward of the possible by an inevitable illusion of reason, of which only the effects can be warded off. This illusion is based in the deepest part of our intelligence and can only be repressed, we can react against this intellectual tendency by bringing to life another tendency – that of the intuition as method. In intuition, we can rediscover differences in kind (metaphysical, non-measurable, spirit) beneath differences in degree (scientific, measurable, matter). Differences in kind, or which that needs a precise metaphysical language of elan vital, where intensity (and its problems) as well as duration in its heterogeneous multiplicity (qualitative); whereas differences in degree, or that where a precise scientific language of matter, in which extensity or space is the plane and has a homogeneous or quantitative multiplicity. Bergson says the intellect, or that which is good at creating differences in degree, is the faculty that states problems in general. But we need to use our intuition, or that which is good at discovering differences in kind, to take the stated problem from the intellect further by using intuition for its decision between true and false. This can be a struggle and we should drive our intellect back with our intuition.

2nd Rule, Differentiating kind with Deleuzian Calculus

“Second Rule: Struggle against the illusion, rediscover the true differences in kind or articulations of the real.” Bergsonism

Bergson loves his dualisms for he has a method of intuition to skewer them on the spot. According to him, a composite must always be divided according to its natural articulations (of the real), that is, into elements that differ in kind. Intuition as a method is one of division, that of a Platonic inspiration. The goal when articulating the real, is to not mix extensity and duration so much that it becomes problematic to the point of non-usefulness. In this same way we mix recollection with perception and don’t know how to recognize what goes back to recollection or what goes back to perception. In this example, we no longer distinguish between the two pure presences of matter and memory in representation and no longer see any differences in degree between perception-recollections and recollection-perceptions. We are measuring the impure mixture with a unit itself that is faulty and have lost the ground of composites and which lands us firmly in badly analyzed composite land. For Bergson, pure has a very specific meaning in that it refers to a restoration of differences in kind, and it is only tendencies that differ in kind. Composites therefore need to be divided using intuition according to qualitative and qualified tendencies, depending on duration and extensity as they are defined as movements, and directions of movements. 

Deleuze calls this the Bergsonian leitmotif: people have seen differences in degree where there are differences in kind. And Bergson’s fundamental criticism of metaphysics is that it sees differences in degree between a spatialized time and an eternity which it assumes to be primary. All beings here are defined on a scale of intensity, between the two extremes of perfection and nothingness. But a similar criticism is directed at science as well, as there is no definition of mechanism other than that which invokes a spatialized time, in which beings no longer present anything but differences of degree, of position/dimension/proportion. The source of false problems that are all around us, and the illusions that overwhelm us, lies in this disregard for true differences in kind. Bergson shows how the forgetting of differences in kind – on the one hand between perception and affection, and on the other hand between perception and recollection – gives rise to all kinds of false problems by making us think that our perception is in-extensive in character:

“There are, in the idea that we project outside ourselves, states which are purely internal, so many misconceptions, so many lame answers to badly stated questions…” Bergsonism

In Matter and Memory, Bergson shows how complex the manipulation of intuition is as a method of division. Here, the representation has to be divided into the elements that condition it, into either pure presences or tendencies that differ in kind. Bergson first asks, between what two things there may be (or may not be) a difference in kind. The response here to this is that, since the brain is an image, that is in the presence of many other images, and the brain ensures certain movements among other movements, there cannot be a difference in kind between the faculty of the brain which is said to be perceptive, and the reflex function of the core. 

The body, to Bergson, is a distinct kind of image, in that “we do not know it only from without by perceptions, but also from within by affections”. If we take the conditions in which the affections from within the body are produced, we find that they always interpose themselves between the excitations received from without, as well as the movement from which is about to be executed – as though the affections had some undefined influence on the final result. If we pass each affection in a kind of meditative review, we find that each contains in it a kind of invitation to act and yet can be left to wait and even to not act upon at all. If we peer even deeper into the affections of the body from within, we see that we find movements begun, but not executed, “the indication of a more or less useful decision, but not that constraint which precludes choice.” If we think of the habits of the organic world, we see this same sensibility appear, where nature confers upon the living being a power of mobility in space but gives as warning to the species by means of sensation of the general dangers which threaten it. But this threat is left to the organic individual receiving the perceptive sensation, necessary precautions for escaping whatever is causing the perceptive disturbance. If we remain in this train of thought, Bergson performs an interrogation of consciousness here as to the part in which it plays in the affection of the body. In response, consciousness replies that it is present indeed but in the form of feeling or of sensation, at all steps in which there is a belief of a taking-of-initiative or subjective-aim. This however fades and disappears as soon as the activity, by becoming automatic, shows that consciousness is no longer necessary. Therefore, we must conclude, that:

