In activity, there is externalized motion on one hand and resistance, or virtual reaction, on the other. Action and reaction are cases of polarity; they are necessary to each other to give each other form. In the cognitive subject, reaction that were purely virtual, without externalizing implication, would be indeterminate dreaming; motion that were purely externalized, without implication of inner virtuality, would be indeterminate activity. Now, anything that is indeterminate or formless simply is not, if being has any significance whatever; for formless significance is a contradiction; certainly the significance of anything would constitute a formal aspect of it. “Pure” matter or quantity is pure nothing, in the sense that it is quantity of nothing. These “pure” limits thus snuff themselves out. And variation between them is not a progression from not-being to being or vice versa, not a strengthening or weakening of the variable function’s essence. Such a notion depends on the absurdity of a not-being that can do things to being, with fluctuating prepotency in the struggle! Strengthening and weakening—degree in any guise—has no application to essence. In any phase, that is, knowledge is itself and nothing else; it cannot be more or less itself.
That which varies concomitantly with the variations in complexion of consciousness, is the dynamic relation between subject and object. It may be expressed as variation of ratio between virtual and real action. At each pole activity vanishes, and consciousness with it. At one pole, where the ratio is zero, it vanishes in the direction of “real” or externalized action, which means that the subject meets no opposing negativity, and so no object; the relation of activity is extinguished through lack of one of its terms. At the other pole, where the ratio is infinity, action vanishes in the direction of “virtuality.” And this means that in the subject there is no positivity, no subjectivity, to oppose to universal negativity or objectivity. The result is the same extinction of the relation through lack of a term. A subject term is lacking in one case, an object in the other.
Knowledge, for Bergson, corresponds only to the ratio infinity, of virtual to real action; all other ratios between them are less than knowledge. To this I object that infinite virtuality is indeterminate virtuality, which is a naught reached in the opposite way from that naught which is infinite and indeterminate actuality. Indeterminate action is nothing, and so is indeterminate knowledge. Identification of knowledge with any specific value of the ratio of virtual to real action is not determined by any logical principle. When a function varies between a positive and a negative pole, neither pole is an apogee where the function is most itself. On the contrary, as in the variation of an including angle, each pole is a limiting position in which the essential nature of the variable is extinguished. Nor is it most itself midway between the poles, nor at any other privileged position, for it is absolutely and fully itself, and nothing else, in every phase. The genuineness of a state of awareness would then depend also on the genuineness of the reciprocity between the terms of this dynamic ratio. Where they are not distinct, where subject and object are identical, awareness vanishes through lack of a quantitative coefficient, as it vanishes at each pole through lack of a qualitative coefficient. In other words, knowledge of a thing by itself, like action of a thing on itself, is a cancelation of terms of opposite sign, a contradiction, and the subject and object, whether of action or of consciousness, are essentially external to each other.
Bergson is treating consciousness as such as if it could be more or less conscious, as, indeed, a conscious subject may be. That is, he is treating consciousness as if it could be of a nature more or less aware or cognitive; he is treating variations of phase as if they were augmentations and diminutions of essence; he is treating quality quantitatively, an error which would not have been possible if he had adhered to the purely conceptual distinction between quality and quantity. And he is treating the variations of cognitive complexion or phase as if they depended on variations in a certain relation (the mutual externality of subject and object) which is invariable and absolute—incapable, that is, of degree.
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“This book,” says the first sentence of Matter and Memory, “affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter.” Lower in the same page, however, it is explained that “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images.’ And by ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing,—an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’ ... the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it; image it is, but a self-existing image (pp. vii, viii).
“... memory ... is just the intersection of mind and matter ... the psychical state seems to us to be ... immensely wider than the cerebral state ... our cerebral state contains more or less of our mental state in the measure that we reel off our psychic life into action or wind it up into pure knowledge ... our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it” (pp. xii, xiii, xiv).
The “intersection of mind and matter” suggests a profound dualism, and this Bergson acknowledges to be essential to his theory. It is true that no opportunity is lost, to discount the reality of matter; but the relations which it sustains to mind are such as can exist only between terms whose reality is coördinate. Perception is just that biological reactive function of material organism engaged with material stimulus, which every psychological text-book proclaims it to be. But the actual conscious state always has memory in it, as well as perception; or rather, the state as conscious is nothing but memory; perception itself, “pure” perception, is action pure and simple, and not cognitive at all.
This is an abuse of the word “perception,” but the epistemology can show a good deal of reason. After all, our perceptions (as we call the states of mind in which we are involved with a material stimulus) mean something, necessarily. They mean something, I insist, the strangest of them. We sometimes speak otherwise, saying that an object of perception means nothing to us. But, I submit, this is only a manner of speaking. A state that meant nothing, absolutely, were genuinely blank, empty, contentless; and there is no difference, I take it, between a state without content and a state that is unconscious. Well, then, meaning something, as a conscious state must, what does it mean? Bergson, I am sure, is right in holding that to mean is to recognize, to recall, to remember. This makes of every concrete perceptive state, so-called, a rudimentary deduction, a genuine syllogism, a work of intellect. The major premise is a memory; the minor is an immediate reactive, sensori-motor datum; the conclusion is the subsumption of the present datum under the memory. Thus: The experience to which I attach the name “orange” has such and such characters (remembered major premise); the present reactive state has these characters (perceptive datum, minor premise); therefore this state is a case of the orange experience. The only difficulty is the nature of the process of subsumption of the present datum with the memory. The present datum in its purity as present is a reaction merely, an event in the physical world. Its nature owns nothing psychical. What commerce, then, can it have with mind? To call its commerce with mind “subsumption” is to give a label to a problem. To call memory the “intersection” of the physical world with mind seems another label, of a metaphorical sort, for the same problem.
But, for the present, let us hear the doctrine. To my thinking, it is Bergson’s best work, and full of illuminating suggestion. To the radical dualist, it should be completely satisfactory. As an adherent of a certain double-aspect conception of the body-mind relation, I shall eventually propose a correction and completion, very radical, certainly, but all that is necessary to make Bergson’s treatment of this problem of the highest interest and value to myself.