SubStance

Bergsonism is characterized by its quest for a "living unity" that would link life, consciousness and the material universe. Clearly, for a philosopher who takes as his starting point the experience of conscious life, and whose line of inquiry concerns what our experience registers, the most difficult aspect is to connect this psycho-vital experience to matter. This difficulty is not unique to Bergsonism; most of the philosophies of nature at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century that consider the question of cosmological unity (especially those of Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Tarde) find that matter poses a problem. The concept of matter seems heavily saturated with intellectual representations that prevent its being included in the "living unity" of the cosmos. Therefore it is not surprising that Bergson considered one of the most important stakes of Creative Evolution to be the comprehension of the material universe as being of the same nature as the self. Thus he told the Société Française de la Philosophie in 1908 that "One of the objects of Creative Evolution is to show that All is [...] of the same nature as the I, and that one grasps it by a more and more complete immersion in oneself" (Mélanges, 774).

This renewal of the concept of matter began for Bergson in Matter and Memory (1896). As we know, this book established a connection between the universe and the living subject—a participation of living duration in the duration of the universe, at every level of life. It shows that the brain, when isolated, produces nothing, neither interiority nor thought. Only the relationship between the living body and the material universe produces an effect of consciousness, which, being transmitted by memory and personal history, enables a more and more intense participation in the universe. Thus the first chapter of Matter and Memory establishes that we can deduce from our perception that the universe is a form of duration connected to our own, although independent from our own. The material universe endures, as does our consciousness, and it is presented to us in such a way that we apprehend it as an appearance in itself, larger that the self, through which life opens itself to its own structure as appearance/perception. I cannot linger here on this paradox of appearance in itself; [End Page 91] suffice it to say that to perceive images is always also to perceive that these images escape toward a level of the universe where they exist as themselves. This appearance in itself of the universe is deduced via our perception; it is that onto which our perception opens; our perception does not create it, for there already is opening—without this opening our perception would be blind.

In Creative Evolution, Bergson proposes to pursue this meditation. This, in sum, is what he tells the philosophical society on that same August 8, 1908, when he compares Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution:

In the first of these two book, it is shown that the objectivity of the material thing is immanent to the perception that we have of it, provided that one takes this perception at its raw state and in its immediate form. In the second, it is established that immediate intuition seizes the essence of life as well as that of matter.

(Mélanges, 773)

At this same meeting, Bergson would defend the idea of a knowledge where "the act of knowing coincides with the act generating reality" (ibid.).

To grasp the essence of matter is in fact to grasp it through the generative act that produces it. Now, at the level of methodology, we can only proceed by starting from the intuition we have of our experience of conscious life. The only path open to knowledge is to follow the irrevocable witness of our consciousness. Already in following this path in Matter and Memory, what Bergson encounters is a universe constantly in trans-formation, made up of images in themselves—a universe of energy, which bursts forth. Creative Evolution does not change its methodology: starting with ourselves, with our...