Even of that, I cannot elaborate. He joined the Irgun National Military Organization as a youth, joined its headquarters as a teenager, and went abroad on a mission at the age of 22, from which he returned a decade later, after his chief political activity was over. I cannot describe all that now. I will sum it up briefly. His life work had two great achievements and two heartbreaking failures. The struggle to rescue the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust (...) and the Declaration of Israel’s Independence were both his achievements and his failures. (shrink)

Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty develops a non-serial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and irreducibility (...) of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage. (shrink)

Through the philosophies of Bergson and Deleuze, my paper explores a different theory of time. I reconstitute Deleuze’s paradoxes of the past in Difference and Repetition and Bergsonism to reveal a theory of time in which the relation between past and present is one of coexistence rather than succession. The theory of memory implied here is a non-representational one. To elaborate this theory, I ask: what is the role of the “virtual image” in Bergson’s Matter and Memory? Far from representing (...) the simple afterimage of a present perception, the “virtual image” carries multiple senses. Contracting the immediate past for the present, or expanding virtually to hold the whole of memory (and even the whole of the universe), the virtual image can form a bridge between the present and the non-representational past. This non-representational account of memory sheds light not only on the structure of time for Bergson, but also on his concepts of pure memory and virtuality. The rereading of memory also opens the way for Bergsonian intuition to play an intersubjective role; intuition becomes a means for navigating the resonances and dissonances that can be felt between different rhythms of becoming or planes of memory, which constitute different subjects. (shrink)

Informed by the philosophy of the virtual, Keith Ansell Pearson offers up one of the most lucid and original works on the central philosophical questions. He asks that if our basic concepts on what it means to be human are wrong then, what is this to mean for our ideas of time, being, consciousness? A critical examination ensues, one informed by a multitude of responses to a large number of philosophers. Under discussion is the mathematical limits as found in Russell, (...) questions on Relativity, Kant's notion of judgement, Popper, Dennett, Dawkins and Proust. He brings into the rapport the concepts of Bergson and their explosive insights into the idea of time. (shrink)

A monumental work by an important modern philosopher, Matter and Memory (1896) represents one of the great inquiries into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Nobel Prize-winner Henri Bergson surveys these independent but related spheres, exploring the connection of mind and body to individual freedom of choice. Bergson’s efforts to reconcile the facts of biology to a theory of consciousness offered a challenge to the mechanistic view of nature, and his original and innovative views exercised a profound (...) influence on other philosophers--including James, Whitehead, and Santayana--as well as novelists such as Dos Passos and Proust. Matter and Memory is essential to an understanding of Bergson’s philosophy and its legacy. (shrink)

Bergson argues for free will by showing that the arguments against it come from a confusion of different conceptions of time. As opposed to physicists' idea of measurable time, in human experience life is perceived as a continuous and unmeasurable flow rather than as a succession of marked-off states of consciousness--something that can be measured not quantitatively, but only qualitatively. His conclusion is that free will is an observable fact.

In Matter and Memory, Bergson examines the relationship between perception and memory, the status of consciousness in its relation to the brain, and more generally, a possible conjunction of matter and mind. Our reading focuses in particular on his understanding of the evanescent presence of the present and of its debt vis-à-vis the "unconscious" consciousness of a "virtual" past. We wish to show that the Bergsonian version of a critique of "the metaphysics of presence" is, for all that, an offshoot (...) of a Platonic type of metaphysics. It is true that Bergson departs from traditional standpoints on the side of a self-sufficient and original present and a form of presence to which the transparency of consciousness would confer the character of immediate evidence. All the same, it can hardly be claimed that his rehabilitation of the past and the unconscious opens up new perspectives on how forgetting and death are bound up with the work of memory. (shrink)

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson, based on his largely ignored 1956 essay, Mergson's Conception of Difference. In this essay, Deleuze first attacks the Hegelian tradition for misunderstanding the notion of difference by reducing it to negation and then uses Bergson's concept of duration – a flow of purely qualitative mental states – to formulate a notion of difference utterly internal to itself, that is, irreducible to negation. The paper argues that this temporalization of difference (...) represents a permanent feature of Deleuze's philosophy – one particularly visible in his highly influential book on Nietzsche – and concludes that Deleuze's Nietzsche therefore appears molded by a Bergsonian imprint. (shrink)