“the act in which the affective state issues is not one of those which might be rigorously deduced from antecedent phenomena, as a movement from a movement; and hence it really adds something new to the universe and to its history.” 

“All seems to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished to me by my body.” Matter and Memory, Bergson

The body perceives afferent nerves, which transmit a disturbance to the nerve centers (central nervous system, where brain is semi conscious for complex decisions and spine is unconscious for simple decisions), and then efferent nerves, which start from the nerve centers, then communicate the disturbance to the periphery (sensations, position awareness, balance) where motion is set in parts of the body or the body as a whole. Bergson questions the physiologist and the psychologist, as to the purpose of both kinds and they respond that centrifugal movements (tendency to move away from the center) of the nervous system can call forth a movement of the body or of parts of the body. This is so the centripetal force (tendency to move towards the center), or at least some of them, give birth to the representation of the external world. 

The afferent nerves are images, like the brain, the disturbance that travels through the sensory nerves and propagates in the brain is an image as well. Here we are in the presence of at least three images, the nerves, the brain, and the disturbance itself, but if the image (representation) that we are calling the disturbance somehow came before the external images, it would contain them in one way or another, and the representation of the whole material universe would be implied in that of this movement. The image that is the disturbance then can not come before the external image, and this can be further proven through a thought experiment. If we eliminated the image that we call the universe, and at the same time you would destroy the image that we call the brain as well as the cerebral disturbance image that are both images of the universe. However, if we were to eliminate the two latter images, that we called the brain and the cerebral disturbance, then the brain and the disturbance vanish but the universe remains untouched. That is to say, to make of the brain the condition on which the whole image depends is in truth a contradiction in terms, since the brain is by hypothesis a part of this image. This shows that neither nerves, nor nerve centers can condition the image of the universe. 

External images influence the image that I call my body by transmitting movement to it. This body can also influence external images by giving back movement to them. My body is in the aggregate of the material world, an image which acts like other images, receiving and giving back movement, with one difference only, that my body appears to choose, within certain limits, “the manner in which it shall restore what it receives.”

“The body is a center of action; it receives and returns movement.” Matter and Memory, Bergson

Does the body in general, and the nervous system in particular, come before the whole or part of the representation of the universe? We could say that my body is matter, or that it is an image. If matter, it is part of the material world; and the material world exists around it and without it as previously shown. If it however is an image, that image can give but what has been put into it, and since it is, by hypothesis, the image of my body only, then it would be absurd to expect to get from it that of the whole universe. 

“My body, an object destined to move other objects, is, then, a center of action; it cannot give birth to a representation.” Matter and Memory, Bergson

The body is but a privileged image, providing for the exercise of choice among other possible reactions. As a rule, any image influences other images in a manner which is determined, even calculable, through what are called the laws of nature. There is no choosing there though, so neither has it any need to explore the region about it, nor to try its hand at several merely eventual actions. The necessary action will take place automatically, when required. Bergson supposes that the image of the body is to exercise on other images a real influence, and, consequently, to decide which step to take among several which are all materially possible. The eternal possibilities of Whitehead. These steps are probably suggested to it by the greater or less advantage which the body can derive from the surrounding images it is in presence with, these images must display in some way, upon the aspect which they present to my body either the joyful passion or sad passion that my body can gain. Here my body can note the size, shape, and color of the external objects and their modifications depending on my moving towards or moving away from them; the intensity or magnitude increases or decreases with distance. This distance represents the measure in which surrounding bodies are insured, in some sort, against the immediate action of my body. That is to say, in the degree in which I can widen my horizon, the images which surround me seem to be painted upon a more uniform background and become indifferent to me. The more I can narrow this horizon, the more the objects which it circumscribes space themselves out distinctly according to the greater or less ease with which my body can touch and move them. Like a mirror, they send back, then, to my body its eventual influence and take rank in an order corresponding to the growing or decreasing power of my body. 

