6/20/2023 0 Comments Bergson matter and memory![]() ![]() ![]() Page of Bergson’s work for the Concours general de mathématiques, 1877, via Wikimedia Commons.īergson anticipates objections doubting the possibility of our holding onto pure memory in some unconscious part of the mind. Pure memory, therefore, is something other than imagery, it constitutes the unconscious: a space outside momentary consciousness but in constant, dynamic interrelation with it. But images, though they might linger, do not extend beyond the sensations of the present: the moment at which consciousness meets the world. In short, what distinguishes embodied consciousness from the images that surround it is the power to act unpredictably. For this reason, he refers to the body as an image, one amongst others, but endowed with the power of spontaneous action. ![]() Images, for Bergson, are the territory of the present moment. The recollection of pure memory might begin to stimulate sensations in definite parts of the body (the more vividly I remember a pain in my foot, the more such a pain might begin to take hold in the present), but this is not the nature of the pure memory itself, which occurs in no definite part of the body, and does not consist in either sensation or image. Pure memory, meanwhile, is constrained to the mind, and does not contain the same unity of the sensory and the motor. ![]()
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