The Sense of Space brings together space and body to show that space is a plastic environment, charged with meaning, that reflects the distinctive character of human embodiment in the full range of its moving, perceptual, emotional, expressive, developmental, and social capacities. Drawing on the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Bergson, as well as contemporary psychology to develop a renewed account of the moving, perceiving body, the book suggests that our sense of space ultimately reflects our ethical relations to other people (...) and to the places we inhabit. (shrink)

In this essay I critique a particular reading of Bergson that places an excessive weight on the concept of the ‘virtual’. Driven by the popularity of Deleuze’s use of the virtual, this image of Bergson (seen especially through his text of 1896, Matter and Memory, where the idea is introduced) generates an imbalance that fails to recognise the importance of concepts of actuality, like space or psychology, in his other works. In fact, I argue that the virtual is not the (...) key concept for Bergsonism and that there is a good deal of evidence in Bergson’s other writings, especially those connected with his actualist notion of ‘refraction’, to think of him as a perspectivist philosopher. Moreover, it will be seen that Virtualism resides within an economy of reflection that is subsumed within the broader paradigm of Actualist refraction. Taking these optical metaphors seriously, the virtual becomes a perspectival image seen from an actual position, or rather, an interacting set of actual positions. This interaction is termed ‘virtualization’, denoting the substitution of a substantive conception with a processual one. In the first two parts of the essay, I direct my remarks more towards Deleuzian readings of the actual rather than Deleuze himself (Deleuze is so open about the biases he brings to his reading of Bergson as to be beyond criticism). In the second two sections, I pursue a philosophical argument for the probity of a non-Virtualist position as such within philosophy, based upon the concept of refraction. This is done not only because it is important that we remain open to other readings of Bergson that are not so heavily mediated in one direction, but also in view of the power of refraction as a new concept for reconciling actual modes such as molar identity, the present, and extension, with their virtual opposites. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy, which Sartre studied as a student, had a profound but largely neglected influence on his thinking. In this paper I focus on the new light that recognition of this influence throws on Sartre's central argument about the relationship between negation and nothingness in his Being and Nothingness. Sartre's argument is in part a response to Bergson's dismissive, eliminativist account of nothingness in Creative Evolution (1907): the objections to the concept of nothingness with which Sartre engages are precisely (...) those raised by Bergson. Even if Sartre's account of nothingness in its entirety is found to be flawed, I argue that the points he makes specifically against Bergson are powerful. My discussion concludes with a brief examination of the wider philosophical background to Sartre's and Bergson's discussion of nothingness: here I point to some important aspects of Sartre's early philosophy, including some features of his conception of nothingness, that may testify to Bergson's positive influence on his thought. (shrink)

Bergson’s model of time (1889) is perhaps the proto-phenomenological theory. It is part of a larger model of mind (1896) which can be seen in modern light as describing the brain as supporting a modulated wave within a holographic field, specifying the external image of the world, and wherein subject and object are differentiated not in terms of space, but of time. Bergson’s very concrete model is developed and deepened with Gibson’s ecological model of perception. It is applied to the (...) problems of consciousness, direct realism, qualia and illusions. The model implies an entirely different basis for memory and cognition, and a brief overview is given for the basis of direct memory, compositionality and systematicity. (shrink)

Bergson, writing in 1896, anticipated “sensorimotor contingencies” under the concept that perception is “virtual action.” But to explain the external image, he embedded this concept in a holographic framework where time-motion is an indivisible and the relation of subject/object is in terms of time. The target article's account of qualitative visual experience falls short for lack of this larger framework. [Objects] send back, then, to my body, as would a mirror, their eventual influence; they take rank in an order corresponding (...) to the growing or decreasing powers of my body. The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them. – Henri Bergson (1896/1912, pp. 6–7). (shrink)