“The objects which surround my body reflect its possible actions upon them.” Matter and Memory, Bergson

If we modify the image which we call the body slightly, by deleting the afferent nerves of the cerebro-spinal system, what would happen? The rest of the universe is still intact, as is the rest of my body, all remain as before. The change that has occurred is that my perception has vanished. Centripetal nerves, or those that deliver messages inward (from outside, afferent nerves), whereas centrifugal nerves deliver the messages outward (from inside, efferent nerves) or send back movement to the periphery. Centripetal nerves (afferent nerves) therefore produce an effect that is to interrupt the current or flow which goes from the periphery to other periphery by way of the center. So if we analyze this modification of an image of body that has no afferent nerves, it would make it impossible for the body to extract, from among all the things which surround it, the quantity and quality of movement necessary in order to act. This is something which concerns action, and action alone yet it is perception that has vanished. My perception must, in the midst of the image world, display an outward reflection or shadow to the eventual or possibility of actions for my body. This curious thought experiment of a vanishing of perception in the image of the body, shows that for the material world the removal of the afferent nerves did little, but for the body that the afferent nerves vanished, so does the perception of matter. 

“I call matter the aggregate of images, and perception of matter these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body.” Matter and Memory, Bergson

The brain is concerned with motor reaction, not with conscious perception. But the brain, itself an image, cannot create images – it does not manufacture representations but only complicates the relationship between a received movement (excitation) and an executed movement (response). Between excitation and response, the brain establishes an interval, whether it divides up the received movement infinitely or prolongs it in a plurality of possible reactions. Even if recollections take advantage of this interval, or strictly speaking, “interpolate themselves”, nothing changes. By virtue of this cerebral interval, in effect, a being can retain from a material object and the actions issuing from it only those elements that interest him. This is so that the perception is not the object plus something, but the object minus something, minus everything that does not interest it. This is to say, that the object itself merges with a pure virtual perception, at the same time as our real perception merges with the object from which it has abstracted only that which does not interest us. 

“We perceive things where they are, perception puts us at once into matter, is impersonal, and coincides with the perceived object. Continuing on this same line, the whole of Bergson’s method consist, first of all, in seeking the terms between which there could not be a difference in kind: there cannot be a difference in kind, but only a difference in degree between the faculty of the brain and the function of the core, between the perception of matter and matter itself.” Bergsonism

Fictions, for Deleuze, allows us to assume that the body is like a pure mathematical point in space, a pure instant, or a succession of instants in time. But these fictions were not simply hypotheses but consist in pushing beyond experience a direction drawn from experience itself. This is how we can extract a whole aspect of the conditions of experience, and then be left with the missing component left to answer, that of what fills up the cerebral interval, what takes advantage of it to become embodied. To this end, Bergson has a three-fold response: firstly, affectivity, which assumes that the body is something other than a mathematical point which gives it volume in space; next, recollections of memory that link the instants of fictions to each other and interpolate the past in the present; and finally, memory again in another form, in the form of a contraction of matter that makes the quality appear. Memory is what makes the body something other than the instantaneous and gives it a duration in time. 

Representation, in general, is divided into two directions that differ in kind, two pure presences that do not allow themselves to be represented: that of perception which puts us at once into matter; and that of memory which puts us at once into the mind. All of our false problems derive from the fact that we do not know how to go beyond experience toward the conditions of experience, towards the articulations of the real, and rediscover what differs in kind in the composites that are given to us and on which we live. 

