Carnal Spirit - Matthew W. Maguire

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anticipation of those same changes, doubt, a sense of peace and acceptance oriented variously toward the past, present, and future. They are mingled, simultaneous, distinguishable and yet never entirely distinct from one another. They can harmonize into a fullness of greater sympathy for others, a sense of lucid happiness for what is given to us through life with all its fragility, that integrates many different dimensions of this multiplicity. But none of these can be simply “reduced” to the other or presented as “nothing more” than material-chemical quantities in the brain, or as neatly separable states, or states that causally determine one another in a temporal sequence.

      For Bergson, to apply an often mathematical, homogenizing instrumental rationality to all experience—not just inert matter but living things as well, in a spatially reduced temporality—distorted the real and rendered it lifeless. Above all, it deprived human beings of their freedom. Furthermore, Bergson was convinced that a careful review of scientific evidence in contemporary neuroscience, biology, and other fields would not refute but substantiate his own arguments. This was the primary task of Matter and Memory, published in 1896, a book Péguy greatly admired (he was more reserved about Bergson’s later book, Creative Evolution).163

      For Bergson, both philosophical idealism and materialism had estranged mental life from the body, and endowed either matter or mind with miraculous powers. Either (for materialists) matter could somehow create consciousness and memory “corresponding” to “an independent reality,” or (for idealists) mind could somehow produce a “material world” that is “nothing but a synthesis of subjective and unextended states.” Ultimately, both doctrines assume “that our representation of the material universe is relative and subjective and that it has, so to speak, emerged from us, rather than that we have emerged from it.”164

      Bergson believes that previous “spiritualists” (roughly, antimaterialist philosophers) had turned matter into a “mysterious entity” that prevented them from refuting materialism. To do so, it must be understood that “there is one, and only one, method of refuting materialism: it is to show that matter is precisely that which it appears to be.”165

      That is, matter is really there, and through our nervous system we have access to the Kantian Ding an sich (thing in itself). Our ability to perceive “images” of the material world is connected to our nervous system and processed by our brain, always in connection to potential action. But materialism fails to explain consciousness, because consciousness is always suffused with memory, which constantly participates in perception but is not itself material. Bergson reviews the neurological literature being published in great quantities around him and concludes that it fails to uphold either Kantian arguments, or the materialism that had claimed that research as vindication. Rather, his own distinction between perception and memory finds experimental confirmation.

      As Ribot himself acknowledged, perception is integrally connected to movement, hence the motor apparatus of one’s nervous system.166 The research surrounding Ribot’s Law (about the patterns of memory loss in amnesiacs) shows that there is often a grammatical structure to the loss of word memory: proper names are the first to elude consciousness, followed by common nouns, and then verbs last of all. Bergson concludes that verbs are “precisely the words that a bodily effort might enable us to recapture when the function of language has all but escaped us.”167 This suggests powerful connections among perception, memory and action, rather than some abstract idealist capacity of “representation” through, say, Kantian forms of intuition.

      Bergson’s inquiry into other neurological research proves no less troubling for materialist explanations of consciousness. It does not appear that memories are localized in the brain (what is called cerebral localization—a claim received skeptically in critical accounts of contemporary trends in cognitive neuroscience as well).168 In cases of aphasia (when one loses the ability to speak or understand speech), a “lost” noun can often be found by paraphrase, sometimes alighting on the noun itself. In other cases, a certain letter is lost—say, the letter F—but it is highly unlikely that such a precise incision into personal memory of the alphabet could be made without unconscious knowledge of that very letter and its exact place in countless words.169 The “destruction” of memories is understood in closer alignment with evidence if it is understood not as a destruction of some part of the brain “in which memories congeal and accumulate” but rather as “a break in the continuous progress by which they actualize themselves.”170

      For Bergson, the brain has evolved to serve the needs of bodily action—those needs are “so many searchlights, which, directed upon the continuity of sensible qualities, single out in it distinct bodies.”171 Memory, however, retains a plenitude of experience; it finds itself slimmed and sharpened by the demands of possible action, but that immaterial plenitude remains.

      At first, this suggests that Bergson has merely returned to older, rigidly dualist arguments, in which perception and the body work on one side and a remote, immaterial memory on the other. But Bergson turns to experiments by R. F. Müller and others to show that memory constantly participates in the instantaneity of the present rather than standing apart from it. For example, Bergson cites research establishing the fact that readers decipher words not “letter by letter” but through memory filling in what letters and phrases have followed from a similar prompt or pattern in the past.172 The immediate present is where memory and material perception constantly meet.

      On the nature of the present, Bergson strikes notes that are characteristically attuned to both philosophy and contemporary scientific research. In the manner of Augustine in book XI of the Confessions, he writes that “when we think this present as going to be, it exists not yet, and when we think it as existing, it is already past.”173 Yet he also observes that recent investigation has established that the smallest interval of a perceived present among human subjects is “.002 seconds.”174 In such an instantaneity, there is no development of thought and no fulfilled intentional action, which always requires perception suffused with memory.

      It is in this suffusion that body and soul are reconciled. The body is responsible for “directing memory toward the real and binding it to the present.” Memory is, through the combination of sensations and movements, “ever pressed forward into the tissue of events,” though as memory it remains “absolutely independent of matter.”175 Memory is spirit, and can “unite with matter.” Idealism and materialism alike cannot think the “reciprocal influence” of mind and matter, and thus “sacrifice freedom.”176 But for Bergson, once they are properly understood, we see “with memory, we are, in truth, in the domain of spirit,” and that our “past” is an indispensable part of our freedom. It is “that which acts no longer but which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality.”177

      Why has the unity of body and spirit not been obvious to us? Beyond philosophical errors, the shaping of the brain by the imperatives of security and control over our environment leads our minds to constantly posit “homogenous space.” If this space is immediately assumed to be the theater of all experience, it is because it allows us to be “masters.”178

      Once movement is turned over to space, it “abandons that solidarity of the present with the past which is its very essence.”179 Yet when we escape the habitual assumption of homogenous space, we see that body and spirit meet temporally. There is always a certain durée in which memory participates, and hence we are able, with Bergson’s philosophy, to “compress within its narrowest limits the problem of the union of soul and body.”180 (Though Bergson’s compression is not the same as a definitive resolution.) What is clear to Bergson is that the proposed solution on offer from many of his contemporaries does not hold: the collapse of conscious experience into material or sociological suppositions no longer appears as a bold extension of scientific reasoning but as the latest error in a long historical procession of errors designed to give human beings power rather than truth.

      For Bergson, the intuitive knowledge of durée in turn relied upon a profound, participatory immersion in temporal mobility and flow (including but not limited to intuiting its presence in one’s self) that

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