Bergson’s Multiplicity, Duration, Perception, Memory

Late 19th/early 20th-century philosopher Henri Bergson's non-reductive consciousness is an unapologetic, sophisticated challenge to Materialism Theories. Bergson distinguishes between consciousness and matter, between mind and body, according to the distinction between “time” (understood as “duration”) and “space”. In consciousness, he says, “we find succeeding states without distinction; and, in space, simultaneities which, without succeeding, are distinguished, in the sense that one is no longer there when the other one appears. Outside of us, reciprocal exteriority without succession: within, succession without reciprocal exteriority.” (Bergson, 1889; Pascal, 2023).

Multiplicity, Duration, and Perception

Bergson's consciousness, which “retains the past and anticipates the future,” is not easy to categorize. It is the complex centerpiece of his grand philosophical system, and is founded upon several original concepts: multiplicity (heterogeneity and continuity, the immediate data of consciousness); duration (no juxtaposition of events, no mechanistic causality, a qualitative multiplicity); perception (active, non-representational); memory (pure, personal)—each from Bergson's idiosyncratic perspective (Lawlor and Moulard-Leonard, 2021).

Bergson self-characterizes his own view as “frankly dualist,” because it “affirms both the reality of matter and the reality of spirit,” though he recognizes (and thinks he can overcome) “the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism.” For Bergson, the problem of the distinction and union of mind and body as it was formulated in the wake of Descartes is one of many “false problems” promulgated by philosophers. The starting point of this “false problem” is the confusion of time with space. In Time and Free Will, Bergson argues that “real time” is “duration”, understood as the pure, melodic continuity of the past into the future, indivisible and resisting all spatial or material categorization. The time of the clock, or the time of mechanics, is incapable of presenting us with this time “in itself”, and is instead the result of confusing duration with spatiality. The human mind is essentially duration: it is impossible to pause, quantify, or divide consciousness in the way that we can divide and group the things of space. If we restore duration to the mind, Bergson argues, then we are capable of understanding that consciousness is something “other” than the body, while nevertheless recognizing that body and mind exist on a mutually interactive continuum.

In Matter and Memory, Bergson argues that memory is the key to what is now called the “hard problem of consciousness”, insofar as memory is simply, in his words, “the intersection of mind and matter” (Bergson 1889, 13). He rejects the representational theory of perception, which claims that “matter is a thing that possesses a hidden power able to produce representations in us." Instead, he argues that, in “pure perception”, we actively seize the immediate reality of matter. Bergson's theory of “pure perception” posits that how we know things, in their pure states, is imagistic in nature, thus establishing a middle ground between realism and idealism (Lawlor and Moulard-Leonard, 2021).

Memory and the Role of the Brain

For Bergson, memory is the heart of consciousness, and the key to solving its mystery. Human consciousness is comprised, in large part, of its memory of the past, both in its explicit recollections or memory–images, and in its implicit preservation of the past in the form of an unconscious and latent persistence (what Bergson calls “pure memory”). He describes the human mind as “a continuous movement between pure perception and pure memory”, or between the “plane of action” (body, matter, the present) and “the plane of dream” (mind, memory, the past).

Bergson criticizes the simplistic materialism that had become prevalent in his day, and likewise anticipates the wholesale mind–brain reductionism that would come to dominate philosophy and neuroscience in the twentieth century. Through a careful analysis and interpretation of neurobiological evidence, he argues that the brain cannot be said to “generate”, “store”, or “reconstruct” experience, and that it is owing to a deep conceptual confusion that memories have been declared to be contained physically inside the brain. Instead, he writes: “The brain does not perceive: it transmits perception (pure or not) from the organ of perception to consciousness (sensory mechanism) and, conversely, it transmits the nascent order of action from consciousness to the appropriate motor organ to act in response to perception (motor mechanism) (Bergson, 1896, 1990; Pascal, 2023).

Bergson recognizes that consciousness and the brain are undeniably related in a certain measure and certain manner, but he is clear that it does not follow necessarily from this observation that the mind can be said to be “contained in” or “reducible to” the brain. The brain, for Bergson, is not the generator or container of consciousness, but a “filter” of consciousness, because unfiltered consciousness would be shattering and stupefying. Our capacity to focus and act in the world is enabled by our brain, which acts as a kind of barrier between the present and the past (Bergson, 1920).

Bergson's notion of consciousness is “a ceaselessly dynamic, inherently temporal substance of reality” that might even allow for some sort of survival after death (Barnard, 2011). Is Bergson a kind of dualist, panpsychist or even idealist? Bergson admits that he is a dualist, although his dualism is different from the traditional formula of “substance dualism”. His dualism is more one of a “dualism of time”, or “dualism of duration”, rather than a dualism of categorically distinct “substances” or “things”. Matter and mind, body and soul, have different ways of existing in time: matter is the tendency towards repetition, instantaneity, and dispersion, while consciousness is the tendency towards duration, memory, and freedom. On more than one occasion, Bergson denies the accusation of pantheism or panpsychism. Lastly, it is difficult to group Bergson among idealists, insofar as he often establishes Plato as his philosophical enemy. He is perhaps best categorized among the French “spiritualists”, following in the footsteps of thinkers such as Maine de Biran and Félix Ravaisson.

Contemporary Reflections on Bergson

According to Àlex Gómez-Marín, "The essential debate about the precise relationship between thoughts and brains (solidarity versus equivalence, participation versus interaction, etc.) has faded. But one can revisit Henri Bergson to find a lucid dose of common sense: ‘That there is a close connection between a state of consciousness and the brain we do not dispute. But there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for, if the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it?’

What do brain data really show? The edifice of twenty-first-century consciousness neuroscience stands on the foundations of the following candid empirical fact: ‘change the brain, experience changes.’ The hard problem of wardrobes is to explain why and how hangers give rise to clothes” (Gómez-Marín, 2022).

Moreover, Gómez-Marín and Juan Arnau retrieve an argument by Bergson to expose, what they call “the fundamental self-contradiction of parallelism: it forces the idealist to sustain that ‘the part is the whole’, and the realist that ‘the part subsists when the remainder of the whole vanishes.’” Bergson's image-movement theory (from Matter and Memory) is then recast “to overcome the conceptual dead-end of parallelism”—the point being that “Consciousness is real. So is its special relation to the brain. Differentiating between solidarity (as lesions demonstrate) and equivalence (as no data does) offers an alternative point of departure for an understanding of consciousness that does not, from the outset, outlay a false problem” (Gómez-Marín and Arnau, 2019).