“These two acts: perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis. The proper office of psychologists would be to dissociate them, to give back to each its natural purity; in this way many difficulties raised by psychology and perhaps also by metaphysics might be lessened. But they will have it that these mixed states, compounded, in unequal proportions, of pure perception and pure recollection, are simple. And so we are condemned to an ignorance alike of pure recollection and of pure perception, to knowing only a single kind of phenomenon that will be called now recollection and now perception, according to the predominance in it of one or other of the two aspects; and, consequently, to finding between perception and recollection only a difference in degree and not in kind.” Bergsonism

Intuition leads us to go beyond the state of experience toward the conditions of experience. These conditions, however, are not general nor abstract and are no broader than conditioned: they are the conditions of real experience. Bergson speaks of going, “to seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn, where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience.” It is above this turn that we find the point at which we can finally discover differences in kind. There are many difficulties in trying to gain access to this focal point, and as a result the actions of intuition have to be multiplied. A movement of intuition is always properly situated to the experience, and utilizes a double-fold nature to either move to broaden its horizon, or narrow it or tighten it, in its ends. In this way we are pushed beyond our own experience: through an extraordinary broadening out that forces us to think of a pure perception identical to the whole of matter, a pure memory identical to the totality of the past. 

Bergson compares philosophy to the procedure of infinitesimal calculus: when we gain a little insight from a certain experiential line of articulation, all that remains is to extend it beyond experience – just as mathematicians reconstitute, through the differentials or infinitely small slopes at each point in a curve can indicate or point to the real curve “the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them.” This broadening out, or even going-beyond does not consist in going beyond experience toward concepts. For concepts only define, in the Kantian manner that is apriori, the conditions of all possible experience in general. On the other hand, it is a case of real experience in all its peculiarities, and if we must broaden it, or even go beyond it, then this is only in order to find the articulations on which these peculiarities depend (or are contingent). So that the conditions of experience are less determined by concepts (for Kant, the intellect provides the concepts, either pure or empirical in nature, abstract idea or notion) than in pure percepts (object of perception). These percepts themselves are united in a concept, but it is a concept molded on the thing itself, which only suits that thing, and which in this sense, is no broader than what it must account for. 

These lines of flight, using intuition as method, can be followed beyond the turn in experience, but we must also rediscover the point at which they intersect again, where the directions cross and where the tendencies that differ in kind link together again to give rise to the thing as we know it. It might be thought that nothing is easier and that experience itself has already given us this point – but it is not as simple as that according to Deleuze and Bergson. For after we have followed these lines of divergence beyond the turn, these lines must intersect again, not at the point from which we started, but rather at a virtual point, at a virtual image of the point of departure, which is itself located beyond the turn in experience; and which finally gives us the sufficient reason of the thing, the sufficient reason of the composite, the sufficient reason of the point of departure. In this way the expression “beyond the decisive turn” has two meaning: first, it denotes the moment when the lines, setting out from an uncertain common point given in experience, diverge increasingly according to the differences in kind; secondly, it denotes another moment when these lines converge again to give us this time the virtual image, or the distinct reason of the common point. This is why Bergson loves finding Dualism in any form with this method of intuition, because in this we can leverage Dualism as a moment which must lead to the re-formation of a monism. In this same way after the broadening out of the horizon a final narrowing follows which, like integration follows differentiation in calculus. 

Differentiation in calculus, breaks a whole into infinitesimal pieces to be analyze or modified in any fashion, but it is always done so to integrate the pieces back into the whole again, that is to say, sum up all of the infinitesimal pieces in the desired area to return, but this time with something new. 

“We have alluded elsewhere to those ‘lines of fact,’ each one indicating but the direction of truth, because it does not go far enough: Truth itself, however, will be reached if two of them can be prolonged to the point where they intersect… In our opinion this method of intersection is the only one that can bring about a decisive advance in metaphysics.” Bergsonism

There are, therefore, two successive turns in experience as it were, both in a reverse direction: they constitute what Bergson calls precision philosophy. 

Complementary Rule to the 2nd Rule

“Complementary Rule: The real is not only that which is cut out according to natural articulations or differences in kind; it is also that which intersects again along paths converging toward the same ideal or virtual point.” Bergsonism

The particular function of this rule is to show how a problem, when it is properly stated, tends to be solved of its own accord. In Matter and Memory, the problem of memory is correctly stated since starting from the perception-recollection composite, we divide this composite into two divergent and expanded directions which correspond to a true difference in kind between soul and body, spirit and matter. However, we can only reach the solution to the problem by a movement of narrowing: when attaining the original point at which the two divergent directions converge again, the precise point at which recollection inserts itself into perception, the virtual point that is like the reflection and the reason of the departure point. Thus the problem of soul and body, of matter and spirit, is only solved by an extreme narrowing in which Bergson shows how the lines of objectivity and subjectivity, the lines of external observation and of internal experience, must converge at the end of their different processes, all the way to the case of aphasia (loss of speech or ability to understand speech caused by brain damage). 

Bergson shows that the immortality of the soul problem tends to be solved by the convergence of two very different lines: that of experience of memory, and that of a quite different, mystical, experience. Each line defines a probability, but it is of qualitative probabilism so lines of fact are qualitatively distinct. In their divergence, in the disarticulation of the real that they brought about according to the differences in kind, they already constituted a ‘superior empiricism’, capable of stating problems and of going beyond experience toward concrete conditions. In their convergence, in the intersection of the real to which they proceed, they now define a ‘superior probabilism’, one capable of solving problems and of bringing the condition back to the conditioned so that no distance remains between them. 

3rd Rule, Temporalizing with Duration

“Third rule: state problems and solve them in terms of time rather than of space.” Bergsonism

Intuition presupposes duration, that is to say, thinking in terms of duration. This rule gives the ‘fundamental meaning’ of intuition. We can only understand it by returning to the movement of the division determining the differences in kind. At first sight, it would seem that a difference in kind is established between two things, or rather between two tendencies. Superficially, this is true, the principle Bergsonian division: that between duration (intensity), and space (extensity). All the other divisions, all the other dualisms involve it, derive from it, or result in it. This is not a simple confining of ourselves to affirming a difference in kind between duration and space. The division occurs between duration, which tends for its part to take on or bear all the differences in kind (endowed with power of qualitative heterogeneity); and space, which never presents anything but differences in degree (endowed with power of quantitative homogeneity). There is no difference in kind between the two halves of this Bergsonian division; the qualitative difference is entirely on one side. When dividing something up according to its natural articulation we have: on the one hand, the aspect of space, by which the thing can only ever differ in degree from other things and from itself (augmentation, diminution); and on the other hand, the aspect of duration, by which the things differs in kind from all others and from itself (alteration). 

Let us use an example of a lump of sugar: it has a spatial configuration. But if we approach it from that angle, all we can ever grasp are differences in degree between that sugar and any other thing. But it also has a duration, a rhythm of duration, a way of being in time that is at least partially revealed in the process of its dissolving, and that shows how this sugar differs in kind not only from other things, but first and foremost from itself. This alteration, which is one with the essence or the substance of a thing, is what we grasp when we conceive of it in terms of Duration. Bergson has a famous formulation here, “I must wait until the sugar dissolves” that has a broader meaning where it signifies that my own duration, such as I live it in the impatience of waiting, for example, serves to reveal other durations that beat to other rhythms, that differ in kind from mine. Duration is always the location and the environment of differences in kind; it is even their totality and multiplicity. There are no differences in kind except in duration – while space is nothing other than the location, the environment, the totality of differences in degree. Intuition is not duration itself, it is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations, above or below us. 

“Only the method of which we are speaking allows one to pass beyond idealism as well as realism, to affirm the existence of objects both inferior and superior to us, though nevertheless, in a certain sense, interior to us… One perceives any number of durations, all very different from one another.” Bergsonism

The illusion of false problems are inevitable, but in what sense? Bergson calls into question the order of needs, of action, and of society that predisposes us to retain only what interests us in things; the order of intelligence, in its natural affinity with space; and the order of general ideas that tends to obscure differences in kind. Or rather, there are varied general ideas that themselves differ in kind, some referring to objective resemblances in living bodies, others to objective identities in inanimate bodies, and others again to subjective demands in manufactured objects. But we have a habit of mind that quickly forms a general idea of all general ideas and to dissolve differences in kind in this element of generality. “We make differences in kind melt into the homogeneity of the space which subtends them.” It is true that this collection of reasons is still psychological and inseparable from our own condition. We must take into consideration more profound reasons, for while the idea of a homogeneous space implies a sort of artifice or symbol separating us from reality, it is nevertheless the case that matter and extensity are realities, themselves prefiguring the order of space. Although illusion, space is grounded in the nature of things, matter being effectively the ‘aspect’ by which things tend to present to each other, and to us, only differences in degree. Experience gives us composites, the state of the composite does not consist only in uniting elements that differ in kind, but in uniting them in conditions such that these constituent differences in kind cannot be grasped in it. That is to say, there is a state of things in which differences in kind can no longer appear. The retrograde movement of the true is not merely an illusion about the true, but belongs to the true itself. Bergson shows us where process philosophy can meet process theology with his static religion versus dynamic religions meditation with his last text, “Two sources of morality and religion: nature and intuition”. I wrote about it here but in summary static religion is that which has at its source nature, whereas dynamic religion is that which has as its source intuition. 

The illusion is a result of us taking nature as a source of religion, morality, or reason of any kind due to its external nature. But the illusion does not result only from our nature, but also from the world in which we live, from the side of being that manifests itself to us in the first place. For late-Bergson, duration had become less reducible to psychological experience and instead became the variable essence of things that provides a deliciously complex ontology. Simultaneously for late-Bergson, space seemed to become less and less reducible to a fiction separating us from this psychological reality, rather, it was itself grounded in being and expressed one of its two slopes, one of its two directions. Bergson speaks of the absolute having two sides or aspects: spirit imbued with metaphysics; and matter known by science. He would say though that the point was not that science is a relative knowledge, a symbolic discipline relegated to commending itself only by its successes or its effectiveness; science is part of ontology as one of ontology’s two halves. The Absolute is difference, but difference has two facets – differences in degree, and differences in kind. When we grasp simple differences in degree between things, when science invites us to see the world in this way, we are again locked in an absolute. 

“With modern physics more and more clearly revealing to us differences in number behind our distinctions of quality…” Bergsonism

Being locked in this absolute is an illusion, but it is only an illusion insofar that we project the real landscape of the first slope onto the other. If the illusion can be repressed, it is because of that other slope, that of duration, which gives us differences in kind corresponding in the final instance to differences of proportion as they appear in space, and already in matter and extension. Illusions of motionlessness or blocking of flows are what we aim to watch out for to maximize our pure mobility of freedom through intuition as method. 

Nomadic Notes: The Year is 2814

Bergson is the philosopher of the future, and intuition as a method is our time traveling vehicle. This method presupposes duration, much like in the way a warp machine might fold the fabric of space time in front of it to provide itself its own ground of being to navigate, momentarily outside, or beyond the realm of spatial-temporal relations. “The moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone.” We are replacing possibility with that of virtuality, replacing essence with that of event, and replacing substance with that of multiplicity. Bergsonism substitutes the notion of the condition of the genesis of the real for the notion of the conditions of possibility of representational knowledge. The positive name for this condition is the ‘virtual’, that is to say, the Deleuzian virtual is the condition of genesis of real experience. Deleuze rejects the notion of the possible in favor of the virtual through actualization rather than realization. The fundamental characteristic of the virtual, that which means it must be actualized rather than realized, is in its differential makeup.

The text, “The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects”, by A. David-Neel Lama Yongden, says our senses deceive us in very clever ways. We give names to our sense perceptions, classify them into a series of similar objects, build them up with language, all for an end to create a world where our perceptions have become familiar to us in a workable, effective manner – like one might furnish a house in which they live. We do so through habits of thought and various other confusion in mind and mental traps. In the process of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition, we utilize habit and memory to understand the world around us. The kind of information that has been given to us by the fact of having seen something makes us conscious of having felt a sensation. A sensation, nothing more, however, all the rest is interpretation. In the same way all of our perceptions, those to which we give names and assign form, color, or no matter what attributes, are nothing but interpretations of a fugitive contact by one of our senses with a stimulus. This leads us to a kind of contemplation of the coexistence of two worlds: that of pure contact not colored by screen of ‘memories’; and that created by the mental formations or of the interpretation (samskaras). The first world, that of pure contact un-mediated, represents Reality and is indescribable; we cannot think anything, cannot imagine anything about it without interpreting it in some way and destroying its character of Reality. In this way, Reality, or the real, is inexpressible and inconceivable. The second world, that created by the mental formations or interpretations, are set in motion by the contact-stimulus. It is not the world in which we live, however, to say that it is not real though does not mean that it is devoid of existence. 

The Oral Secret Teachings of certain Tibetan sects say that the tangible world is movement, not a collection of moving objects, but movement itself. There are not objects ‘in movements’, it is the movement which constitutes the objects which appear to us, however they are nothing but movement. This movement is continuous and infinitely rapid succession of flashes of energy (tsal or shoug). All objects perceptible to our senses, all phenomena of whatever kind and whatever aspect they assume, are constituted by a rapid succession of instantaneous events. Each of these momentary happenings is brought about by manifold causes and multiple conditions acting together. Here one should not think that the event is distinct from these causes and conditions, it is these which, together, constitute the event. Apart from them, there is no event. 

This word, event, must not be taken in the sense in which it is understood in ordinary language, that is to say as meaning a fact of exceptional importance as when one speaks of an historical event. Event in this context means ‘something which happens’ and has a duration or time period of which it unfolded within, and a space. These somethings arise instantaneously and in series, these rapid flashes of energy are sufficiently like one another during the series to remain imperceptible to us, then suddenly occurring, in this series of moments a different moment which catches our attention (perception = object - interest) and makes us think that a new object has appeared. This process is often explained by comparing it with the grain of corn which remains apparently inert in the barn, until one day the grain shows signs of disease, now the grain has become something different in kind, now it is lifeless and different from the original grain. However, the inertness of the grain of corn was only in appearance (virtuality). That which we saw as a lifeless grain was a series of combinations of causes and conditions, a series of separate moments among which occurred others moments which we saw as a diseased grain of corn. The Secret Teachings of certain Tibetan sects however, do not teach the transformation from the grain of corn to diseased grain as a transformation of the grain itself. The disease that the grain picked up exists in dependence or contingent upon the grain according to the classical formulation: “This existing, that arises” which is not to be understood as meaning that this is the father who has begotten that by a transmission of substance. This is the only occasion which rendered possible the appearance of that. 

Here there are two theories we can speak of that both consider the world as movement: one states that the course of this movement, which creates phenomena, is continuous, as the flow of a quiet river would seem to us; and the other states that the movement is intermittent and advances by separate flashes of energy which follow each other at such small intervals that we cannot perceive them so they are virtually non-existent. Both of these theories however flatly deny any existence of matter which is motionless and homogeneous. When we look at an object, a kind of contact occurs, with an exterior object, but this contact lasts only for a flash. When you are looking for a long time, what in fact is happening is a series of repeated contacts, each of which last only for an instant and of which none are identical to the previous. They could never be identical due to the principle of motionless not existing, and phenomena, whatever they may be, consist in a succession of changes following one another with a speed far beyond our faculties of perception and understanding. So a material organ that we call an eye, maybe we could think of it as an image, consists itself of an aggregate of a large number of cells that are themselves not motionless. These cells that compose it are in perpetual movement, and are sensitive, individually, to numerous influences brought to bear on them by agents exterior to them and undergo numerous changes depending on the nature of their own evolution. The eye at the moment of the second contact, is not identical to the eye which underwent the first contact, and it continues to change during every repeated contact thereafter. When we look at length at an object, these contacts bring to us a series of images that in their rapidity cause us to see them as a single image. In this same way, the object at which we were looking at is itself not a homogeneous and motionless block, it is a body formed by a large number of particles in movement. In their dance, they undergo change due to their own evolution and changes caused by exterior agents. Again, they move away from or near to each other, forming different arrangements, different patterns. It follows that the object envisaged changes, in reality, from one moment to another. 

Although the majority of us are mislead by illusions of perceptions which hide from us the forces at work both in the organs and in the object with which it is in contact, it does not follow that we all share the same error to the same degree. By using certain methods which we explore further in future endeavors, we can learn how to navigate these illusions of perceptions in optimal ways.

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Part 2, of a multi-part series on Deleuze’s Bergsonism text.

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Sources:

• Bergsonism, Gilles Deleuze

• Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson

• The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects, by A. David-Neel Lama Yongden